Milan is a city with great culture, fashion, art and food. Its long summer days nourish you as you explore arcades, museums, parks and markets, and every corner of the centre of the city oozes with history. It also possesses one of the most iconic structures in the footballing world. When I was in Italy I had to make pilgrimage to perhaps the greatest cathedral known to sport, Stadio Giuseppe Meazza, commonly known as San Siro.
San Siro is unlike any other stadium. It is gargantuan. It’s swirling spiral staircases mesmerise you as they rise from the ground. The exposed concrete, brutal but inevitably crumbling, is too much for you to take in all at once. It’s impossible to find an angle that you can fully appreciate the whole beast so one must take it in small doses. Most iconic are the huge red girders jutting out from on top of the stadium, such an evocative element on a stadium has never been matched.
When you walk around the stadium you can’t help but think of the legends that amazing teams that have played there, Jose’s Inter side that won the Champions League in 2010, that AC Milan side of the late eighties that won the European cup twice in a row. Images of Paolo Maldini, Javier Zanetti, Seedorf, Gattuso, Eto’o, Shevchenko, Kaka, and Ronaldinho are impossible to shake. The stadium intoxicates you with its history, it is filled with legend.
San Siro is, as mentioned, crumbling. It is not long for this world as both Inter and AC Milan look for their own, separate, stadia to replace it in the near future. Within a decade it will be no more and our sacred pilgrimage will be lost, that’s why I had to visit it when I was there. I dragged my girlfriend, in the summer heat, to the outskirts of the city to marvel at the concrete and wonder what it would be like to see a game there. Unfortunately, there was no game on. Neither Inter nor AC Milan were present, those ungrateful two.
What was on, however, was a friendly, between two slightly less glamourous sides, that we chose to go to instead. In northern Milan, in the Sesto San Giovanni neighbourhood lies Stadio Breda, the home of SSD Pro Sesto, and they hosted fellow local side ASD Alcione. Pro Sesto play in Serie C this season and came against Alcione who compete in the division below.
It was well into 30 degrees at Stadio Breda. On three sides there were elevated stands filled with white plastic seats and blue details, the main stand was the only one that was covered and supplied a meagre amount of shade. On the fourth side of the pitch, behind one of the goals was a few trees, an ambulance and some bored looking Italian guys in bibs.
As two Brits, the Italian sun was harsh for my girlfriend and I. In Pro Sesto’s clubhouse, situated under the main stand, I used my non-existent Italian and somehow garnered a couple of ice lollies and a few bottles of much-needed ice-cold water. The guy behind the bar seemed bewildered at me as I mumbled pidgin-Italian, handed over a few coins and looked uncomfortable. They probably didn’t get many tourists.
The game itself was awful. It was a friendly, it was scorching hot, and it was two amateur teams trying hard not to injure themselves, collapse or get heat stroke. After some long hard toil, it finished 0-0. I can’t remember a shot on target. Although the game was bad, I wasn’t annoyed or underwhelmed. Pro Sesto provided what I needed to complete my Milanese football pilgrimage. I had seen both ends of the Italian football spectrum, from the grandeur of the San Siro to the real grassroots Italian game. Yes, I sweated through my shirt and didn’t even see a goal, but my mission was complete, and I was happy.
Leave a comment