AC Milan were founded in December of 1899 by three English ex-pats - Herbert Kilpin, David Allison and Samuel Davies, as the Milan Cricket and Foot-Ball Club. The club was registered with the Italian Football Federation, and its first game was played against a team named Mediolanum on 11th March 1900. AC Milan got its history off to a good start with a 3-0 win. Just one month later, the club claimed its first ever trophy, Il Medaglia del Re (The Kings Medal).

 

As football was still a fledgling sport at the time in Italy, the club mainly concentrated on playing cricket, although they aimed to also promote football in the region. The focus shifted more towards football over the coming years, and their record in this sport during the early days was very good indeed, although it wasn’t until 1919 that the clubs name would be shortened to ‘Milan Football Club’. The team that would be destined to become AC Milan, one of the world’s best and most famous clubs, won their first league title in 1900, also collecting another Kings Medal that year and a third in 1901.

 

They soon became the most popular club in Lombardy by winning a prestigious cup called the “Pappa Dapples” three times on the trot in 1905, 06 and 07. Their second Scudetto arrived in 1906 and they became back-to-back champions in 1907. Back in these days, in order to play for Milan, one needed to be a fee-paying member of the club. The fee was 20 Lira, 12 Lira for students. The punishment for forgetting to pay up was not being permitted to train. By 1908, the club was dominated by Italians and this upset a group of Italian and Swiss club members who wanted the club to be more open to foreigners. The group broke away and formed their own club going by the name of Football Club Internazionale. It’s this event that instigated the heated rivalry between AC Milan and Inter that is as strong today as ever. 

Achievements: Italian Football Championship - Champions x3
                         Pappa Dapples – Winners x3
                         King’s Medal – Winners x1

Star player: Herbert Kilpin, DOB 24 January 1870, Nottingham, England

The son of a butcher, Kilpin grew up with nine older brothers and sisters in a small house in Nottingham. He soon started work as an assistant in a lace warehouse. He loved football, and at just 13 years old he helped to start up a small club named Garibaldi Nottingham after Italian war hero Giuseppe Garibaldi. Little did young Kilpin know that his life journey would in fact take him to the country that inspired him. By 1891, Kilpin was working in Turin for Edoardo Bosio, who was an Italian-Swiss textile merchant. Bosio himself founded a team named Internazionale Torino, which is possibly the first ever Italian football club. Kilpin started playing for them, and in doing so he became the first ever Englishman to play abroad. Seven years later, Kilpin moved from Turin to Milan. This place was missing a football team, so Kilpin and a small group of other English ex-pats started Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club. This was the birth of the famous Rossoneri. The club was immediately successful, and eventually evolved into AC Milan as we know them today. Not much is known about his life after football, apart form that he married an Italian woman and died aged 46, probably because of his heavy smoking and drinking. In the 1990’s, an amateur historian tracked down Kilpin’s grave, and AC Milan paid to have his remains transferred to the Famedio, the main building of the graveyard where the tombs of Milan’s most illustrious individuals are located.