When a player breaks his leg in a top-flight game, it is never immediately obvious. There are always two conflicting views from the two sets of supporters. As one group of fans cry gamesmanship, the other lot rail against the act of battery they have been forced to witness. After a few minutes, when a stretcher is brought on and the strap of an oxygen mask is slipped behind the player’s head, the argument is settled, though rarely the cause.

Italia Wasteels’ games are not played in front of a large crowd of supporters, so it is more immediately obvious that something is very wrong when Domenico Cattini goes down. Unimpeded by the roar of fans, the sound of a bone snapping is terrifyingly loud.

The substitute and de facto linesman Vincenzo Gambino rushes on to the pitch, immediately aware of Cattini’s injury. An ambulance is called and Cattini, ashen-faced as the blood diverts elsewhere, is kept warm under a mass of coats, propped up on captain Marco Marchini’s shoulder. The game had been full-blooded but not bad-tempered, with his broken leg probably best chalked up as “just one of those things”.

After a while, once the shock has worn off, Cattini starts making jokes and the players tell me stories of other, even worse, injuries. There have been plenty throughout the history of Italia Wasteels. Among the players and staff present at the game, all 49 years of the club’s history are accounted for. Most of the thousands of fixtures they have played have been attended by two generations of Italians living in London.

Luigi Farnesi calls the ambulance. He started the team with his brother when they were in their early twenties and has remained at Wasteels in a variety of roles ever since. This is not the first time Luigi has had to deal with the broken leg of a Cattini. The club’s meticulous records note that Domenico’s father, Mario, was a “wonderfully skilled attacking midfield player whose career was held back after breaking his leg”.

Claudio Marchini, the club’s manager and scorer of nearly 100 goals in the 1970s, brings water on to the pitch. Like Luigi, he has been with Italia Wasteels since the beginning, with his sons Riccardo and Marco now the defensive linchpins of the side.

This is just another twist in the long story of the UK’s only surviving Italian football club. Along with the broken legs and other misfortune, there have been league triumphs and cup runs, late winners and stoppage-time sickeners. It is a rich history and one inextricably linked to the wider story of post-war Italian migration to England.

The History

Italia Wasteels in the 1970s and 2014. Photograph: Italia Wateels

A community of Italians in London had been established long before the second world war, most notably in the “Little Italy” of Clerkenwell, which boasts its own basilica-style church, St Peter’s. Thousands of Italians settled in London the 1800s. Many of them were artisans, specialists in terrazzo or plaster figure-making, while others worked in catering, particularly producing and selling ice cream. Most came from the north of Italy and by 1939 more than 20,000 Italians lived in the UK.

After Benito Mussolini allied with Adolf Hitler’s Germany in 1940, Italian men of fighting age were arrested and interned in camps around the UK as they were considered potential enemies of the state. In July 1940, 476 Italian internees drowned when the SS Arandora Star passenger ship was sunk on its way to Canada, carrying those deemed, often incorrectly, most sympathetic to the fascist cause. Internment cost many Italians their livelihoods and some their lives.

Back in Italy, things were even worse. The country had been ravaged by a land war that had all but destroyed its economy. The harsh conditions drove a wave of emigration throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, only later stemmed by Italy’s emergence as a major industrial power.

Though many Italians chose to settle in the New World – predominantly Argentina and the US – and Australia, some preferred the Old. Of those who moved to England, most were recruited under the European Voluntary Workers scheme, usually as labourers in heavy industry, before they had residence and choice of work; many were recruited by brick factories in Peterborough and Bedford. However, London was still the place to be and most of the post-war recruits moved there as soon as they could.

Robin Palmer, who is now a professor of anthropology at Rhodes University in South Africa, wrote about Italian migrants in London in the 1970s for his doctoral thesis. “The accepted term for Italians in Britain at the time was ‘Italianates’ but I didn’t like it because I thought it objectified them,” Palmer tells me. “I needed a collective term to include not only the Italian-born people, but also their British-born children. So I called them Britalians instead.”

Palmer’s work was revolutionary for its time. Rather than regarding the immigrants as sociological problems, as had been the academic norm, he sought to look at where they had come from as well as the conditions they encountered once they had moved. During his research, he found that the relationship between the Britalians and their hosts had been damaged by the war.

“The experience of internment, culminating in the Arandora Star disaster … for a small community to lose more than 400 men was a terrible thing,” says Palmer. “They were terribly shocked by the experience of a whole society turning on them through no fault of their own, simply because they shared a nationality with Mussolini. They were very cautious after the war and it persuaded people to live in the community.”

