LR Vicenza
L.R. Vicenza S.p.A., better known as Vicenza or Lanerossi, is an Italian football club based in the city of Vicenza. It plays in Serie C, the third division of the Italian football league.
Founded on 9 March 1902, as Associazione del Calcio in Vicenza, it is the oldest football club in north-eastern Italy as well as in the Triveneto and Veneto regions. It has competed in 30 Serie A seasons and is listed by the IFFHS as the 15 best Italian teams of the 20th century.
Domestically, Vicenza won the Coppa Italia in 1996–1997 and the Italian Cup Serie C in 1981–1982 and 2022–2023, while its best result at international level is reaching the semi-final of the UEFA Cup Winners' Cup. It reached the final in the 1910–1911 First Division championship, where it was defeated by Pro Vercelli, and finished as runners-up Juventus in the 1977–1978 Serie A championship, in which it achieved the best result ever by a newly promoted club in the single-round era.
The club was reformed in 2018, following Vicenza Calcio's bankruptcy, thanks to the moving and name change of Bassano Virtus from Bassano to Vicenza. L.R Vicenza is now the heir, and de facto continuation, of the sporting tradition that began on 9 March 1902 with the founding of Associazione del Calcio in Vicenza which later became Lanerossi Vicenza from 1953 to 1989 and finally Vicenza Calcio, before going bankrupt in 2018.
History
Vicenza, founded in 1902 by a group of citizens led by Professor Tito Buy, headmaster of the Lioy High School, and by physical education teacher Antonio Libero Scarpa, it is one of the oldest football clubs in Italy. The formation of the first board of directors took place on 9 March 1902, while the competitive debut took place on 18 May 1903 in a friendly match valid for the Provincial Championship for Schools.The professional debut dates back to the 1910–11 season: ACIVI inaugurated its new Borgo Casale ground on 12 February 1911 with a great victory over Bologna and in March finished the Veneto-Emilia round with a full score, qualifying for the final for the title. However, it had to succumb, both away and at home, to Pro Vercelli which was in its golden years.
Vicenza challenged Pro Vercelli in the double final of the 1910–1911 First Category championship.
In the years before the First World War it took part to several national finals of northern Italy, which were played between the winners of the regional groups. Vicenza thus met Bologna, Juventus, Milan and Inter several times, establishing itself among the best Italian teams.
Vicenza began in the First Category in the 1920s competing in various regional groups. In 1921-22 it joined the schism of the great teams, going to play in the C.C.I. championship: it finished last in group A, a result that condemned it to having to play and win the inter-divisional qualifiers against teams from the Second Division to escape relegation. When the Compromesso Colombo was implemented, it faced the inter-divisional qualification round which it lost against Derthona, thus leaving the top national division. In the 1924–25 season Vicenza won the elimination round of the Second Division after play-offs with Udinese and Olympia Fiume, but was then disqualified and downgraded to last place due to the irregular positions of the Hungarians Horváth and Molnár; however, it was not relegated because thanks to the Italian Football Federation. Unprepared for the transformations that were launching Italian football towards professionalism, it was overwhelmed by the various tournament restructurings, leading to the 1929 plummeting to the fourth level of the national football pyramid.
Romeo Menti
The 1930s were years of redemption for the biancorossi, after a decade to forget. In 1932–1933 the team was promoted to Serie B, where it remained for two seasons, while trying again and again to gain promotion to Serie A. In that period the "biancorossi" churned out talents of the calibre of the Umberto brothers and above all Romeo Menti, captain "Neno" Rossi, Bruno Camolese, Luigi Chiodi, Giovanni Costa, and the star Piero Spinato, the club's top scorer to this day. In the 1939–1940 season promotion to Serie B arrived with a clear advantage over the second team. On 8 September 1935 a new stadium along the Bacchiglione river had been inaugurated, leaving the Borgo Casale pitch, the inaugural match was against the Hungarian team Soroksár with a 16-year-old Romeo Menti making his professional debut. After his death during the 1949 Superga air disaster, the stadium in Vicenza would be named in his honor.At the beginning of the 1940s Vicenza conquered the top national division, thanks also to a midfield that went down in history as one of the best of the era formed by: Osvaldo Fattori, Alfonso Santagiuliana and Luigi Abeni.
Serie A 1942–1943: the Vicenza eleven in Juventus-Vicenza 2–6
Vicenza's Serie A 1942–1943 season ended with a historic escape from relegation, won on the last day by defeating Juventus 6–2 in Turin on Easter Sunday 1943. After 8 September they took part in the Veneto round of the 1944 War championship, but renounced the national finals. After the Second World War, Vicenza returned to play in Serie A, after the mixed championship of 1946. In the 1946–1947 Serie A, when the single-round championship returned, Vicenza surprisingly placed fifth ; the following year, however, the team finished last and was relegated. In 1949 Vicenza came close to an immediate return to Serie A, but it slipped away by one point. This was followed by several seasons in Serie B in which it placed in mid-table, and which were characterised by economic problems.Lanerossi Vicenza
On 26 June 1953 an event occurred that would change the history of the Vicenza club for many decades: the old ACIVI was bought by the Schio-based wool producing giant, Lanerossi, founded in the 19th century by Alessandro Rossi. This was not the first case of football sponsorship in Italy, which was still forbidden at the time, but instead a so-called coupling, i.e. a real takeover: the football club became a rib of the textile company, even carrying its name and symbol - the R - on its shirts. The logo remained on the red and white shirts until the 1988–1989 season, but has made a return since the 2000s as it has become a de facto symbol of the Vicenza football club even following the company's departure.Luís Vinício and Giulio Savoini, were Lanerossi's flag-bearers in the early 50s two players who would go down in history as some of the club's best.
