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Amateurs and Professionals

Early Italian football, as with the game in England, was strictly an amateur sport, played for honour, fun and physical well-being, but never for money. Payment of any kind was frowned upon. Most players had other jobs – as doctors, artists, businessmen, dockers, students. Amateurism was written into the statutes and rules of clubs and players caught taking money were banned. By the 1920s, this system had become unworkable. Money was beginning to flow into the game – through gate receipts, advertising, newspapers and journalists, and prizes. Working outside of the rules the bigger clubs began to employ coaches and pay players, using a series of tricks, such as calling managers ‘consultants’. Sometimes they were caught, sometimes they weren’t. Italy was slowly catching up with England, where there were already more than 4,000 registered professional footballers by 1914.²⁰

From 1913–1914, Genoa’s star player Renzo De Vecchi, who was known as the ‘Son of God’ because of his precocious talent, was handsomely paid for his ‘work’ as a clerk for a Genoa bank. Other sectors of De Vecchi’s pay (and transfer fee) were hidden as ‘travel expenses’. Thanks to this new job, De Vecchi’s transfer from Milan to Genoa was allowed to go ahead. In general, however, before World War One, the federation dealt harshly with those found guilty of professionalism.

When Genoa poached two players from local rivals Andrea Doria in 1913, they were caught breaking the rules.²¹ Offered 1,000 lire each as a signing-on fee, the players accepted, but they had the bad luck to cash their joint cheque with a bank teller who was also a disgruntled Doria fan. Upset at the loss of two excellent players, the bank clerk copied the cheque and informed the football authorities. At first, the players were banned for life, a ban that was reduced to two years on appeal and then cut further by an amnesty. Both players proved to be excellent signings, going on to win three championships with Genoa and play for Italy.

The rationale behind the amateur ideal was ideological. Sport should not be played for money, which sullied the concepts of fair play and healthy physical activity. It was a leisure activity, not a job. These lofty ideals quickly collapsed in the face of the economic needs of clubs, presidents, players and the demands of fans for success. In the 1920s a number of very high-profile big-money transfers led to bitter public discussion and in the 1926 Viareggio Charter, professionalism was officially recognized for the first time. From that point on, players’ wages (as players, not bank clerks or lawyers) were subject to negotiation and the big clubs began to buy up the best talent. And it was not just players who were on the market. The best-paid football employees never took to the pitch themselves, but selected and trained their teams: the managers.

The first manager. The odyssey of William Garbutt

Foreigners had been largely responsible for setting up the game in Italy, and had been amongst the best early players. In 1912, Genoa became the first Italian club to appoint a professional manager. He was an Englishman, from Stockport, and was only 29 years old. William Garbutt had been a fine player with Reading and Woolwich Arsenal, before suffering a terrible injury while playing for Blackburn Rovers during a match witnessed, according to his own memoirs, by future Italian national coach Vittorio Pozzo. Garbutt’s salaried employment as Genoa manager was outside of the rules, so he was paid through a series of semi-legal means until the onset of professionalism in the second half of the 1920s.²²

As with most Italian versions of early football history, the origins of Garbutt’s employment by Genoa are unclear. What is certain is that he took up the reins of power at the club in 1912, and went on to have a quite remarkable career in Italy. Although not a manager by trade, Garbutt introduced some of the modern training techniques he had experienced as a player in England. He planted poles in the ground for dribbling practice, and supervised jumping exercises, abolishing the desultory kickabouts that had previously passed for training at most clubs. In 1913 Genoa finished second in the northern championship and they went one better in 1915 in the controversial war-suspended tournament.²³ It is said that the English manager also introduced a crucial aspect of post-match material culture to the Italian game – hot showers in the dressing room.

Genoa, which already had the best stadium in Italy, invested in the market, tempting players (illegally) from local rivals Doria and buying Renzo De Vecchi from Milan in 1913. Garbutt also used his contacts to bring over various English players. When war broke out, Garbutt returned to England before rejoining Genoa after the conflict, tempted by a wage increase to 8,000 lire a year. Genoa won the scudetto in both 1923 and 1924, and came close to a third successive championship in 1925.