Many of the post-war migrants settled south of the river, where the houses were cheaper. The church was positioned at the heart of that community on Brixton Road. It was, and still is, run by the Scalabrini Fathers, an order set up to tend to the needs of the Italian diaspora throughout the world. “The order were sent as missionaries,” says Palmer. “But, rather than working to convert natives, their mission was to retain the Italian diaspora for the church – to keep them Catholic but also to look after their spiritual, material and recreational needs.”

The church on Brixton Road. Photograph: Gianlucca de Paoli

The Scalabrinians thought up numerous ways to keep young and old Italians involved in the community. The best example being Club Italia, which was founded at the Scalabrini Centre in 1963. An extract from the diary Palmer kept while working on his thesis gives a good sense of what the social club was like:

Sunday 22 October 1972. This is the first time I have seen so many Britalians together in one place. Either most of the families which belong to Club Italia are here or many members have brought friends. Nearly all the young people are dancing; there are a lot of older women sitting around the edge of the floor trying to talk to each other above Father Silvano’s discotheque and minding the younger children. The other children are dancing or just running around, jumping from the stage. The bar lounge is full of men; some of them around the bar, others in groups playing cards at tables. The other priests are there too, mingling. I watch the way they relate to their parishioners. It is very informal and natural. Father Silvano is surrounded by a group of young people, requesting records, having a go at being disc jockey, or just chatting to him.

The migrants who arrived after the war were desperate to make better lives for themselves and their children in a new country and the order understood that language schools, cultural events and newspapers were as effective social glues as the church. This was also the driving force behind the creation of the Anglo-Italian Football League (AIFL).

Every fortnight the Scalabrini-run Italian-language newspaper La Voce Degli Italiani printed the Serie A table across from that of the AIFL. In the issues from the 1970s, mentions of the great Juventus of Turin are often given second billing to the less famous Juventus of Peterborough, or even the one in Swindon. In 1969, the inaugural Anglo-Italian Cup is advertised, but still follows after the more important news of the latest AIFL results.

The league was a major fixture of amateur football in London for several decades. Some years there were close to 20 teams competing for the title, most sponsored by companies with links to the Italian community. In 1968 the league expanded to include three more teams, one of which was the embryonic club Italia, which would later adopt the suffix Wasteels.

The Anglo-Italian Football League in all its glory. Photograph: Gianlucca de Paoli

Luigi was encouraged to set up the club by Silvano Bertapelle, the aforementioned priest and DJ. Both Claudio and Luigi remember him fondly. “He was a priest,” says Claudio, “But he was also a friend to us. He used to ask me why I never came to confession, and I would tell him: ‘Father, I see you every day! If I told you about all of the things I was doing you would have to kick me out of the club.’”

Claudio and Luigi are quite different. Where the manager is gregarious and talkative, Luigi, though equally amiable, is more reserved. They both moved to London as teenagers with their parents and ran coffee shops as their parents had done. Indeed, Luigi still runs one, in the main UCL building.

I meet him there during the week and it is obvious his convivial manner has made him popular with the staff and students. Luigi was 23 when he started the club, which was later sponsored by Benedetto Longinotti, who ran the Wasteels travel agency in London. He offers me a coffee and hands me a book printed for the club’s 25th anniversary. Over almost 200 pages, every appearance and goal is recorded meticulously, with an appraisal of each season written by a former coach or player.

Great team-mates are remembered. Claudio and his brother Oscar take a paragraph to marvel over the ability of Osman Bayram, who was with the club for a few seasons before he went on to play for Dulwich Hamlet and Millwall. Both are certain he could have played for Turkey if he had wanted to. The biggest name, however, is Ray Houghton, who turned out for AIFL side Avellino when he was just 13.

Rivalries are recalled and refereeing grievances are recorded. After mixed results in its first few seasons, Wasteels won the AIFL in 1972, the first of many league triumphs. La Voce Degli Italiani gave a double-page spread to celebrate Wasteels’ league and cup double. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of spectators were there to witness the club beat Libertas in the league final.

But, after this success, more fallow years were to follow. It was well over two decades before Wasteels were again crowned champions. An influx of ice cream money helped Benigra FC, named after the now defunct gelateria on Tottenham Court Road, dominate the league.

Though they enjoyed only limited success in the league, Wasteels did win the 1984 London Junior FA Cup, a tournament that hundreds of sides across London enter. They beat Toby FC in the final and, judging by the match programme, they had quite the team. Their spine was made up of youth products from Chelsea, Fulham and Brentford, and one of their players, Mark Gerbaldi, had been in Arsenal’s youth team alongside Martin Keown and Tony Adams the previous season.

