If the city of Verona resonates with Hellas for the younger generations, those nostalgic for Italian football surely remember the great epics of Chievo Verona in the 2000s, particularly during the 2005/2006 season with players such as Amauri, Victor Obinna, Luciano, Lorenzo D’Anna, Davide Mandelli, Paolo Sammarco and Franco Semioli. All this great troop had managed to secure a 4th place in the championship, synonymous with historic qualification for the Champions League play-offs the following year. A few seasons later, under the leadership of Rolando Maran, Chievo managed to regain the first part of the table thanks to elements like Nicolas Frey, Simone Pepe, Roberto Inglese, Ivan Radovanovic, Valter Birsa, Perparim Hetemaj but also Massimo Gobbi. And it’s difficult to talk about Chievo Verona without talking about striker Sergio Pellissier. A true living legend of the club (441 matches, 139 goals), he was the face of this team for 19 years, even representing his team in the ranks of the Nazionale by scoring a goal for his only appearance in 2009 (1 cap, 1 aim). But it was in the summer of 2021 that everything changed for Chievo Verona.
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In July 2021, Mussi Volanti were expelled from Serie B for failing to prove financial viability due to unpaid tax payments. The Verona club argued that an agreement was reached during the COVID-19 pandemic that allowed them to spread payments over a longer period. However, after three unsuccessful appeals to the Council of State, the decision to ban Chievo Verona from registering in Serie B was confirmed – with Cosenza taking the final Serie B spot. Demoted to Serie D a few weeks later , Chievo Verona, declared bankrupt, disappears definitively on August 22, 2021, for lack of a buyer. But after three years when the club, administratively dead, simply no longer existed, it was officially reborn from its ashes, taking back its crest and jersey thanks to enormous work behind the scenes by… Sergio Pellissier, president of Chievo Verona. Currently 16th in Group B of Serie D, the Clivensi hope to achieve for the second time in its history one of the greatest performances that Calcio has known: succeed in climbing the entire amateur and professional pyramid of Italian football until reaching the Serie A and European competitions.
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A reconstruction with FC Clivense
In the months following the club’s exclusion, former captain Sergio Pellissier led the search for a new ownership group to enable the creation of a phoenix club capable of entering Serie D under the name from Chievo Verona. Due to the lack of a buyer, the project fell through. And that’s how Sergio Pellissier decided to part ways with then president Luca Campedelli, to found himself a brand new club based in Verona which was admitted to Terza Categoria at the very bottom of the football league system Italian, the ninth division, during the 2021-2022 season. The club, initially named FC Chievo 2021, then changed its name to FC Clivense following legal pressure from Luca Campedelli, who still held the operating rights to the Chievo Verona brand. For its first season of existence, FC Clivense won the title of champions of the Terza Categoria in 2022. The following year, the players then coached by Riccardo Allegretti followed up with a second trophy won this time as promoted to Eccellenza. With this title gleaned in 2023, FC Clivense was therefore able to be promoted to Serie D where they finished in 9th position for this first season in the fourth division.
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On May 10, 2024, Sergio Pellissier officially successfully acquired the naming rights of the original club Chievo Verona during an auction, allowing him to recover the logo, prize lists, numbers and jerseys of his favorite club: “It was an extraordinary three years where we gained a lot. We worked well, we grew, we started to rebuild the club. We saw players come through, the guys who came to work for us also grew up. Everything was good until last year when the results were a little less good, they were not as we hoped, as we wanted. With the repurchase of the brand this year, we can reuse it: Chievo Verona. This buyout completed a year that was perhaps not very positive with the results, so we are really happy with what happened and it was really three fantastic years“, Sergio Pellissier told us. Now, for the first time since the 2020/2021 season, Chievo Verona participates in a division of Italian football. The club is officially back thanks to a huge amount of work from its legend.
A legal standoff
One thing is certain, it was not easy for Sergio Pellissier and his colleagues. According to what the newspaper reports L’Arenaa certain Cristian Zaffani and his delegation, considered very close to the former boss of Chievo Luca Campedelli, tried everything to thwart the takeover of the club by the native of Fenis in the Aosta Valley. Indeed, Zaffani, president of the small Vigasio club based in Verona, also wanted to seize the operating rights. But ultimately, the Chievo Verona brand returned to Sergio Pellissier and his FC Clivense for a total investment of 330,000 euros: “The difficulty in taking over the brand was linked to the long procedure that must therefore be completed if we want to hope to take it back at all costs. We had to wait for the brand to be put up for auction. Our proposal was not accepted, we had to go to auction twice. Then when we went to make a proposal, no one went. The former president wanted at all costs to take over this brand for us. For us, that’s the pride, the heart, the sacrifices, the desire to obtain this brand at all costs. This made us spend more than we expected, but we achieved our goal, so it was a really fantastic result», Explains the former Italian international at length.
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The hardest part having now been done, Sergio Pellissier can now take the time he needs to develop, stone by stone, his new sporting project: “I believe that dreaming is the most beautiful and cheapest thing in the world, so it costs absolutely nothing to dream and I would like this new Chievo to be able to at least get closer to what has made history in recent years in the world of Italian football and I hope that it will give a lot of satisfaction to all those people who have believed in us for years. The associates, the supporters, the people who follow us. We can really do great things by getting back to where the club deserves to go. Passion is what has always guided me. I never worked for money. I have never invested and sweated for any other purpose than to do good for this club, and I still carry that today as president. For me, the goal is to invest in whatever our friends sponsor or whatever we can get around. We can inject it into the team and we can also use this money to expand more sectors and achieve our goals, so passion is fundamental“. If the start of the season is not perfect with a 16th position in Group B and three defeats in six games, Sergio Pellissier is dreaming for the long term.
A clear sporting project
Without having expandable finances, Sergio Pellissier wants to learn from the past. Stability is today the main mission of the Gialloblu after a first disappearance in 1936 then the second in 2021: “Chievo’s philosophy places importance on values. These are the attentions that we pay, we have absolutely no secondary goal other than to grow this club, to create a lot, to make it always stronger, always more important, always more stable. If I have to bring in a billionaire for the team to be taken to high levels certainly, we will contribute to make that happen. But if that doesn’t happen, then we will work with what we can find without going crazy, because we know what we went through and losing a club for three years wasn’t pretty, so our goal is to bring back these values in which we grew up in Chievo, the time I arrived“. Despite everything, Chievo managed to recruit interesting players like Mattias Bonafede, a young right back on loan from Empoli, or the Brazilian midfielder Paulo Henrique, who passed through the youth sector of São Paulo. Then, Sergio Pellissier’s other mission to reconquer the city of Verona.
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For more than 20 years, Chievo had achieved the feat of completely eclipsing Hellas, who had then fallen back to the third division. Proud of its local identity, the small club from the Chievo district, located 4.5 kilometers northwest of the historic center, wants to tickle the rival again: “The city is normal and divided as it always has been. The Hellas fans, who are in large groups, much more numerous than us, are certainly afraid that Chievo can return to high levels, because for 20 years they have been obscured by this small club, this small neighborhood so they have this fear. They don’t see this in a good light, but it doesn’t matter, we have no desire to prove that we are better than them, but we only want to show that little Chievo has people who believe in their projects, have people who work to achieve these things, have lots and lots, lots of passion and truly believe this club can grow. I think we have a bit of pride, what others do shouldn’t interest us because in the end, everything will come from us», concluded Sergio Pellissier on our microphone. In any case, Italian football fans can’t wait to see the Derby della Scala, one of Calcio’s biggest rivalries.
Pub. the 06/10/2024 14:12
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