The rise, fall and rebirth of Parma

In the relatively small city of Parma, roughly a kilometre from the centro storico, you'll find the Parco della Cittadella. As the name suggests, it was once a formidable fortress, a pentagonal barracks dating back to the 16th century. There was also a time, though, when one of the best teams in Europe used to train at the Cittadella.

In the early-to-mid-90s, players from Parma Associazione Calcio would change at the Stadio Ennio Tardini and then make the five-minute journey to the park's public playing pitches in a mini-van, which was often driven by Brazil goalkeeper Claudio Taffarel. Star striker Faustino Asprilla was also allowed behind the wheel on a couple of occasions before it quickly became clear that the colourful Colombian was as wildly unpredictable behind the wheel as he was with a ball at his feet.

In general, though, everything about Parma back then was more relaxed, more open, and more accessible. This was the provincial club who had gone global - but without allowing anyone to get too big for their boots.

In 1995, they had even signed the previous year's Ballon d'Or winner, Hristo Stoichkov, and yet they were still training at the Cittadella. "It was a team that was born right there, that grew up in the middle of a public park," defender Luigi Apolloni said. "The whole city was involved together."

For captain Lorenzo Minotti and those who had been playing for Parma before their promotion to Serie A, there was nothing remotely unusual about the players being put through their paces by coach Nevio Scala while some locals watched on and others went about their daily business. It was "all normal", pure provincial Parma.

Looking back at it now, though, through a modern lens, it was utterly surreal. As academy product turned all-time great Buffon told Sky Sport Italia, "When you think that you had all these people around the pitch, standing up against the fence, or some just sitting on benches playing cards and eating bread and salame, it makes you understand that Parma was an unrepeatable reality."

There was certainly a dream-like quality to Parma's emergence as a major force in European football. Arrigo Sacchi had served notice of both his and the team's potential before being snapped up by AC Milan in 1987, after getting the Gialloblu to within three points of promotion to Serie A.

However, even in an era when money was not yet the decisive factor in football, what Scala achieved during his six-year tenure at the Tardini was truly extraordinary. The Venetian took over in 1989 and secured a spot in Serie A at the first time of asking, and for the first time in the club's history. More history was made the following year, as Parma qualified for the UEFA Cup via a stunning sixth-placed finish in the league.

Their European debut didn't last long, with Scala's side falling at the first hurdle, but they went all the way in the 1992 Coppa Italia, upsetting Juventus 2-1 on aggregate in the final thanks to goals from Sandro Melli and Marco Osio. It was the first major honour in Parma's history and it immediately led to another, with the Gialloblu winning the European Cup Winners' Cup the very next year thanks to a 3-1 win over Antwerp.

Captain Lorenzo Minotti rather fittingly opened the scoring on a barely believable night at Wembley and immediately ran to "a stand full of Parmigiani" to celebrate with those who had been with the team from the start of their remarkable rise.

"They were people that fully understood what we were doing," the former defender explained, "because a few years before, we were playing in front of three or four thousand people. But half of Parma was at Wembley for that final!"

Buffon was there too, as one of Parma's most promising academy products, and by the time he made what became one of the most memorable debuts in Serie A history, on November 19, 1995, had added a European Super Cup and UEFA Cup to a suddenly impressive trophy cabinet.

Tanzi had even grander plans for Parma, though. He wanted to win the Serie A title at all costs - quite literally.

"On my first day at Parma in 2001," former director Luca Baraldi told Sky, "there was a very peculiar meeting at the club's headquarters with the vice-president, Fulvio Ceresini, and Calisto Tanzi, whom I still didn't really know that well.

"They were talking about the following summer's transfer market and Calisto Tanzi gave the green light to try to sign Francesco Toldo and Rui Costa, but, having seen the accounts myself at that stage, I just thought to myself, 'But with what money?!'"

Not even Baraldi, though, had a full appreciation of Parma's precious economic position.

The club had been run recklessly for years. Stefano Tanzi, Calisto's son, and Parma president between 1996 and 2004, admitted that, during his tenure, the operational strategy had been to try to "resolve problems and realise objectives by always spending a little bit more money. And by doing so, the wage bill increased fivefold in just five years."

Attempts had been made to alleviate the strain on the club's accounts by offloading star players: Veron left immediately after the second UEFA Cup win, Crespo was sold the following summer before Buffon and Thuram both moved to Juventus in 2002.

However, even after further high-profile departures, the club still wasn't remotely equipped to deal with the fallout from arguably the most shocking financial scandal in Italian history.

On December 15, 2003, after months of economic uncertainty surrounding Parmalat, Calisto Tanzi stood down as the company's chairman and chief executive officer. Just over two weeks later, he had admitted that there was a €8 billion (£6.9bn/$9.3bn) hole in the multinational's accounts which, as it transpired, was almost twice that size. By that stage, Parmalat had gone into administration, resulting in thousands of shareholders losing their savings, and thousands of employees losing their jobs.

Unsurprisingly, Parma were also left in dire straits. Brazilian attacker Adriano was sold to Inter during the January transfer window but the club remained so strapped for cash that even after they found a new shirt sponsor (Cariparma), staff had to use tape and stickers to cover the old Parmalat logo, as they didn't have enough money for produce new jerseys.

There was no hiding the grim reality of the situation, though, and, on April 28, 2004, Parma AC was declared insolvent.

