U.S. Sassuolo

Sassuolo is a town of 40,000 that makes the world's ceramic tiles, the global capital of the industry, and since 2013 it has manufactured a sporting miracle too: it is the smallest Italian locality in Serie A since the war. The club was born on 17 July 1920, played in red and yellow, the town's colours, until adopting green and black in 1970/71, and spent nine decades in Emilian amateur football until Giorgio Squinzi, the industrialist of Mapei adhesives and mortars, arrived as sponsor in 2002, bought the club in 2003 and took it from the fourth tier to the elite in ten years, with the historic 2013 promotion under Di Francesco. The Neroverdi settled at the Mapei Stadium in Reggio Emilia, reached the Europa League with 6th place in 2015/16, and under De Zerbi became the small club that plays big, always with Domenico Berardi as their flag. Squinzi died in 2019, a year before the centenary, but he left the proof complete: with a project, patience and ceramics, even a town can sit at the table with Milan, Rome and Turin.