Since it always rains on wet surfaces, Sassuolo’s annus horribilis is nevertheless destined to be remembered as the worst of the anni horribiles among those which, in the last two decades, have seen the clubs of our province lose the Serie A. Modena 2003-04, Carpi 2015-16 and Sassuolo 2023-24: different stories, each with its own peculiarities, but in the end, of the three, it is the relegation of the neroverdi that highlights the most negative performance. All three lost the category, and this is therefore a poor statistic, yet only Sassuolo are relegated from the penultimate team in the standings. Gianfranco Bellotto’s Modena finished third from last, Fabrizio Castori’s Carpi also finished third from last, and both finished the championship with an average points average higher than that with which Sassuolo finished: 30 in 34 games for the yellow-blues’ last Serie A team, for an average of 0.88 per match, while the red and whites were not saved despite 38 points in 38 matches, with an average of 1 per match, a score which was of no use at the time but which in a championship like the current one would have been sufficient to save themselves in the carriage. And instead today Sassuolo, with 29 points in 37 games, has an average of 0.78 which, in Rome against Lazio, would become 0.76 in the event of a defeat, would touch 0.79 in the event of a draw and would reach the maximum at 0.84 if a victory were to come from the Olimpico. Sassuolo’s current relegation has some similarities with Modena’s latest, but none with that of Carpi. In this last case, in fact, the red and whites – where Sannino had replaced Castori, who then returned and picked up the pace – were the architects of a return round of pride and struggle, exactly the opposite of what happened to Sassuolo and of what which happened to Modena, who had started the tournament with one coach (Malesani) and finished it with another (Bellotto), winning only one of the last 14 matches (6 draws and 7 defeats). However, from A to B Modena also had five other relegations, lost over time: those from last in the table in 1931-32, 1939-40 and 1940-41, the one from penultimate in 1948-49 and that in 1963-64 in the play-off with Sampdoria, third to last on equal merit with the yellows, on 7 June 1964, a date remembered more than anything for a different play-off, the one for the scudetto between Bologna and Inter. Well, at the time victories were worth two points, but making the change to the current three points, the averages per game were 0.85, 0.96, 0.83, 1 and 0.97. This means that, if Sassuolo does not beat Lazio, in this respect the black-green average will be the worst average of all those recorded by the Modena team in the years of relegation from A to B in the history of the single group.
Lorenzo Longhi
