March 11 – Milan Kick Off | On This Football Day

March 11 – Milan Kick Off

AC Milan is one of the most stylish and sophisticated football clubs on the planet, but the club owes its existence to a very uncool-sounding lace-maker from Nottingham named Herbert.

Herbert Kilpin is perhaps one of the unlikeliest heroes of Italian football, but hero he is. One of ten children he was born in Nottingham in 1870 and was soon playing football for Notts Olympic and then for St. Andrews, a church team based near the Forest Recreation Ground.

In 1891 he moved to Turin to work for Edoardo Bosio, an Italian-Swiss textile merchant and the founder of Internazionale Torino, believed to be the first Italian football club. Kilpin was soon playing for the team – and became the first Englishman to play football abroad.

In 1897 Kilpin moved to Milan for work and it was there that he would truly leave his mark. Never a man to turn down a drink or two, just before Christmas Kilpin was enjoying a boozy session with some fellow Brits in Fiaschetteria Toscana, a tavern in Via Berchet. As with most men in pubs the conversation soon turned to sport and the chaps decided to start a football and cricket club. Unlike most ideas a group of drunk men come up with in a pub, they actually did follow through on their plan and the Milan Cricket and Football Club was born. “We will wear red and black,” said Kilpin. “Red to recall the devil, black to invoke fear.”

Three months later, on this day in 1898 the club played its first ever football match, with six Brits in the line-up: Kilpin, Hoode, Lees, Davies, Neville and Allison, alongside Cignaghi, Torretta, Valerio, Dubini and Formenteri. The match was played on a field to the north-east of the city where the grand Central Station now stands.

The fledgling team won the match against local rivals Mediolanum, by either 2-0 or 3-0 depending on which report you believe.

The following year Milan won their first League title and soon joined Genoa as powerhouse in Italian football. Kilpin continued to play for the team despite his slightly unorthodox refreshment tastes – John Foot claims in his book Calcio, A History of Italian Football that Kilpin was famed for his drinking and even kept a bottle of whisky in a hole behind the goal. Kilpin claimed this was to soften the blow when the opposition scored.

In 1908 the cosmopolitan feel to the club evaporated when the ex-pats left to form Internazionale, and one of the world’s great rivalries was created.

As for Kilpin, he died in poverty in 1916 aged just 46, his death a mystery and his grave thought lost until in the 1990s an amateur historian named Luigi La Rocca, after months of searching, found Kilpin’s grave in the Municipal Cemetery, Milan.

In 1999, AC Milan paid for a new tombstone and their illustrious founder and superstar, was reburied in the Monumental Graveyard in Milan.

Of course since then some notable Brits have turned out for the Rossoneri including Mark Hateley, Ray Wilkins, Luther Blissett and Jimmy Greaves, oh, and some chap named Beckham.

Another Englishman was making headlines yet again on this day back in 2005, Kevin Keegan was quitting yet another job. Find out which was the lucky club right here, and be sure to come back tomorrow for more from the best football nostalgia website this side of the Rio Grande.