Today the body of a Nottingham lacemaker who helped found one of the world’s most important football clubs lies alongside those of famous poets, sculptors, actors, politicians, musicians and racing drivers in Milan’s Cimitero Monumentale, a place of ornate marble tombs and elegant tree-shaded avenues. But when Herbert Kilpin died on 22 October 1916, aged 46, the memory of his role in establishing the place of football in Italian life already seemed to be fading fast enough to deny him even a name plate on the vault where his remains were originally placed, in the humbler surroundings of a cemetery in Milan’s north-western outskirts.
Although a story in Gazzetta dello Sport had announced the death of “the pioneer of Italian football”, many decades would pass before his bones were transferred to a place of greater honour. In 1998 a fan of Milan named Luigi La Rocca, who devoted his spare time to tracing the players of the club’s early years, matched an entry in the cemetery’s record card – on which the dead man was erroneously identified as “Alberto Kilpin” – to the number on the vault where the club’s founder lay.
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