The Wasteels line-up was decidedly less grand, yet they still ran out winners. The only goal in the 1-0 win was scored by Johnny Sidoli, whose father, Guido, was the manager at the time. Johnny went on to manage the team himself when he hung up his boots. Though many players were of Italian descent, Wasteels operated with a pragmatic “if you are good enough, you are Italian enough” recruitment policy. For every Gabrielle on the team sheet, there is an Anderson, for every Cattini a McKillop. A vowel at the end of your name helped, but ability with the ball helped even more.

The cup-winning team of 1984. Photograph: Italia Wasteels

The AIFL reached its peak in 1984, when it became so large it was split into two divisions; though the league would decline as Wasteels grew stronger. In 1991, Wasteels left the league altogether; having won it five times in a row, they sought new and greater challenges.

Wasteels continued to be successful, winning a league and cup double in 1996, and another citywide tournament, the London FA Challenge Cup, in 1999. Luigi was there for all these triumphs. He takes me through all the pictures he has kept, including snapshots of Sidoli’s cup-winning goal, the team on tour in Italy, and posing for the front cover of Pete May’s book, Sunday Muddy Sunday.

Luigi came to London with his parents from Tuscany and has worked in coffee shops since he was 14. His accent is definitely one of a Londoner but it is laced with the peninsula on which he grew up. Well over half of his life is wrapped up in the history of the football club he started in the Scalabrini hall. “Me and Claudio took over running the club two years ago,” he says. “There was a chance that it might die out and we didn’t want to see 50 years go down the drain.” Every year the team try to bring clubmen, past and present, together for a celebration of the team’s anniversary. “It will be the 50-year anniversary soon, if we get that far.”

The Present

Italia Wasteels Photograph: Italia Wateels

I decided to write about Wasteels after reading about them online, but a month into following them around south London, I was yet to see them finish a game. First there was poor Domenico’s broken leg, then another one for an opposition player. Next there was a team that dropped out at the last minute and the Sunday after that a waterlogged pitch. I had almost given up hope of ever seeing a match completed.

Then, one Saturday evening, captain Marco Marchini sends me a text asking if I could come the following morning, not just to take pictures and conduct interviews, but to play. I agreed and turned up at 9.30am to replace Marco’s brother, Riccardo, a tall defender with great feet who was away at a wedding. I was quite pleased to be given the chance. My grandfather moved from Friuli to Ireland shortly after the war and I felt that playing for the team was a fulfilment of my responsibilities to the wider diaspora.

I slot in at centre-back for the cup tie, ready to hold the fort and play my part in Italia Wasteels’ illustrious history. We lose 8-0.

Marco struggles to find words to articulate his annoyance. The team was cobbled together at the last minute, with injuries and other commitments taking their toll on a small squad. It is a wonder there were 11 players at all and Marco is reticent to attack those of us who did the team the favour of turning up. He references the proud history of the club and gestures to Luigi, who is somewhat less worried about lambasting us. “Lu started this club 49 years ago and he is here every week,” says Marco.

The secretary is busy stuffing dirty kits into a bag and mutters “It is weeks like this that make me wonder why I bother.” I wonder whether this game is more or less of a disaster than the ones that ended with broken legs. It sure as hell feels worse for me, though I think that Domenico, still on crutches, might disagree.

In truth, the result is an anomaly and not indicative of the season. The team has had some bad luck and is in the wrong half of the table but there is good reason to think they won’t be relegated. When a full team is fielded, they are quite the proposition. The Marchini brothers are resolute in defence, their cousin Damon is a tricky winger and in midfield Reda Barouti and Darren Anderson (one of the very few non-Italian second generation Wasteels players) are more than capable of holding the team together.

The problem is not so much with the core personnel, as it is with them turning up. It wasn’t like this in Claudio’s day. “Back then we had the football and Club Italia. That was it. We may not have had a lot of money but we would spend it on petrol to travel to Peterborough, Woking or Bedford every week.”

To be fair to the current players, Italia Wasteels are hardly the only Sunday league team scrabbling around for players on Saturday nights. They were just the only ones unfortunate enough to call on me.

Italia Wasteels captain Marco Marchini looks for a pass. Photograph: Gianlucca de Paoli

Dr Giuseppe Scotto, a researcher at John Moore’s University in Liverpool, has looked closely at the differences between post-war migrants, such as Luigi and Claudio, and their modern-day counterparts. The old and new migrant groups have surprisingly little to do with one another, he says. “In my study, I distinguish between people who arrive after world war two up until the end of the 1970s. Then in the 1970s, immigration from Italy decreased. I considered the new wave that began in the 1980s, but became more significant in the 1990s and boomed in the past few years.”

