Credits Photo UEFA Europa League
Bergamo and Parma are just over 160 km apart along the motorway. A straight line that in the space of 25 years started from Moscow and arrived in Dublin, with the two Italian cities as the common denominator of a magical European night. L’Atalanta Bergamasca Calcio managed to wrest the scepter from Parma Calcio and raised the Europa League (formerly the UEFA Cup) to the Dublin sky after beating Bayer Leverkusen thanks to a hat-trick from Nigerian center forward Lookman. A performance without history, which is very reminiscent, even in the same result, of the 3-0 achieved by Parma by Crespo, Chiesa and Vanoli against Marseille in the final in Moscow in May 1999.
Twenty-five years later the UEFA Cup returns to Italy and it is brought there by a provincial team that wins a European trophy for the first time. In 117 years of existence, Bergamasca Calcio had won only one Italian Cup. It took Gasperini’s courage and the idea of a football that he has been pursuing for eight years in Bergamo. In Malesani’s Parma there were champions like Crespo, Veron, Cannavaro, Thuram, Buffon, just to name a few. At Dea there are players like Koopmeiners, Scamacca, Lookman and De Ketelaere who are already established and known worldwide but far from the potential of the Crusader team in 1999. The comparison will be able to hold when Atalanta goes on to win three cups in one hundred days . Maybe it will take another 25 years.