The golden twenty years in Serie A (1955–1975)
The injection of confidence and, above all, cash allowed Vicenza to set up a team that soon, after a season of adjustment, returned to Serie A in 1955 after seven seasons, with coach Aldo Campatelli and many goals from Enrico Motta. On their return to the top division Vicenza achieved a surprising escape from relegation with a ninth-place finish. The glory of the first team was complemented by winning the famous Viareggio tournament in 1954 and 1955, twice in a row. From the Viareggio team came players such as Azeglio Vicini, Sergio Campana, Renzo Cappellaro, Mario David, Mirko Pavinato, Luigi Menti and many others who later wore the biancorossa shirt in Serie A. In the second half of the 1950s, the offensive department was strengthened with the addition of two South Americans, first Américo Murolo and, in the following season, Francisco Lojacono, as well as the Vicenza-born Renzo Cappellaro.At the turn of the decade Vicenza placed with two consecutive seventh places, and in 1960–1961 the coach Roberto Lerici won the Seminatore d'oro award for best coach of the season. Lanerossi maintained its characteristics of a provincial club, careful about budgets, that valorised young players, produced from its youth sector or coming from other teams, maintaining a strong nucleus of flagship players, and occasionally welcoming great players at the end of their careers, such as Giovan Battista Fabbri and Paolo Rossi, respectively coach and striker of Lanerossi in the second half of the 1970s.
In 1962, the arrival of 30-year-old Brazilian centre forward Luís Vinício brought further lustre to the team. In the 1963–1964 Serie A season Vicenza rose to first place in the league table for three consecutive matches, taking sixth place at the end of the championship. Luis Vinicio in the 1965–1966 season, his best season, was the league's top scorer's with 25 goals. Lanerossi finished that season fifth.
However, great results were followed by years in which relegation was risked, often escaping it on the last match day. Among the most risky escapes from relegation, a historic one was that of 1972–1973, in which Lanerossi seemed doomed, but with three victories in the last three match days managed to climb the slope up to play a relegation match against Atalanta, winning it thanks to an own goal by Atalanta. Luck deserted Lanerossi in 1975 when, in their 20th consecutive Serie A championship, they were relegated to Serie B.
After an opaque 1975–76 season in which they even risked relegation to Serie C, Lanerossi went into the 1976–77 season with little hope. However, the new coach, Giovan Battista Fabbri had an intuition: he transformed the young Paolo Rossi from a right winger with poor prospects into an excellent centre forward, leading Vicenza to promotion to Serie A. After a hesitant start, the red and whites proved to be overwhelming, thanks to Rossi's goals, the safety of libero Giorgio Carrera, the plays of Franco Cerilli and Giancarlo Salvi, Mario Guidetti in midfield, and the unstoppable Roberto Filippi.
Real Vicenza 1977–78 season: newly promoted and runners-up in Serie A
Only Juventus did better than Lanerossi. The team finished the championship in 2nd place and made it to the UEFA Cup: it is still the best ever result by a newly promoted team in the history of the Italian top division. Paolo Rossi became the new phenomenon of Italian football: in December 1977 he was called up for the national team and at the end of the season he won the title of top scorer with 24 goals, a significant figure for a 16-team tournament. In June 1978 Rossi was part of the Italian team at the World Cup in Argentina, where the Azzurri finished fourth and the centre forward scored three goals.On his return to Italy, the agreement of the player's co-ownership with Juventus had to be addressed, in retrospect a fundamental crossroads in the Biancorossi's future at the end of the 1970s. The deal was only resolved at the trade deadline, with record sums never committed before in a single football market session: Farina offered as much as 2,612,510,000 lire to secure the other half of Pablito's card. The considerable sums proved problematic for Vicenza's shrunken coffers, who were now forced to sell some of Fabbri's other best elements in order to recoup their investment in "Mr. Five Billion" Rossi, as well as facing discontent from the rest of the squad due to the different economic treatment reserved for them. In this difficult context, Farina's plans failed in the short space of a season: in its European debut, the team was eliminated in the first round of the 1978–1979 UEFA Cup by Czechoslovakia's Dukla Praga, while in Serie A, after never having found a real rhythm of play, it slowly slipped to the bottom of the table to an unthinkable relegation. Lanerossi thus found themselves in Serie B and, two years later, even in C1; meagre consolation was the winning, in the 1981–1982 season, of the Coppa Italia of Serie C.
A young Roberto Baggio, born and raised in the province of Vicenza, made his professional football debut with Vicenza in the 1984–1985 championship after years in their youth sector. He would later become one of the best Italian football players in history.
On 16 June 1985, even with the young star Roberto Baggio absent due to injury, on the neutral pitch of the Franchi in Florence, Vicenza, led by coach Bruno Giorgi, returned to Serie B after winning the promotion play-offs against Piacenza. The following season, it gained a third place in Serie B seemily reopening the doors of Serie A for Vicenza, however, the CAF annulled the club's promotion due to the club's involvement in a betting scandal: the blow was so strong for the Vicenza that in 1987 they fell back into Serie C1.