Although the club was reformed in June of that year as Parma FC, it remained under the control in a state of special administration for three years - during which time the team's top players continued to be sold to the highest bidder.

Essentially, the stellar side that had dismantled Marseille in Moscow in 1999 had itself been taken apart, one key player at a time. And yet, that slow, painful death by a thousand budget cuts was nothing compared to the fate that befell Parma's long-suffering supporters in 2015.

The arrival of Tommaso Ghirardi in January 2007 signalled the end of Parma's agonising administration, and appeared to point to a brighter future for the fans. Ghirardi was young (31) and ambitious but also seemingly mature and prudent. He spoke about avoiding the mistakes of the past, of Parma living within their means, and intended to help them do so by identifying and developing young players before selling them on for a healthy profit. Consequently, while the team's fortunes fluctuated on the field, Parma looked steady and stable off it.

However, the first sign of trouble appeared before the start of the 2014-15 season, when the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) refused to grant the club a license to compete in the Europa League for failing to pay a €300,000 tax bill. Ghirardi was outraged, claiming Parma had been the victim of a great injustice.

"My staff have done everything by the rules," he insisted at the time. "Only a fool would think that this is an act of cunning to save €300,000. We are good people who run a house in good order.

"But they have managed to push me away from the game. I'm done with football. I'm resigning as Parma president and, as of July 1 next year, a new story will begin. Parma is now for sale."

Ghirardi wasn't being made to walk the plank, though. He was simply abandoning a sinking ship. As team manager Melli subsequently admitted to the Corriere dello Sport, Parma were essentially the Titanic and "the UEFA license issue was just the tip of the iceberg".

Ghirardi's Parma had essentially run out of money because of a flawed business model that left them far too reliant on capital gains from player sales. After months of looking around for a buyer, he sold the club in strange circumstances to Cypriot-Russian Dastraso Holding Limited - and for €1, which was more than Ghirardi had paid out in wages since the previous summer.

Parma hoped that they had found a saviour in Rezart Taci, an Albanian oil tycoon who was eventually revealed as the primary investor. However, the players never saw him once. Captain Alessandro Lucarelli claimed that the only positive thing one could say about Taci was he had promised the players nothing - which was precisely what he gave them.

By February 2015, the situation had become increasingly bleak. Parma had been cast adrift at the foot of Serie A, with the relegation-threatened squad struggling to focus on on-the-field matters. "It's very difficult," teenage midfielder Jose Mauri told GOAL at the time. "There are so many things going wrong. Luckily, the people here are calm and still encouraging us. Thank goodness, otherwise we would go mad. I really don't want to go crazy thinking about all of the rumours we're hearing."

The situation was bad enough as it was, though. Mauri & Co. were washing their own gear, while Hernan Crespo's youth team players were taking cold showers at the training centre because of unpaid electricity bills.

Parma was sold for a solitary euro for the second time in a matter of months in February 2015, this time to Giampietro Manenti, but Lucarelli admitted that both he and his team-mates knew from the moment they met the new owner, they knew the club was doomed.

"He came into the dressing room with a blank sheet of paper with 100 million euros written on it and claimed that it proved he could clear the debts and pay our wages, and we turned to each other and said, 'We're done for!'" Lucarelli said.

"Two weeks later, he told us that they had given him the wrong IBAN to send the money to! He was a clown. It all felt like a Fantozzi movie. Instead, it was real: a living nightmare."

That was no great exaggeration. An entire club was collapsing around the players. When Parma was declared bankrupt on March 19, 2015, everything was put up for sale, from the seats that the players sat on in the dressing room to the trophies that were won during the unprecedented spell of success between 1992 and 2002.

"It seems like we are zombies, walking without knowing where we are heading," Melli told CNN. "Every day they take away a part of our work and a piece of our hearts. Bits of the club are foreclosed every day and we come here to work just because we love our work and our team, but we cannot do our job.

"Because this is not just about the money, even though we can’t ignore it, there is a lot more that they are taking away: dignity, our smiles. They took away our respect, too, and it hurts."

And one could fully understand why: the team that could have won it all had lost everything.

Through it all, though, Melli never lost hope that Parma might survive, or perhaps to put it more accurately, might rise again. And they did.

After the drawn-out demise of Parma FC in June 2015, the club was reborn (again!) as Parma Calcio 1913 in the fourth tier of Italian football and, after three consecutive promotions, the Emiliani found themselves back in Serie A in 2018.

Another stint in the second division soon followed but the 2026-27 campaign will be Parma's third in a row in the top flight, meaning they've close to achieving the kind of stability under the Krause Group that was so conspicuous by its absence under previous owners. However, whether Parma will ever be what it once was is doubtful.

Times have changed. And so too has the game. As Parma supporters know only too well, money has a tendency to corrupt, and modern football is more about finances than ever before. It would take a colossal amount of cash to put the club back among Europe's elite, and even then, it wouldn't be the same.

"In my day, we were a family, with all the strengths and weaknesses of a family," Scala told the Gazzetta dello Sport. "There was respect, there were precise rules, there was dialogue. We were serious about our work, but also carefree. We trained in the Cittadella, among pensioners playing cards and mothers walking their children, and we had fun. That was our strength." And what made Parma so special.

Before the club's owners lost sight of what made the club great in the first place, before the inspirational success story became a cautionary tale, before the dream turned into a nightmare, Parma were an unrepeatable reality, the team born in a public park that grew into one of the strongest sides in Europe.