In the aftermath of the air crash in Colombia earlier this week that killed almost all of the players and coaches of Chapecoense, the remaining officials at the Brazilian club have naturally been making all the right noises about rebuilding the club. For example, Cecilio Hans, a club director, said: “In the memory of those who died and to honour their families, we will rebuild this club from scratch so it is even stronger”.
This is undoubtedly commendable and doubtless genuinely heartfelt, but the difficulty, if not impossibility, of rebuilding a football club after a disaster of this magnitude has been proven several times throughout football history, and no more so than in the story of Torino’s tragedy in the Superga air crash of 1949.
The word “Superga” has the same kind of immediate emotional impact in Italy that the word “Munich” has in England. It is synonymous with the rise and devastating fall of a marvellous football team, one that had already achieved great things but that might have gone on to achieve even greater things, but for destiny’s malign intervention.
It was on 4 May 1949, less than five years after the end of World War Two, that the great Torino side – ‘Il Grande Torino’ – were destroyed when the plane in which they were returning from a friendly match in Lisbon crashed in heavy fog into a hillside outside Turin, careering into the back of the famous Basilica of Superga, an early 17th century church.
The whole first team were killed, including such already-legendary players as Valentino Mazzola and Ezio Loik, and its creator and coach, Erno Erbstein, who has finally been given his rightful place in football history in the recent biography, “Erbstein: Football’s Forgotten Pioneer”, by Dominic Bliss.
The feats of that fabulous team are worth recounting because they are truly extraordinary. They had already won the first three Italian titles when Serie A resumed after the end of WWII. In fact, they had already won four in a row, as they had also won the 1942-43 title before Serie A was finally cancelled as the war turned against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and the Allies moved in on Italy from North Africa. In 1943, Torino also became the first Italian team to win the league and cup double, which, although it lacked the mythical status that it acquired in England, was still a historic triumph.
What is more difficult to quantify, especially now, nearly 70 years later, is the impact that Il Grand Torino had on Italy as a whole and not just their native Turin. As documented in the supreme neo-realist films of De Sica and Rosselini, especially The Bicycle Thieves, Italy had been decimated by the war and much of its industrial base had been utterly destroyed by Allied bombing. However, just as Turin rebuilt itself, so Il Grande Torino restored much of Italy’s sense of self-worth, which had taken such a toll during the war, especially in the virtual civil war that led to and followed the killing of Mussolini.
The fact is that Torino, despite being the subject of claims similar to those now being made by the officials of Chapocoense, has never truly rebuilt itself as a football club. Having achieved such dominance in the immediate post-war period, to the point that they were genuinely overshadowing Turin’s (and Italy’s) traditional giant Juventus, Torino have never achieved any period of success remotely comparable to that of the 1940s. The club has only ever won one more Serie A title, in 1976, when it was spearheaded to glory by a young Francesco Graziani, who six years later would star alongside a young Paolo Rossi as Italy won the World Cup.
There is an argument that Torino are one of the truly “tragic” football clubs, if not the most tragic, because Superga is not the only disaster it has suffered, even if the others have not been on the same scale. The greatest individual tragedy that has ever affected the club is the almost literally unbelievable story of Gigi Meroni, its great star and great hope of the 1960s, when he briefly threatened to return Torino to their glory days of two decades earlier.
However, just as Meroni was coming into his peak years, he was tragically killed by a car driven by (of all people) a die-hard Torino fan, who subsequently became the president of the club in an attempt to “atone” for his accident. Unfortunately, he ultimately oversaw a relegation and was hounded out of the club by other fans who could never forgive him for his destruction of their darling.
To this day, Torino has never truly recovered from Superga and in the new global age of football, where its hated city rival Juventus has survived the 2006 Calciopoli scandal to reinvent itself as one of the most successful clubs in world football, it is unlikely now that it ever will. Its only real claim to international attention in recent years came when Joe Hart joined them earlier this year on loan from Manchester City after he had been discarded by Pep Guardiola.
As the greatest English writer on South American football, Tim Vickery, has commented: “The great Torino side in 1949 was wiped out in a plane crash – they received a lot of solidarity afterwards. But you look at their subsequent history and you see how difficult the challenge has been for them.” As Vickery rightly points out, Torino are a far bigger club from a far bigger city than Chapocoense, so the likelihood is that Chape’s attempt to rebuild, let alone to become “stronger than ever”, will be difficult, if not downright impossible.
Of course, it is not completely impossible, as Manchester United demonstrated after Munich, but it is worth remembering that Manchester United’s air crash is very much the exception that proves the rule. Most football teams, whether club sides or, in the case of the promising Ghana side that was destroyed in 1993, rarely recover from an air crash that wipes out a whole team.
That Manchester United were able to do it was largely down to the indomitable willpower of the mighty Matt Busby, who ten years after Munich finally led a Manchester United team – albeit one that Busby himself regarded as probably inferior to that of his famous “Busby Babes” – to the European Cup.
That, with all due respect to Vinny Pazienza, is truly “the greatest comeback in sports”, and one that is unlikely ever to be matched, as Torino have already proved and as even the most optimistic Chape fan or director must secretly fear.
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