Whereas the community fostered by the Scalabrini and similar organisations had meant so much and been so important to many Italians in London, more recent migrants from Italy are less reliant on these institutions. Much of this is down to alternatives offered by technology, as Scotto explains “Facebook and other social media can satisfy some of the needs that migrants traditionally have. On many of the groups there are requests for information, about what paperwork you need to get a job. Often there are requests from those who are still in Italy but are considering moving.”

Italia Wasteels are one of the few remaining relics of the Italian community that once thrived. La Voce Degli Italiani stopped printing in 2011; the travel company from which Wasteels take their name no longer operates in England; and the AIFL’s final season concluded over a decade ago.

Despite these closures, the Scalabrini church is still at the same place on Brixton Road, offering mass in Italian several times a week. Club Italia also continues, though it is less popular and raucous than when Professor Palmer was doing his fieldwork there. “Club Italia is now for the elderly,” says Katia Bortolazzo, the church’s secretary. “Back then they were not so elderly and they are the same people. So now we tailor it for them, as a social platform.”

While I was at the Scalabrini centre, scouring old issues of La Voce Degli Italiani for news of Wasteels’ long-concluded LFA Cup run, two teenagers were working next to me, sent to London in order to improve their English. Bortolazzo says this is a big part of the reason Italians come over nowadays and that they tend not to settle in the same way as the post-war generation. And those who do settle are less likely to rely on the community the Scalabrini offer.

“Don’t forget that those who came before may have spent years before returning back to their land,” says Scotto. “There is not the same desire to spend time with those from your country, when it is so much easier to just travel back. Travelling then would have cost a fortune and they were not very well off, of course. That is why they were here trying to build a better future.

In his preface to a book celebrating Wasteels’ 25th anniversary, Luigi gives much the same reasons for the importance of the community the Scalabrini have created: “The social club was a focus point for the younger generation which met, enjoyed each other’s company and reminisced about the land they had all left to emigrate to England, each for their own reason, and for having to leave so many loved ones behind.”

For Luigi’s generation the community seems more important than it is for the Italians who play in the team now. This is natural given the ease with which these Italians can return home, as well as the inexpensive communication they can have with family and friends back in Italy. It is also important to remember that Italy has changed. The old and new migrants “come from two different Italys” as Scotto puts it. “People who left Italy 40, 50, or 60 years ago had a completely different view of Italy and Italians than those who have moved more recently.”

Migration from Italy declined after the unexpected transformation of the country’s economy in the late 1950s, so unexpected that it was referred to as il miracolo economico. Though there is still a huge and widespread Italian diaspora, the improved economic situation in Italy has meant fewer Italians are forced abroad to make a living.

Whereas Italy was once a country that might send over 800,000 migrants a year, it now finds itself at the heart of a different migrant crisis, with thousands making perilous and often fatal journeys to the country that Luigi and Claudio’s parents left in desperation. The Scalabrini order still work with migrants, but often with those arriving on the shores of Sicily, rather than those leaving it. The order’s church in London conducts mass in Portuguese, as well as Italian, to cater to the large population of Portuguese immigrants in south London, which now dwarfs the Italian counterparts in that area.

The AIFL could not exist today. Many of the travel agents and catering businesses that once sponsored teams are gone or have moved away from the Italian community. In one way, this is a good thing. Italians are now more integrated, with new arrivals less suspicious of their hosts. The descendants of the post-war migrants have embraced an English way of life, their surnames adding a little continental glamour to pub teams across the country.

Still, of those Italian clubs that formed in the 1960s, it is heartwarming to know that one survived. Testament to the hard work of generations of Sidoli, Andersons and Marchinis. Luigi has shown a remarkable dedication to a club he started almost half a century ago. Though my visit coincides with a difficult period for Wasteels, what with all the broken legs, they still win several of the games I attend, though none of the ones I play in. Merely coincidence, I am sure.

The Wasteels have outlived every other Italian team and they continue to offer Italians a chance to speak their language on the weekends. It is now a relic of a time, not too long ago, when the calciatori ruled London’s Sunday league football. As such, there is one team still befuddling opposition centre-forwards with Italian instructions from centre-back to goalkeeper.

During another game I play in, one such confused striker looks up after Marco shouts something at Valentino. He asks the captain, dressed in blue with the tricolour on his breast, “Are you lot fucking Italian or something?”

“Yeah,” Marco replies, “Something like that mate.”

• This article first appeared on The Gentleman Ultra

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