Mad for it: From Blackpool to Barcelona: Football’s Greatest Rivalries. Andy Mitten
duties, desperately stretches but can’t cut out the inch-perfect ball. With one deft touch the spidery Serginho takes the ball sharply square inside, wrong-footing keeper Francesco Toldo who is shaping to anticipate a burst towards the left byline. The move ends with a hard grass-cutting shot into the gaping Inter net, and the San Siro erupts with an earringing roar. It is AC Milan’s 97th derby win, now ten more than Inter. Gate receipts are around €1.4m. The worldwide TV audience runs into tens of millions.
It wasn’t always thus.
In the very last days of the final year of the 19th century, a small group of enthusiasts met one evening to establish the Milan Cricket and Football Club. Most football historians quote the date as 16 December 1899, but in reality the original document of the club’s founding statute was lost, so the gathering could have been any time between the 9th and the 17th of the month. There is also doubt over its location. Some accounts refer to the Hotel du Nord in Piazza Repubblica, others locate it at the nearby Bar Fiaschetteria in Via Berchet, which certainly became the regular meeting place. No exact figures exist for the numbers in attendance.
But what is not in doubt is the club’s English roots. Half a dozen English names featured in the association’s original membership and the driving force behind that inaugural meeting of what would later become the mighty Associazione Calcio Milan – AC Milan – was an English textile worker, one Herbert Kilpin.
A keen striker, Kilpin – the 29-year-old son of a Nottingham butcher – was the team’s first captain, its first club president being one Alfred Edwards. So it was that the final letter ‘o’ was dropped from Milano to adopt the English spelling. The club’s original pitch was on the site of what is now Stazione Centrale, Milan’s main railway station, a huge marble masterpiece of Italy’s Fascist era of public works of the 1920s and 1930s.
But the history of the Milan derby is the history of a sporting divorce. The two parties separated over a point of principle without ever coming to blows, then ended up sharing the same home without ever quite kissing and making up. They are football’s odd couple.
The separation came just a little over eight years after that original gathering. A splinter group led by artist Giorgio Muggiani, broke away because it wanted to permit foreigners to play for the side, contrary to Federation regulations. On 9 March 1908 a group of like-minded rebels gathered together at the L’Orologio restaurant in Via Orefici just a goalkeeper’s kick away from the city’s famous landmark, the giant Duomo cathedral. And thus was born Internazionale Milano, the new name proudly reflecting the reasons for the divorce.
‘The colours they chose for their new kit reflected these early romantic leanings,’ says Fabio Monti, Inter expert at the Milan-based Il Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading daily newspaper. ‘The black was to represent the night, blue for the sky.’ It was an idealistic gesture towards the nascent internationalism of the turbulent European politics of the early 20th century. Ironically, after winning their first scudetto – (literally, ‘little shield’) – in 1910, Inter’s first captain Virgilio Fossati was himself later to fall victim to the nationalistic carnage of World War I. Meanwhile, the design of the club crest produced by those early artistic founders is today ridiculed by Interisti as illegible.
Italian football fans are notoriously superstitious. And the birth of Inter produced what must be one of the most eerie ghosts at any football feast. Barbara Ballardini, 29, who compiled an entire academic thesis on the fans of Inter and Milan, explains: ‘Historically, AC Milan have experienced lots of ups and downs, with long periods without winning anything. Before the schism that created Inter they had already won three scudetti with the latest coming the year before the breakaway. But then they entered their longest ever barren period. AC Milan had to wait another forty-four years before they won their next scudetto. And that inaugural Inter meeting was attended by forty-four founding members.’ Woo, spooky.
For many years the Internazionale splitters were dismissed as a bunch of upper class intellectuals, while AC Milan remained associated more with the working classes. Indeed, Milanese dialect gave early nicknames of Casciavit for Milan and Bauscia for Inter – roughly translated as ‘spanners’ and ‘braggers’. But, these original socio-economic differences are now well outdated. A recent survey also found little difference between the fans’ political affiliations, with the traditionally left-leaning Milan fans shifting towards the centre since the arrival in 1986 of club president Silvio Berlusconi, the media billionaire and current Prime Minister of Italy’s centre-right governing coalition. Like the rest of Italy, club nicknames derive from team colours, hence nerazzurri (black-blues) for Inter, and rossoneri for Milan’s red-and-black.
The very first meeting of the two Milan formations was, perhaps uniquely in the history of footballing derbies, not actually staged in the home city – nor even in the country. The two sides came head to head on a football pitch for the first time in Chiasso, some fifty miles north of Milan just over the border in Switzerland. ‘Nobody really knows why,’ admits Fabio Monti. And if the affable Monti doesn’t know, you suspect nobody does.
The result of the match, reported at the time as a ‘Chiasso Cup’ tie, was a 2–1 victory for the Milan Football and Cricket Club. Goalscorer Lana, Milan’s number seven, went on to score the Italian national side’s first ever goal two years later.
The renegade Inter’s early history was peripatetic, shifting from one location to another until 1930 when they settled at the roofless Arena stadium just outside the city’s inner ring of ancient gates which date back before Napoleon. Evocative of an ancient Roman amphitheatre, the Arena still hosts Serie D games.
Meanwhile Milan, with the big money backing of the Pirelli tyre-manufacturing family – nowadays one of Inter’s main sponsors – built a stadium on the then city periphery, in the San Siro area, in 1926. They sold it to the city authorities in 1935. An enlarged version was inaugurated in 1939 with a 2–2 draw against England in a friendly international just four months before the outbreak of World War II. In Italy, not even global conflagrations tend to stop football matches, and the following year Inter obtained permission to shift their title-winning end-of-season fixture against Bologna to the larger San Siro to accommodate the crowds.
The odd couple were back living under the same roof. Or at least Inter had cheekily brought its toothbrush to stay the night. The domestic arrangement was to be made permanent from 1947.
‘Yes, it’s a peculiar history,’ admits Barbara Ballardini, the thesis-writing rossoneri. ‘Two huge teams with huge fan bases that share the same ground and don’t really have any strong ties to any particular part of the city. They are devoid of religious or political rivalries, save for the ’70s when some ultra groupings reflected the violent political environment in Italy at the time.’
But one of the most curious features of Milanese footballing culture is that nobody can explain why they chose one team or the other. ‘As a little girl I just always liked wearing red. I’d dress up as a Milanista at carnival,’ laughs Barbara Ballardini. It’s about as good a response as you get. When asked by a sociological survey why they chose Inter, one third quoted family allegiance. Yet an astonishing 18 per cent said they couldn’t remember. Thirty-five year-old financial advisor Andrea di Cola is an Inter season-ticket holder: ‘When I was a kid they were a legendary club. Now, even though we haven’t won anything for years, I like the fans. They are notoriously critical, yes, but there is a lot of self-irony in it all. It’s good fun.’
The derby’s passion on the pitch comes without the surrounding air of menace sometimes associated with such confrontations. ‘There certainly isn’t the aggression that you get back home,’ says Linda McCanna, a 30-year-old Manchester United fan from Cheshire now living in Italy with Massimo, her AC Milan season ticket-holding boyfriend. ‘If a City fan – or a Liverpool fan, for that matter – wandered into a United pub they’d be likely to find a bit of bother, especially on a matchday. Here, they sing songs against each other at the match, but then afterwards they’re in the bar sharing a drink. They know each other, work in the same places, live in the same areas.’
Perhaps surprisingly, the absence of violence also derives from the network