Almas Roma

In 1944, with the war still smouldering, a group of shopkeepers from Rome's Appio-Latino quarter founded a club and made a decision that would one day bring it to this collection: to dress in white and green in the image of Celtic of Glasgow. Thus was born A.L.M.A.S., Appio Latino Metronio Associazione Sportiva, led by accountant Aldo Assorati and Marcello Manciati, a former Lazio player, with a panda for a symbol and registration number 1620, among the oldest in all of Lazio football. The club absorbed the historic Juve Roma in 1946, settled on the name Almas Roma in 1948, and peaked in the late 1970s with four straight seasons in Serie C2; in 1969, with Naim Krieziu, the Albanian of Roma's first scudetto, on the bench, it won the amateur Italian Cup and the amateur European Cup. But Almas's true glory is its nursery: from the Sant'Anna ground, planted among the ruins of the Appia Antica, came Vincenzo D'Amico and two AS Roma captains, Giuseppe Giannini and Lorenzo Pellegrini. Eighty years on, the panda keeps raising Romans among Roman ruins, dressed as Celtic.