Sassuolo

In the spring of 2013 a club that had never played a minute in Serie A won the second division outright, and then found it had nowhere to play. The stadium in Sassuolo was too small for the top flight, so the team moved 25 kilometres up the road to Reggio Emilia, into a ground bought and renamed by a chemicals company from the same industrial belt. The Mapei Stadium – Città del Tricolore holds 21,525, and it has stayed home ever since — a side representing a town of ceramic factories playing every league match in someone else's city.

The promotion of 2013 was not a one-off spike. Sassuolo had come up through Serie D twice, taken the Serie C1/A title in 2008 along with the Lega Pro Super Cup that year, and kept climbing. What followed in the top division was steadier than anyone outside the region expected: sixth place in 2015–16, the best finish in the club's history, and with it a group stage in the Europa League the following autumn. For a club whose supporters could remember amateur football, that was the range covered inside a single decade.

The fall came later, and so did the answer to it. Sassuolo went back down and won Serie B again in 2024–25, a second title in the same division twelve years after the first — the same route, walked a second time.

The black and green vertical stripes are older than any of it. Football in Sassuolo dates to 1920; the club as it exists now, US Sassuolo Calcio, was assembled in 1974 out of a merger with other sides from the town, which is how a modest Emilian outfit ended up carrying a founding year from between the wars.