Mantua, Cesena and Juve Stabia won their groups in the Serie C championship and will consequently play in Serie B next season, together with a fourth team, which will be promoted after a very long playoff journey. The first to win promotion was Cesena, who last week mathematically won group B of Serie C; in the following days Mantua and Juve Stabia did the same with groups A and C. The ways in which they accumulated their advantage over the second-placed teams were different, all in some ways surprising.
Cesena with the players from the youth teams
Cesena’s last year in Serie B was 2018 (the last time in Serie A was 2014-2015): at the end of the season, the club was forced to declare bankruptcy due to serious economic problems. The team was then refounded and had to start again from Serie D, and therefore from amateurism. In 2019, he immediately obtained promotion to Serie C and, five years later, came promotion to Serie B. Cesena is today coached by Domenico Toscano, considered a true Serie C specialist (he is the only coach to have finished first five times) , and this year he dominated the championship.
After losing the first match, he played 28 in a row without losing. In the 35 matches played so far he has totaled 28 wins, 5 draws and only 2 defeats. With 74 goals scored and 18 conceded, it also has the best attack and defense of all three groups of Serie C. In its home stadium, the Dino Manuzzi, it has never lost and has an average of over 9 thousand spectators per game ( the best in its group).
What Cesena has distinguished itself in is having lined up as starters for a good part of the season several players who trained in the team’s youth sector. On the day of Cesena-Pescara, the decisive match for promotion, the fans created a choreography with the writing That shirt you wear is my childhood dream and with the six shirts of the players who grew up in the youth teams: Simone Pieraccini, Matteo Francesconi, Tommaso Berti, Alessandro Giovannini, Antonio David and Cristian Shpendi. The latter (twin brother of Empoli player Stiven Shpendi) is twenty years old and is currently the best scorer in group B of Serie C, with 19 goals scored.
Mantova with an exciting game
Mantova’s promotion is exceptional especially if you consider the premises. In fact, last summer the team was relegated to Serie D after losing the playouts against Albinoleffe, and had changed ownership, going from Maurizio Setti (who is still the president of Hellas Verona) to Filippo Piccoli. Pordenone’s decision to renounce Serie C, however, led to their repechage. In less than a month, sporting director Christian Botturi therefore had to try to build a team worthy of Serie C.
As coach, the management chose Davide Possanzini, a former striker who had been technical collaborator of the current Brighton manager Roberto De Zerbi for several years (at Foggia, Palermo, Sassuolo and Shakhtar Donetsk). From the first matches, Possanzini showed a courageous and ambitious idea of football, especially for a championship like Serie C, where the game is usually played in a more traditional way.
Already in January, the sports in-depth site was reporting on the team’s great season The Last Man he had written about Mantova’s fun and offensive game, defining Possanzini’s game as «one of the most peculiar game proposals in the entire Italian football scene» and saying a little provocatively that «perhaps we should call him piccolo Manchester City, maybe”. Mantova hasn’t played in Serie B since 2010 and in Serie A since the early Seventies.
One of the decisive matches of Mantua’s season, the 5-0 victory against Padova, second in the table
Juve Stabia with a very young sporting director
Like Mantua, Juve Stabia (the team from Castellammare di Stabia, in the province of Naples) was not among the favorites at the start of the season. In its group there were teams considered more equipped to win the championship such as Benevento, Avellino and Catania, while Juve Stabia has the fourteenth salary in the championship, that is, thirteen teams (out of twenty) spend more than it to pay their players. For this reason, and above all for the fact that he is just 28 years old, the work done by the team’s sporting director, Matteo Lovisa, is remarkable.
Lovisa arrived at Juve Stabia after having been the technical director of Pordenone for years. Last season he also held the same role in Castellammare di Stabia, before being appointed sporting director.
Together with coach Guido Pagliuca, this year he has created a very solid team, which has not conceded a goal in 20 out of 35 games. Then, in January, Lovisa managed to purchase the 24-year-old striker Andrea Adorante from Triestina, who was decisive for their promotion to Serie B: since his arrival, he has scored 12 goals in 15 games. Juve Stabia’s last season in Serie B was 2018-2019 (they never played in Serie A).
2024-04-09 13:45:15
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