How Cricket Clubs Became AC Milan, Juventus and Genoa
The FIFA World Cup is on in full swing right now and most of the usual suspects are in action. But four-time champions, Italy nowhere to be found. For the third straight edition, the Azzurri are missing. But did you know that that two of the country's biggest football clubs only exist because a pair of Englishmen could not find anyone to play cricket with.
HOW AC MILAN & INTER MILAN WERE BIRTHED
The story starts, as these things often do, in a tavern. Alfred Edwards and Herbert Kilpin, lace traders sent to Milan on business, missed their cricket badly enough to start a club to play. And the result was the Milan Cricket and Football Club. Cricket came first in the name. Football was the add on, included presumably because someone needed a way to fill the winter months.
However, football did not stay the junior partner for long. Kilpin gave the club its red and black colours, declaring they would be a team of devils, red like flames and black like the fear of their opponents, which is the sort of line that sounds better after a night out perhaps than it reads the next morning, but it stuck regardless. Milan won their first national football title in 1900, had overtaken Genoa as Italy's leading side by 1906, and by 1908 had split in two, with one faction breaking away to form Internazionale [Inter Milan]. A falling out among a cricket club's football wing produced the Derby della Madonnina, one of the fiercer fixtures on the European calendar, which is a strange legacy for a club that started out trying to organise a decent net session.
THE ORIGINS OF JUVENTUS
Juventus tell much the same story with less fanfare. A group of students in Turin formed a multi sports club two years before Edwards and Kilpin had their idea in Milan, and they called it Juventus, with cricket sitting somewhere in the original mix before football took over entirely. No one in Turin seems to have bothered keeping the cricket bats around once the football took hold. There are 36 Serie A titles in the cupboard now, and not a single mention of an opening partnership.
GENOA’S BEGINNINGS
Genoa, at least, never pretended otherwise. Founded in 1893 as Genoa Cricket and Athletic Club, with football only introduced a few years later by Sir James Spensley, the club still goes by Genoa Cricket and Football Club to this day. It played nothing but cricket for its first two seasons, membership restricted to the British until the Italians were eventually let in too, by which point football had already won the argument. The cricket itself never entirely vanished. In 2007, a group of supporters with an interest in the club's forgotten origins put together a side made up of English, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani players and started turning up for nets sessions again, more than a century after the club's first matches.
Interestingly, while Italian football remains locked out of the biggest global tournament, Italian cricket has, rather quietly, managed something it had never done before. The Italian men’s cricket team walked out in an ICC World Cup for the first time in its history earlier this year, a footnote next to the football tournament currently dominating every conversation, but a footnote that can well grow into at least a paragraph in global cricket’s history books soon.
Three of Italy's grandest football institutions, then, all began life with a cricket bag in the corner of the room. Edwards and Kilpin wanted nothing more than a game of cricket on a Sunday. What they got, eventually, was one of football's great rivalries, and a continent that has more or less forgotten where any of it started.
The European T20 Premier League appears determined not to let that happen again. Franchise cricket, the sport's most exciting export, is now arriving on the same continent where Edwards and Kilpin once struggled to find eleven willing fielders. Cities across Europe now have cricket franchises of their own. Whether it produces a rivalry to match the Derby della Madonnina remains to be seen. Stranger things, as Milan and Genoa can attest, have certainly happened in Europe before.