Modena

The story that keeps resurfacing in Modena is not a match or a trophy but a teenager on the wing at amateur level, before the voice that would later fill opera houses took over: Luciano Pavarotti played as a winger for one of the club's amateur sides.

Modena Football Club traces itself to a merger, on 5 April 1912, of two local sides, Football Club Audax Modena and Associazione Studentesca del Calcio. During the Fascist years the club renamed itself Modena Calcio, part of a broader purge of foreign words from Italian sport. The current entity, Modena FC 2018, dates only from that year, after the original club went bankrupt in 2017.

Those decades produced two Serie B titles, in 1937–38 and 1942–43, and repeated returns from Serie C, most recently in 2021–22. One name from the shirt-count era still anchors the dressing room's memory: Andrea Fortunato, who went on to become a Parma favourite, started out here, as did Stefano Pioli, long before he built a reputation as a coach.

Home games are played at the Stadio Alberto Braglia, a ground holding a little over 21,000, in a city that has watched the club rebuild itself more than once and kept coming back to the same yellow and blue.