Italy entered World War Two in June 1940, Garbutt was advised to leave Italy but was tempted to stay on as his team had reached the Italian Cup final. He finally left the city on the eve of the final – which Genoa lost – and went into hiding in the Ligurian countryside with his wife, leaving his adopted Italian daughter behind. On 26 June, a warrant was issued for his arrest. Garbutt was too famous to be able to hide for long near Genoa, and in mid-July the couple were picked up. According to the arrest report, which was full of praise for the manager’s reputation, Garbutt had remained in Italy ‘thanks to his great sympathy for fascism’. After being held in a small and crowded cell for some time, Garbutt’s health and that of his Irish wife Anna began to deteriorate.
Two weeks of negotiations between the authorities and the club followed. The Garbutts were spared the indignities of an internment camp, and instead sent into exile in the south of Italy, near Salerno. Garbutt was a familiar figure in the south, after his time with Napoli. The family ended up in a tiny village in the mountains, where they lived off their savings and, when those ran out, on a small state income. In February 1941 an order came through to move the Garbutt family to an internment camp in the poverty-stricken Abruzzo region. There they were held for more than a year, until a palace coup removed Mussolini from power in July 1943. German troops poured into Italy and the Garbutts were terrified that they would be deported. In the chaos that ensued, the family used false documents and fled north. They were helped in their escape by a local politician, and ended up in a refugee camp in Imola in central Italy. In May 1944, Garbutt’s 55-year-old wife Anna decided to go to the local church. The city was bombed by the Allies and the church was hit, killing Anna and many others. After Imola was liberated by Allied troops in April 1945, Garbutt returned south where he stayed with his adopted daughter’s family.
This long and tragic odyssey was only completed with Garbutt’s return to Genoa, nearly five years after his first arrest. A crowd formed when the news broke that Il Mister had come back to the city. After a brief spell in England, Garbutt was re-employed by Genoa in 1946, after being persuaded to return once again by Edoardo Pasteur, one of the club’s original founders. He stayed in the job right up to 1948 – his sixteenth season with the club, thirty-five years on from his first spell in charge. He then worked as a scout for the port-city team until 1951, when he finally returned to the UK. Garbutt died in Leamington Spa in 1964, after moving to a small house there on retirement, still cared for by his faithful Neapolitan daughter.27 This quiet death was met with indifference at home, but obituaries appeared in all the Italian papers. As Pierre Lanfranchi has written, ‘the contrast between how he [Garbutt] is remembered in England and in Italy is astonishing. Forgotten in England, he is an historic figure in Italy, celebrated as the first real football manager and one of the major actors in the development of professional football in the peninsula.’28 His biography is a perfect example of the ways that football history and Italian history simply cannot be separated.
Fans and History
Italian fans have a deep sense of history. In the 1990s, in a derby game, Genoa fans produced an enormous banner – which stretched across the whole end – We are Genoa. The message here was twofold, referring to the English origins of the club, and underlining the belief that Genoa represents both real football history (as the oldest club in Italy) and the core of Genoa itself (as the oldest club in the city – rivals Sampdoria were only formed after a fusion between two other Genoa teams in 1946). The same appeal to a stronger historical identification with the city is often made by Roma fans (against ‘provincial’ Lazio followers) and Torino fans (against Juventus).
Genoa fans have always been proud of their English origins. Elegant, older and supposedly well-informed fans at the Genoa stadium were always known as ‘the English’. Genoa fans are also renowned for their aplomb and irony. Forced to drop their English name in the 1920s (although recent historical work has argued that club authorities did so more out of zeal than under pressure from fascism) and call themselves Genova, the fans demanded a return to the English Genoa after the war. There are still supporters’ organizations in the city that are known as ‘Garbutt’s clubs’.
Most serious Italian fans are well aware of the date of foundation of their club, its record, its founders and its historic players, managers and even the various stadiums where the club has played. All these historic features are a strong part of a civic religion – adherence to which is a crucial aspect of fan-identity. Founding myths, legends and stories permeate this self-styled football history, as tales are handed down from generation to generation. These stories are a key part of every fan’s collective identity, and are reinforced by the presence of a series of institutional and footballing enemies. Many stories are linked to scandals, ‘thefts’ and injustices which teams have suffered in the past, and whose legacy can last for decades.
From Lions to bankruptcy. The rise and fall of Pro Vercelli
Vercelli is (and was) a sleepy, rice-growing town on the Piedmont plains, between Turin and Milan. Yet, between 1908 and 1913, and then again from 1921–1923, the town’s football team – Pro Vercelli – was more or less unbeatable. Pro Vercelli lost just one championship in the five years between 1908 and 1913 – and even that was in extremely controversial circumstances. The club’s rapid rise has been attributed largely to their modern training methods and tactics, and to the extraordinary fitness of their players.
This small-town team, with players who were not only all Italians but almost entirely from Vercelli itself, demonstrated that early football success was not so much about talent, but also about determination, preparation and teamwork. One of Vercelli’s most celebrated players – the midfielder Guido Ara – allegedly coined the Italian cliché ‘football is not a game for little girls’. Vercelli was the first modern Italian club, on and off the pitch, and the lessons of its victories were to become part of the DNA of calcio from that moment on. Corners and free-kicks were practised in training and the team controlled possession instead of simply booting the ball upfield. They were also very young – the average age of the 1908 squad was just twenty. In Genoa’s 1906 team, Spensley was nearly 40 and Pasteur, another key early player, was 30. Pro Vercelli often dominated the last fifteen minutes of games, relying on their exceptional strength. The club was perhaps the first to have a serious youth policy which paid off handsomely. A series of legendary players came through the ranks. Giuseppe Milano was their formidable captain before the war and his brother Felice won five championships at Vercelli, before dying in the trenches in 1915, at the age of 24.
Pro Vercelli played in white shirts with starched collars and cuffs and were one of the first teams to inspire loyalty and almost religious fervour among their fans. Pro Vercelli were also given a rhetorical nickname – The Lions – which tied in neatly with the nationalist rhetoric emerging in Italy at that time. As an all-Italian, provincial and local team, Pro Vercelli represented national pride against the foreigner-dominated clubs from the cosmopolitan cities of Milan and Turin. It was no accident that in the first national team game in 1910 Italy’s shirts were white, in homage to Pro Vercelli.29 So dominant was the Vercelli squad in this period that they provided nine of the eleven players who played for Italy against Belgium in May 1913.30 A staggering eight of these nine players were from the little town of Vercelli itself.
In 1910, Inter and Pro Vercelli finished level on points at the end of the season. The title playoff was to be played in Vercelli because of their superior goal difference. However, on the date chosen by the federation a number of Pro Vercelli players were committed to a military tournament. The club asked for the date to be put back but the federation (and Inter) refused. In protest, Vercelli played their fourth team (made up of 10–15-year-olds). Not surprisingly, Inter won easily, 10–3. Pro Vercelli were furious, and were banned
