Seven games, zero goals scored. By late February in 1990, Parma’s Serie A dream was slipping away. Weeks earlier, the club had been rocked by the death of their long-serving president, Ernesto Ceresini; now, they just couldn’t find the net. Even when they did score twice, against Reggina, a visiting player was struck by a missile thrown from the crowd and their opponents were awarded a 2-0 win.
Over the entirety of their 77-year history, Parma had never competed in the top flight. Eighth in Serie B, after a 1-0 loss to Cosenza, their chances of making it in 1990 looked remote at best. A fortnight later, they lost at Barletta, another relegation-threatened team.
Then the remarkable happened.
Not only did Parma recover to seal the club’s first ever Serie A campaign, but by the end of the decade they had established themselves as one of calcio’s powerhouses and won three European trophies – a tally unsurpassed by any club across the continent during the ’90s. From unlikely origins emerged one of football’s greatest cult teams.
“WHERE ARE WE TRAINING TODAY, GUYS?”
Parma is a provincial city in the north of Italy, with its population of nearly 200,000 people putting it roughly on a par with Colchester or Gateshead. Milan or Turin, it is not. Its football team’s golden era had previously come in the 1950s, when they came ninth in Serie B: Parma stayed in the second tier for 11 straight seasons, then returned to the lower leagues before being liquidated in 1968.
Eighteen years later, the reformed club were promoted from Serie C under the guidance of a little-known coach by the name of Arrigo Sacchi, and their rise began. A season later, they shocked Milan in the Coppa Italia – enough to persuade Silvio Berlusconi to hire Sacchi for the Rossoneri. Without him, Parma set up home in Serie B’s mid-table, drawing 21 of 38 matches in 1988-89 and netting a paltry 29 goals.
In the summer of 1989, Nevio Scala
