no real tactics, the ball was heavy and goalkeepers didn’t even attempt to catch it. Punching or kicking out were much preferred. Kit was made up of long-sleeved shirts, often with buttons. Many essential items were imported from England – balls, shirts, boots. Shorts were long, and trousers were often worn, as were caps. There were no changing rooms, so players usually turned up, and went home, already changed.
Many rules in place at the birth of calcio were dissimilar to those that govern today’s game. A player was offside if, when the ball was played, there were fewer than three players between him and the goal and until 1907, the offside rule applied to the whole pitch. After that date, you could not be offside in your own half. For many years, a draw usually led to a replay, not extra-time. Disciplinary rules were rudimentary. Pitch invasions led to replays, not sanctions (thereby encouraging more pitch invasions). There were no shirt numbers until the 1939–40 season and no substitutes at all until 1968. Early Italian football history was also dominated by foreign players, presidents, clubs, entrepreneurs, referees and words, and above all by the English, the Swiss, the Germans and the French.
From the start, matches were often played on Sundays, despite the fact that Italy was a Catholic country. The reason for this anomaly was simple. Most people worked on Saturdays, and the battle for an ‘English Saturday’ – one without work – was one of the historic demands of Italy’s nascent trade union movement in the early twentieth century. Later, the Church was to complain about this tradition (which is also true of Catholic Spain). Until the 1990s, when Pay-TV destroyed the rites and rhythms of the great Italian football Sunday, the Sunday afternoon match formed a central part of Italian culture. Some fans went to games, partaking in the physical act of watching their team. Others hung around outside stadiums, trying to get in free or just lapping up the atmosphere. Many others simply waited for news, or visited bars. Once radio became widespread, the little transistor became a key element of the classic Sunday family outing, pressed as it often was to the ear of the father, or listened to through a primitive plastic earpiece. With the advent of TV, the afternoon outing had to be cut short in order to get back in time for Ninetieth minute, a programme with short reports on all games, transmitted at about 18.30.
Spensley and the Reign of Genoa, 1898–1904
James Richardson Spensley’s Genoa team went on to dominate early Italian football history, winning the title in 1899, 1900, 1902, 1903 and 1904. The doctor played in goal in all of these finals apart from 1899, when he moved to left back to allow one of only two Italians in that particular team to take over between the posts. Spensley, the first name on the first team sheet of the first official game in Italy, retired as a player in 1906. He then became one of the earliest referees in the Italian game and a key member of the embryonic football associations. It is not clear what kind of managerial role Spensley played, if any. Did he select the team? Did the team train at all? Nobody really knows. But, being captain, we can assume that some kind of leadership was provided by the doctor and some Italian histories even list Spensley as a kind of modern coach of Genoa. This detail is an example of the temptation to read back football history, imposing the structure of the modern game onto that of the past. When war broke out in 1914 – although Italy did not join until May 1915 – Spensley signed up as a military doctor. He died in agony in a hospital in Germany, from injuries sustained, it is said, whilst tending to an enemy soldier.
In the photos that survive of James Spensley, the doctor-goalie is wearing a white shirt (not what we would think of as a football top – but a real shirt) and his sleeves are rolled up. His shorts reach down to below his knees. He is not particularly tall and his boots appear to be normal boots, without laces. He has no gloves and sports an impressive beard and moustache. The goal, behind him, has no net. In England, by this time, the game had taken on many aspects of modern football. Italy was still in the dark ages, in footballing terms, as the twentieth century began.
The big teams are born. Juventus, Milan, Internazionale, Torino
Slowly, but inexorably, calcio grew in influence and importance. The second championship lasted three days, the third in 1900 twenty days. Other cities became football centres – above all Milan, traditional rival to Turin as Italy’s football capital. The infrastructures associated with the modern game began to take shape. Clubs formed all over the country, including in the south, and the business possibilities of the game also became evident.
In November 1897 a group of school students from the prestigious Massimo D’Azeglio school in the centre of Turin – a school attended over the years by such Turin luminaries as FIAT magnate Gianni Agnelli and Primo Levi – met to organize the foundation of a new Turin sports club. They settled on a Latin name – Juventus – ‘youth’. What was to be the biggest club in the history of Italian football became a calcio team in 1899 – Juventus Football Club. The famous black-and-white shirts came to Turin – allegedly – via an English referee called Harry Goodley.6 Given the task of buying some football kit in England, he sent back Notts County’s, which thus became the black-and-white of the Turin team.7 Juventus won their first championship in 1905, by one point from Genoa. It was about this time that shirts and other items of kit began to be produced in Italy, and not simply imported from England. In 1907 Juventus pulled out of the playoff final in protest against a change of venue. They were not to win the title again until 1926.
The early history of Turinese football was extremely complicated but began to take shape in 1906 with the formation of a second, unified, Turin club to rival Juventus. Torino Football Club was set up in a beer hall by ‘twenty or so Swiss men with bowler hats and a lot of good will’ (Marco Cassardo).8 Torino’s first ever official game was a derby victory in 1907, although the club’s fans would have to wait until 1928 for their first championship success. Since then, Torino’s history has been intimately linked to that of its hated, rich and envied cousins. Torino’s colours were claret red – leading to one of the club’s nicknames (along with Toro, the bull, their symbol) – the granata. Many of calcio’s greatest, most controversial and most tragic moments were to be associated with the extraordinary history of Torino.
In 1899 a group of Milanese industrialists and English and Swiss footballers in alliance with the local Mediolanum gymnastic society created the Milan Cricket and Football Club. Milan had rapid success, winning their first championship in May 1901. The team’s most influential early player was Herbert Kilpin. Like Bosio in Turin and Spensley in Genoa, Kilpin played a pioneering role in the development of Milanese calcio. In his native Nottingham he had played in a team named after the Italian nationalist leader Giuseppe Garibaldi, complete with red shirts. A minor player in England, he became a legend in Italy – perhaps the first real football star – underlining the huge gap in the level of play in that early period.
As a utility player, Kilpin popped up in defence, midfield and in attack, and was captain of Milan for ten years. His nickname was ‘Il Lord’. Legend also relates that he chose the team’s red-and-black shirts. There is some controversy over the team’s ‘Devils’ nickname, however. Relatives of Kilpin argue that it was his Protestantism, in a Catholic country, which led to the epithet.9 Kilpin is supposed to have said that ‘our shirts must be red because we are devils. Let’s put in some black to give everyone a fright.’ Kilpin’s Milan team won three championships, and might well have claimed a fourth if it were not for a split in the football federation (over the question of foreign players) in 1908.10 Another oft-repeated story (first spread by Kilpin himself, and then rewritten with poetic licence by Gianni Brera) is that he abandoned his own marriage party to play a game in Genoa, whereupon he broke his nose. The most famous of all early footballers, he played up to the age of 43, and then became a
