Pro Vercelli… The Forgotten Champions Living in the Shadows of the Giants

When it comes to the Scudetto, Piedmont is in a league of its own. The northern Italian region is home to 52 of the 122 Serie A titles won, with Juventus accounting for 36 of them and their city rivals Torino on seven.

Another seven belong to Pro Vercelli, a club which last graced calcio’s upper echelon 91 years ago and has been a Serie C regular for the past eight seasons.

Tucked away between Turin and Milan, Vercelli, like most towns in the Po Valley, is often overlooked in favour of its bigger, more glamorous and more famous neighbours.

The same dynamic applies to football, where Vercelli have existed in the shadow of the Turin clubs and the two Milanese giants for almost a century.

But the status quo wasn’t always thus.

Pro Vercelli won their seven titles in a 14-year period beginning in 1908, and such was their supremacy they lost just once in 56 league games between December 1910 and June 1913, winning 47 and drawing eight.

If those figures sound scarcely credible, their goals-for tally stood at 177, against 22 conceded. Italian football, of course, was vastly different at the time, split into regional groups in the north across Lombardy, Liguria, Piedmont and subsequently, Veneto and Emilia-Romagna.

The winners of the regional groups progressed to a knockout stage to determine the national winner and the tournament was open to teams from central and southern Italy from the 1912-13 season.

It would be another 16 years before Serie A implemented the current format, but by then Pro Vercelli’s rich vein of titles had long dried out.

What still flowed was the talent within their ranks, embodied by a young striker named Silvio Piola, who would go on to become Serie A’s all-time top scorer. Born just across the regional border with Lombardy, he rattled in 51 goals in 127 league matches for the Lions.

“We will never sell Piola, not even for all the gold in the world,” proclaimed president Secondo Ressia. “Once we sell him, the decline of Pro Vercelli will begin.”

His forecast proved to be prescient, as cash-strapped Pro Vercelli sold Piola to Lazio soon after the 1934 World Cup and they were relegated nine months later. The White Shirts haven’t been back in Serie A.

Piola is the only man to hold the title as record scorer in Serie A for two clubs, rattling in 86 in 185 games for Novara, the team he joined in 1947 and where he retired seven years later. For a while he was also Lazio’s leading top-flight marksman, until Ciro Immobile overtook him.

Piola, along with former Grande Torino defender Romeo Menti, has two grounds named after him, with Pro Vercelli and Novara both playing at their own Stadio Silvio Piola. The grounds are just 13 miles apart.

Built in 1932 and with a capacity of just north of 5500, the venue in Vercelli is older and smaller than the one in Novara, which was opened in 1976 and is the third-biggest in Serie C Girone A with a near-18,000 capacity.

The two clubs are arch-rivals and have shared the same Serie C girone for the past four seasons. The Derby del Riso – the rice derby – is Piedmont’s biggest grudge match after the Derby della Mole in Turin, and one of the biggest fixtures in lower-league football in Italy.

It owes its name to the region’s main export. Along with Biella, Novara and Vercelli are the tips of the ‘Golden Triangle’ of the Piedmontese rice paddies, which produce over half of Italy’s rice and are responsible for making the country the biggest producer in Europe.

The culinary symbol of the rice paddies is panissa – a rich, hearty risotto with salami and beans that is best washed down with a bottle of the local Nebbiolo or Barbera. After all, as an old Piedmontese adage has it, rice is born in water but dies in wine.

The next instalment of the Derby del Riso is scheduled for November 22, with little else other than local bragging rights at stake.

Novara finished 13th last season, one point and one place ahead of Pro Vercelli, and have been to the play-offs just once since returning to Serie C four years ago, while the White Shirts have made the play-offs three times in the past six seasons but never got past the first national round.

That same weekend as the derby, AC Milan are at home to Frosinone and Juventus entertain Venezia. Turin and Milan are under an hour from Vercelli on the train, and so a Serie A-Serie C double-header, when kick-off times allow it, is doable.

Even in a football landscape awash with fallen giants, Pro Vercelli have it harder than most. Bar the two Milanese teams and Juventus, only Genoa have won the Scudetto more times than Pro Vercelli’s seven, a tally which puts them level with Bologna.

They have three more titles than Napoli and two more than the city of Rome as a whole, yet they have long been relegated to a footballing backwater. That, however, is not necessarily a bad thing for visitors keen to explore their Italian football horizons.

“The best thing to do is come in the night before, have a good meal and watch the game,” fan Chris King told Destination Calcio ahead of the derby against Novara back in February.

“Then get one of the hourly trains out to either Turin or Milan, and carry on your football journey around the north of Italy.

 “There is enough if you fall in love with Vercelli. There’s lots to do, but it will take you a couple of years to scratch the surface.” 

Originally from Leeds, King has been scratching that itch for 15 years. Calcio aficionados may join him soon.