Max Allegri sought refuge in the dug-out at the Mapei Stadium. He bowed his head and pinched the bridge of his nose. Not Sassuolo. Not again. The team with whom he began his rise through the leagues, taking ‘Sasol’ up to Serie B for the first time in their history two decades ago, has a funny way of coming back to haunt him. A 4-3 defeat in 2014 brought an end to his first spell as coach of AC Milan. The scorer of all four of Sassuolo’s goals that day was Domenico Berardi. Now a little longer in the tooth, Berardi struck again at the weekend in a 2-0 win. Historically only Enrico Chiesa and Silvio Piola have been more prolific against Milan than Sassuolo’s No 10.

Over lunch I asked Sassuolo’s chief executive Giovanni Carnevali how it is a player as gifted as Berardi, now 31, has stayed his entire career at this club. The Calabrian, who was spotted while visiting his brother, a student at the time at the university of Modena, is arguably the most talented player of his generation in Italy with more than a 100 goals in Serie A.

“It’s the beauty of our game that’s fading away,” Carnevali romantically tells The Athletic. “There are no longer bandiere.” The one club men. The talismanic and iconic. “Players these days are drawn to money and move around. Domenico grew up with us. He started out with us and had plenty of opportunities to leave.”

Performances like the one he put in against Milan all those years ago meant Juventus regularly came in for him when he was a kid. “But,” Carnevali explains, “Domenico preferred to stay at Sassuolo. We were playing in the Europa League for the first time. And for him playing in Europe with the club that raised him was something extraordinary. I think having Berardi in our team, at our football club, has always been kind of our strength.”

It was, in many respects, quite the weekend for Carnevali. He has known Allegri for years. L’Acciughina (the Little Anchovy), as Allegri is nicknamed, was Carnevali’s player when he was an executive at Pavia in the early 1990s. Allegri’s assistant Francesco Magnanelli also played in every division with Sassuolo. Milan’s defeat on Sunday lunchtime meant Inter could clinch the Scudetto with a draw against Parma. Carnevali must have been pleased for his friend, Beppe Marotta, the Inter president. He was the best man at Marotta’s wedding. The pair of them started out together at Monza shortly after Adriano Galliani and Ariedo Braida left to run AC Milan for Silvio Berlusconi.

Sassuolo’s late patron, Giorgio Squinzi, never hid his sympathy for Milan. But he also liked showing Berlusconi up with his own team. In a recess behind the desk in Carnevali’s office a photo shows Squinzi and his wife Adriana Spazzoli holding the TIM Trophy at the Mapei in 2013. “It started with these two extraordinary people here, a husband and wife,” Carnevali points.

Carnevali had left football altogether to start a marketing and events company, Master Group Sport. One of the competitions they organised was the TIM Trophy, a pre-season triangular tournament that ran from the turn of a century until a decade ago. Squinzi, the head of the Confederation of Italian Industry, convinced him to come back. He wanted Carnevali to establish Sassuolo as a team in Serie A. Initially reluctant, it was a challenge that fascinated Carnevali.

Giovanni Carnevali with Giorgio Squinzi in 2018 (Alessandro Sabattini/Getty Images)

Sassuolo is the smallest town to play in Serie A since the Second World War. It has a population of barely 40,000. When Allegri was the coach, Sassuolo played at the Enzo Ricci, a stadium with a capacity of 4,000. If the wider public have forgotten the origins and dimensions of the Sassuolo story it is because the Squinzis and Carnevali have normalised the Neroverdi as a Serie A club. “We are already part of the day-to-day reality of top-flight football in Italy,” Carnevali says. “We are no longer a revelation. The fact we were in Serie A for 12 years in-a-row and got good results on and off the pitch counts a lot.”

