Sant’Elena Calcio

Quartu Sant'Elena is Sardinia's third city, pressed against Cagliari and the beaches, and its club wears the colours of the municipality itself: green and white. Founded in 1957, Sant'Elena climbed from the Rosas ground to national football and lived an improbable peak at the turn of the 1980s: Serie D champions in 1979/80, three seasons in C2 with a new home at Is Arenas, the status of the island's second team behind Serie A Cagliari, and a bench graced by Nené, champion of Italy, and Liedholm's assistant at Roma. The fall was even more memorable: in 1983/84, so broke that players paid for their own away trips, the club was expelled mid-season, the first time that had ever happened in Italian football. The city answered with Sardinian ingenuity: it transplanted Monreale to Is Arenas, renamed it Sant'Elena in 1990 and returned the green and white lineage to the regional summit, where it stayed fifteen straight seasons. Then came odysseys worthy of a novel, Is Arenas lent to Cagliari's Serie A and later dismantled, exile in Quartucciu, and in 2024 the return to the original name and home. It died once and did not enjoy it: ever since, Sant'Elena has confined itself to being reborn.