Cassano Magnago

Cassano Magnago's handball section grew out of the town in 1974, and within a decade it had built one of the strongest women's teams in the country: eleven straight Serie A1 titles between 1986 and 1996, a run that took the club into the last eight of the European Cup in 1990 and to the quarter-finals of the Champions Cup twice, in 1988 and 1989, without ever going further. Economic trouble forced a refoundation at the end of that spell, and the club that survived it was a different animal, rebuilding from the men's side up rather than living off the women's record. That rebuilding took the better part of three decades to show on a trophy shelf. The Coppa Italia won in March 2025 against Conversano was described inside the club as its first senior title of the modern era — a way of drawing a line under the 1996/1997 refoundation rather than counting it against the old sides. Fourteen months later the men beat Raimond Sassari to take the Serie A Gold title, the top domestic league, completing a double that the amaranth shirt had not managed in either of its two lives. Alessio Moretti, a left back capped by Italy, is the club's all-time leading scorer and the closest thing it has to a link between the two eras. Home games are played in front of 800 at PalaTacca, small enough that the Lombardy Derby against Metelli Cologne still carries a local, parish-hall intensity rather than a stadium one. Having taken the league for the first time since the refoundation, the men's side now carries the harder job: defending a title the club has never had to defend before.