When Sassuolo suffered relegation in 2024, the club kept the team together and bounced straight back up under World Cup winner Fabio Grosso. Satisfyingly they clinched promotion against local rivals Modena with the best attack Serie B has ever seen. With three games of the current season left Sassuolo not only have the chance to finish in the top half of Serie A but to better the Emilia-Romagna region’s biggest clubs, Bologna and Parma, as they have often done over the last 15 years. It promises to be Sassuolo’s best season since Roberto De Zerbi’s time at the club.

Giovanni Carnevali handing Roberto De Zerbi a shirt to commemorate his 100th game in charge (Alessandro Sabattini/Getty Images)

Carnevali hopes to visit his old coach at Tottenham before the end of the season. They have stayed friends since De Zerbi left to prove himself in the Champions League with Shakhtar in 2021. “To me, De Zerbi is a manager who, when I see him coaching on the pitch, really enchants you,” Carnevali smiles. “Watching the team train under De Zerbi is truly a thing of beauty, because you can really see the manager’s influence. And this comes through even more during matches; the ability to give the team an identity. De Zerbi always did that for us during those three years, embracing Sassuolo’s philosophy of trying to attack and play attractive football.”

The team that used to play at the Ricci, trained there when De Zerbi first arrived. De Zerbi would then move with the club to the Mapei Football Center, a state-of-the-art training facility that opened in 2019. There is an image in the foyer from one of Italy’s greatest photographers, the Reggio Emilia native, Luigi Ghirri. It reminds everyone of the inspiration for the design.

House proud, Carnevali strolls out onto one of the six pitches. “The first team trained on this earlier today,” he says. You’d never have guessed. It is immaculate. It is said, in these parts, that the ever meticulous De Zerbi was every bit as demanding on the ground staff as his players. Standards are high. Italy trained here before playing qualifiers at the Mapei, a ground which has hosted, among other things, Coppa Italia finals and the women’s Champions League final 10 years ago.

“We have built everything,” Carnevali says, as his assistant Alessandra recommends a local dessert before our lunch at La Montana nears the end; il dolce mattone. Biscuits are stacked on top of one another. Creme patisserie acts as the mortar. It is then dusted with cacao and, poetically enough, resembles its namesake; a brick.

At a time when the football commentariat in Italy is proposing that the entire system of Italian football be demolished, Sassuolo act as a reminder than not all is bad. On the contrary you can construct something very good here. This is a club that has all the things other teams lack in Italy; a privately owned stadium, a new training ground, and an emphasis on developing the next generation of Italian players and coaches. Allegri, Stefano Pioli, Eusebio Di Francesco and De Zerbi all passed through here on their way to winning titles, reaching the latter stages of the Champions League or working in the Premier League.

When Italy won the Euros in 2021, an all too hastily forgotten success, three Sassuolo players — Berardi, Manuel Locatelli and Giacomo Raspadori — were in Roberto Mancini’s squad. In the club secretary’s office, Ciccio Caputo and Gian Marco Ferrari’s Italy shirts are framed. Fourteen Italians, a disproportionate amount for a club of this size, were capped while playing for Sassuolo.

“(Stefano) Sensi was one of the first players to make his debut for the national team, and many others followed,” Carnevali recalls. “But it was hard for us to imagine that a club like Sassuolo could supply players to the Italian national team; yet we did it, and at the Euros we managed to win, becoming European champions with Sassuolo players — so these are the successes that fill you with a sense of satisfaction.”

Expect more to follow. Only two years ago, Sassuolo’s Under-19s, the Primavera, won the national championship and the Super Cup. While surprising, it perhaps should not come as a shock. The Squinzi family have long been successful in sport. As a kid growing up in the 1990s, I watched the Mapei team become the best in cycling. They dominated Paris-Roubaix, in particular. Every rider on the podium in 1996, 1998 and 1999 was a Mapei rider. The sport science clinic in Varese has, for 30 years, prepared and rehabilitated some of Italy’s best athletes. Is it any wonder that once the Squinzis turned their attention to football, they would make Sassuolo competitive.

