Sassuolo Surprise of Serie B

By: Francesco | October 3rd, 2008

Serie B has always been an interesting championship. There’s always a good mix of clubs that were just in Serie A, clubs with lots of history and tradition, yo-yo Serie B/C clubs, and little teams that performed miracles by just getting promoted to Serie B. There are always those teams out to surprise, and this year the Italian second division has been extremely interesting. There are three teams right now that are surprising and raising eyebrows, but it remains to be seen if these teams can keep up the good performances and seriously mount a promotion challenge. The most surprising story of course is Sassuolo. We’ll go into further detail after the jump.

Sassuolo

If you look at the top of the Serie B table right now, you’ll see Sassuolo. Many people unfamiliar with Italian football or Serie B and haven’t followed the story will be scratching their heads saying “Who are Sassuolo?”. It’s ok, because even the greatest of calcio experts would’ve had trouble telling you who Sassuolo was before last season. Sassuolo is a town of around 41,000 in the province of Modena in the Emilia-Romagna region. The club’s official stadium is the Stadio Enzo Ricci, but since it only holds 4,000 the club had to move into Modena’s 20,000 capacity Stadio Alberto Braglia.

I had mentioned Sassuolo as a possible surprise in my Serie B preview, and there story is pretty similar to the Chievo story. They are a small club that for all their history have been jumping around the lower leagues of Italian football, finally reaching Serie C1 in 2006. In 2007 they narrowly missed promotion to Serie B and last year under the helm of Massimiliano Allegri (now Cagliari boss) surprised everyone by gaining promotion to Serie B for the first time in their history. In the off-season they hired Andrea Mandorlini (sacked by Siena last season) as manager and made some smart signings to strengthen their squad, with the most important being experienced striker Riccardo Zampagna. If you browse the Sassuolo roster, you’ll see some familiar names: Marco Andreolli, the U21 starlet who was loaned from Roma, Angelo Rea, who was a fixture with Messina for a couple of years, Emiliano Salvetti, who played with Hellas Verona when they were in Serie A, young talents Andrea Poli and Attila Filkor, on loan from Sampdoria and Inter respectively, and up front San Marino striker Andy Selva.

Sassuolo currently lead the table with 13 points, and are putting in some excellent performances. Last year Pisa was the newly promoted club that did extremely well, now this year it seems to be Sassuolo’s turn. We’ll have to see if the tiny club can keep up the good results, and they may even be able to grab a promotion playoff spot, and if all goes well who knows they might be making trips to the San Siro and Stadio Olimpico next season.

Some videos of Sassuolo’s results so far: