Torres

Gianfranco Zola spent three seasons wearing red and blue on Sardinia before anyone outside Italy knew his name. He arrived at Torres in 1986, scored 21 goals in 88 appearances, and left enough of an impression that Luciano Moggi noticed him and signed him for Napoli. The side Zola played in won Serie C2 in 1986-87, one of only two occasions the club has topped that division.

Torres was founded in Sassari on 19 April 1903 as the Società per l'Educazione Fisica Torres, and its supporters still know it by the nickname Rossoblù, after the club's red and blue. Its home, the Stadio Vanni Sanna, went up in 1922. For much of its history the club measured itself against Cagliari, the island's dominant side; the sharper rivalry now is local, against Latte Dolce, the other club from Sassari, in a fixture known around the ground simply as the stracittadina.

The club has gone under and come back more than once. It was excluded from Serie C2 in 1991 and dropped into the interregional league; excluded again from Serie C1 in 2006 and rebuilt as Sassari Torres 1903; excluded a third time from Serie C2 in 2008 and restarted from Promozione, seven tiers below the top flight. New financial and legal trouble surfaced between 2015 and 2017, and the club reorganised once more, as AS D SEF Torres 1903, working its way back through the regional leagues to Serie C, where it now plays in Girone B.

Through all of it, Serie B has stayed out of reach. The nearest Torres came was fourth place in Serie C1, in the 1988-89 season — still, decades on, the highest the club has ever finished.