Another trinket in Carnevali’s office is a yellow submarine with the emblem of Villarreal. The two clubs share many similarities beyond playing a friendly in 2014 and doing business in the form of Nicola Sansone’s transfer a decade ago. Both are owned by giants of the ceramics industry in Porcelanosa and Mapei. Both have stood out for having a long-term strategic vision for football rather than big spending. Both are small, over-performing case studies in excellence. “We’ve never changed our way of working that much,” Carnevali says. “I think that’s a good thing: having clear ideas, knowing you have to stick to that path. You can tweak things, but you can’t completely overhaul them.”

The stability at the club, even after Squinzi and his wife passed away within six weeks of each other in 2019, has been to Sassuolo’s benefit. Their daughter, Veronica, has carried on their legacy. As examples go, many clubs in Italy could do worse than follow Sassuolo, particularly at a time when there is so much gloom about the state of the game in the bel paese.

“We are certainly not having an easy time of it at the moment,” Carnevali acknowledges. “But maybe it’s actually a good thing that we’re not going to the World Cup, because we need to focus on everything that needs to be put right. Because if we’d just gone to the World Cup, perhaps we’d have simply swept all the underlying problems under the carpet. Instead, here we need to try to think things through, bring them out into the open and start working from the ground up with people who have the expertise, with people who have the ability to try and sort out the Italian football system a bit.”

Carnevali believes the government, regardless of which party is in power, can do more to help Italy’s best loved sport. He thinks the way TV rights are allocated should be changed at the next tender. At the moment, a portion is decided by a club’s standing in the game. Their history and tradition. It recognises the value of Inter, Milan and Juventus. It is a nod to the past when Italian football perhaps needs to be incentivised to look to the future instead. “In my view, we need to look into a system whereby, when you invest in facilities, training centres, stadiums and the like, and when you invest in young players and give them a chance to play… these should be the incentives available to you,” Carnevali argues.

More protections need putting in place too although EU freedom of movement and workers’ rights make them difficult to impose. Take the case of Luca Reggiani, a kid from Modena, developed by Sassuolo, poached by Borussia Dortmund. An Italy international at every level from under-15s to under-19s, Reggiani is considered one of the brightest talents in Italian football. Dortmund snapped him up just as he was about to turn professional. They did the same with Atalanta’s Samuele Inacio. It left Atalanta’s hierarchy so aggrieved they refused to lunch with their Dortmund counterparts before the Champions League play-off games between the two sides in February.

Sassuolo need to be able to hang on to talents like Luca Reggiani, who left for Borussia Dortmund (Stuart Franklin/Getty Images)

“(Reggiani) did everything with us from age seven to 16,” Carnevali says. “Then he moved to a foreign club. Dortmund swooped in and took him from us, and there’s nothing you can do about it. He made his Champions League debut this season (against Atalanta) and scored his first goal a week later (against Augsburg). These are defeats, these are the real defeats — not the ones you suffer on a Sunday. I gave this lad everything. Facilities, coaches, physios, fitness coach, nutritionist, psychologist. Everything. Then you turn 16, and it’s ‘thank you and goodbye’, because there’s a club that snaps you up and offers you a big contract.”

One silver-lining, perhaps, is at least players like Reggiani and Inacio are coming through. It suggests, as Sassuolo do, that not everything is wrong in Italian football. You don’t have to hold your head in your hands like Allegri did at the weekend.

“We are a team and a club that believes in youth,” Carnevali says. As I wait for my high-speed train at the Mediopadana station to hurtle me back to Rome where the future of Italian football will be decided at the election of the next FIGC president in June, Sassuolo give me reason to be hopeful. This region, famous throughout the world for Ferrari and Lamborghini and the best restaurant in the world in Osteria Francescana (although, frankly, nothing beats Rossella’s tagliatelle at La Montana) might one day also be renowned as the place Italian football reset and relaunched.