6 Champion sides who fell by the wayside - the stories of their forgotten triumphs
Montpellier finished 15th season last year, after having won the Ligue 1 title in 2011-12Winning a 38/40 game league is not something every other team can do – it takes consistency over the duration of the season. This consistency is often built as a result of years of strategic and technical training, and often takes years to hone. Usually once done, these champion teams are all almost always there or there abouts, competing for the title – which is why you have the Real Madrids, the Barcelonas, the Juventuses and the Bayern Munichs of this world competing for, and winning, domestic titles year after year.Sometimes though, fairytales become reality. The right money comes in, the right manager gets associated with the right players – and magic happens. Unheralded teams put up displays that stun the established lot and romp home with the goods. Oftentimes though, they fail to sustain this success with financial troubles, bigger clubs with bigger wallets, and internal mis-management all playing its due course in pulling the unfancied challengers crashing down to earth,Here, we take a look back at 6 sides who spent an amazing season(s) at the very top of their leagues but since have disappeared – either into mid-table mediocrity or relegated obscurity.
#1 Sampdoria (1990 91)
In the late 80’s the Italian Serie A had emerged as undisputedly the place to be if you wanted to consider yourself a top, top football player. The three foreigner rule in vogue at the time saw the crème de la crème of world football vying to find themselves a spot in the powerhouses of Milan, Naples and Turin, and their dominance on the league was all-encompassing.
The Dutch holy trinity of Van Basten, Gullit and Rijkaard at Milan, the competing German triumvirate of Matthaus, Brehme and Klinsmann at Inter and the South American superstars Maradona, Careca and Caniggia at Napoli were the hubs around which those champion sides had been built.
In the (relatively) small port town of Genoa, however, there was an unheralded team on the rise with an all-Italian flavour about them (all though coached by a Serbian in the form of the remarkable Vujadin Boskov). Considering their opposition, the mere fact that little Sampdoria had risen to become credible challengers would have been remarkable by itself, but what they did over the course of the season cemented their places in footballing folklore.
With Gianluca Pagliuca stationed behind an impenetrable fortress of a defence marshaled by the indomitable and insanely tough Pietro Vierchwood, the club had embraced that most pure of Italian philosophies – catennaccio. But this wasn’t catenaccio as the immortal Helenio Herrera had perfected it. For it turned out that Samp were also the most fun team in the land.
The rocket-fuelled winger Atillio Lombardo ripped teams apart and softened them up for the main act to come along and finish them off. Gianluca Vialli and Roberto Mancini - Samp’s terrible twins, one a ruthless powerful force of nature and the other a twinkle-toed devil of a genius, destroyed all that stood in their way in performance after performance of counter-attacking brilliance.
This was no smash and grab against weakened opposition, they beat all the big sides on the way to a comprehensive championship triumph – their first (and till now only) Scudetto. Vialli left the next season, along with Boskov and soon they were on a disastrous slide that got them relegated in 1999. They are back in Serie A now – a decent mid-table unit, as demonstrated by their 12th place finish last season.