Garbutt moved on to manage Roma in 1928, and then to Naples, where the team finished third twice in six seasons – their best-ever showing up to that point. Whilst in Naples he adopted a young orphan girl, Concettina Ciletti, an act of charity that endeared him to sentimental locals. The local press also accused him of hitting the bottle.²⁴ Garbutt then took control at Athletic Club Bilbao, where he won a title just as the Spanish civil war broke out. In 1938 he began his third spell with Genoa.²⁵ It is often said that the name given to managers in Italy – Il Mister – became popular thanks to the influence of Garbutt and other English managers in the 1930s. Even today players will refer to their managers as il mister in cliché-ridden post-match interviews: ‘who will play next week?’ – ‘decide il mister’; ‘That’s up to the mister’.²⁶

When 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 until the end of the year for their impudence. An amnesty relaxed the ban in October and Pro Vercelli swept to the title in 1911, 1912 and 1913. The team was famous enough to gain a prestigious invitation to tour South America in the period before the war. After winning two more championships in the 1920s Pro Vercelli began a long decline. As a poor, small-town club, they were unable to hold on to their star players in an increasingly professional game.³¹

In decline, however, Pro Vercelli’s youth team managed to produce a striker who turned out to be perhaps the most extraordinary player of his generation. Born in a small town near Pavia in 1913, Silvio Piola moved to Vercelli as a little boy and went on to a career that no other player has come close to matching. After making his debut in 1930 Piola played five seasons for Pro Vercelli, scoring 51 goals and he remained close to his old squad even after Lazio signed him for a record fee in 1934. Pro Vercelli’s president had once stated ‘we will never sell Piola, not even for all the gold in the world. Once we sell him, the decline of Pro Vercelli will begin.’ He was right. His side finished bottom of Serie A with only fifteen points in that year and, once relegated, they were never to return to add to their seven championship titles. Piola went on to greatness and in 21 war-interrupted seasons stretching from 1930 to 1954 he scored 290 goals in 566 games in Serie A.

Pro Vercelli languished in the lower levels of the semi-professional game for a time, before rising slowly up to Serie C again by the end of the 1990s. However, by 2003, like so many other clubs, they were in financial crisis. In December of that year, bankruptcy proceedings began after the club failed to pay player wages. The company which owned the club – whose name was Spare Time – had debts of over £600,000. Pro Vercelli’s players were forced to have a whip round to pay for their transport to an away match. A Committee to Save Pro was set up and began looking desperately for a buyer. Today, Pro Vercelli struggle on in one of Italy’s third divisions, backed by a small group of loyal fans.

The First Scandal. The Rosetta Case

In a society racked with scandal, suspicion, accusation and counter-accusation, and where the rule of law has always been something of an option, Italian football was caught up in controversy almost from the very beginning. Many early championships were marked by intense debate, as the football federation struggled to impose any kind of authority over the game. In 1906 Juventus refused to play in the title playoff against Milan after a change of venue and 1910 saw the Pro Vercelli ‘baby-players’ protest. The post-World War One period was marked by splits, debates and arguments amongst the various clubs and federations.

Italian football’s first real scandal became known as the ‘Rosetta case’. Virginio Rosetta was one of the most admired and prized defenders of the heroic early phase of calcio history. Born in Vercelli in 1902, he is usually recognized as Italy’s first professional footballer and was the subject of the first big transfer fee. Rosetta’s move was also the spark, for the first, but certainly not for the last time, of protests by one set of fans against the transfer of a player. An accountant by trade, Rosetta was idolized in Vercelli. As he approached his second championship victory with the club in three years (in 1922–23) rumours began to spread of an offer from Juventus. Rosetta had, it appeared, been tapped up. At that time Luigi Bozino, criminal lawyer and Pro Vercelli’s president, was also president of the FIGC, so the case took on football-wide proportions.

A lot of money was involved. A cheque for at least 50,000 lire went directly to Bozino and Rosetta’s new highly-paid accountancy post in Turin was underwritten by Juventus (and therefore by their owners FIAT). The Rosetta scandal led to the resignation of a number of leading members of the various football federations, and threatened to split the world of calcio wide open. Moreover for the first time the amount of money paid for a footballer led to scandal in itself. It was seen as immoral to spend so much cash on what was essentially just a game. The scandal dragged on. Rosetta moved to Juventus, but after just three games of the 1923–24 season, the federation ruled that the transfer had been irregular. Juventus were docked points for the three games Rosetta had played for them. Without this penalization, Juventus would have won the northern league. The scandal had effectively cost them the championship. Furious at this decision, Juventus’s management threatened to pull their team out altogether. This is a unique scandal in Italian football history – with Juventus as the victims of an injustice. The trend since then has been for the FIAT club to be the benefactors of scandal and favouritism.

The controversial transfer was finally completed the following season, and Rosetta proved to be well worth the money. Pro Vercelli’s fans were still angry at Rosetta’s ‘betrayal’ when he came back in 1929 for a game against their team. He went on to win six championships with Juve as well as the 1934 World Cup. Rosetta’s move also highlighted the increasing power of the big clubs, and the beginning of the long decline of the strong provincial sides who had taken calcio by storm in the early part of the century. Some writers even trace the deep hatred of many Italian fans towards Juventus to the ‘Rosetta case’.