The Torino Club Focus takes a slightly different route this week by taking a look back at one of the most important figures in the club’s history in the week of his birth – president Ferruccio Novo.
Without his passion, vision and above all else execution in getting what he wanted, Torino would not have been able to assemble one of the greatest sides ever to take to a football field, the Grande Torino, and it is down to this man that much of what the club stand for is owed.
He was born on March 22, 1897 and showed his headstrong attitude and love for the game at an early age when, after attending Turin’s St Joseph’s College, the Piedmont man immediately began trying to building for himself a life in calcio.
Novo joined Torino, the club with whom he would form in everlasting link, as a young 16-year-old defender desperate to prove himself but never quite managed to make the step up from reserve football into the first team.
“I was a duffer, the playing side of the game, alas, it was not for me,” he once recalled of his playing days with a chortle.
He instead chose to go into business with his brother Mario as owner of the famous Antonio Novo – straps of Torino and made his living that way until, of course, the lure of the Granata called him back once more.
The by-then successful businessman returned to the club in 1939 in an advisor to then president of the club, Giovanni Cuniberti, who was struggling to help them break the dominance of rivals Juventus.
Instantly, he set about trying to build a team which the fans could once again be proud of and left the maintaining of the family business to his brother, choosing to concentrate solely on the football club.
He also tried to instil English management values in each of the coaches he hired, having been impressed with how things worked there and everyone at the club was very impressed with his willingness to give his utmost for the club.
This was a man who when he set his mind to something, he got his way. He once attended a Venezia/Torino game to cast his eye over two opposing players, Valentino Mazzola and Ezio Loik, both of whom were prime targets for Juventus.
So impressed was Novo by the duo’s displays that the story goes that he marched to the dressing room at half time and agreed a deal there and then to bring the players to the Filadelfia where Toro played there home games then.
Each would go on to become a legend in the famous claret jersey with Mazzola holding the president in such high regard and respect that he named his son Ferrucio (who played for Lazio, Inter and Fiorentina) after the great man.
The president was famous for being something of a gentle dictator, a man who was very much in charge and who always had the final say but one who was willing to listen to others, especially those whose opinions he greatly valued such as those of his inner circle (“men I trusted who understood the game, they just got it,” he once said of his circle of helpers), among them Roberto Copernico who owned a clothing store in the city.
As well Mazzola and Loik, he snapped up a number of fantastic players who would go on to form the spine of the all-conquering Grande Torino team of the ’40s including Guglielmo Gabetto (unwanted by the Bianconeri but who went on to become one of the peninsula’s most feared strikers with Torino), Franco Ossola, Romeo Menti and Giuseppe Grezar were just some of the names he convinced to join his revolution.
His persistence and intelligence paid off, they immediately set about smashing and setting records for various incredible achievements, some of which stand to this day, and captured the first trophies of his era with a league and cup win in 1942/43.
It would be the first of six they would win during his time there which could have been more were it not for the war (although a title tournament held in this time during which Silvio Piola played for them was recognised on a ‘voluntary basis’ in 2002) and the ensuing Superga tragedy.
In 1945, he put the remaining pieces of his jigsaw together by recruiting Mario Rigamonti, Aldo Ballarin, Valerio Bacigalupo, Eusebio Castigliano and Virgilio Maroso and with this side, for the next four years, they vanquished almost all comers both home and away and all over the world.
He even tried his own hand at management of the national side, which during that decade had featured a great deal of Torino players, but was ultimately unsuccessful in this venture although shows the confidence he had in his own abilities.
After the leading the club he loved to one glorious victory after another, his team were cruelly taken away from him in a plane crash on May 4, 1949 while they were returning from a testimonial game in Benfica against Portugal.
Many Torino fans believe that Novo never quite recovered from the shock and devastation of what happened as he was one of the first to arrive on the scene at Superga and insisted on helping identifying the disfigured bodies of the players who had given their all for him.
The president took this travesty to heart, perhaps suffering from survivor’s guilt having not made the trip, but insisted to fans that he would once again build another great team that would rival that of the Grande Torino.
However, this was a bridge too far as he received continual empty promises and spent money on players who did not achieve what was expected of them with the Granata in his desperation to chase a dream that had slipped away.
Novo stepped down in 1953 and left the game, staying out of it until his death on April 8, 1974, where he passed away in ill health at Andora on the Ligurian coast after never fully recovering from the death of both his brother and wife.
He is still remembered very fondly by Toro fans for all that he achieved and the club themselves paid him no greater tribute than, just over two years after his death, the won the 1975/76 Scudetto in honour of Novo, a man who had helped deliver the previous five.
