Sassuolo have been crowned Serie B Winter Champions and Atalanta may still follow suit in Serie A.

Neither, however, will get to lift a trophy for their achievements. At least not yet.

In calcio’s complex lexicon, there’s perhaps no more confusing entry than “Campioni d’Inverno”, literally “winter champions”.

The title is “awarded” to the club that tops the league table at the end of the first half of the season.

Awarded, of course, is something of a misnomer in this context as the title of Winter Champions is purely statistical.

And yet, while there is no trophy to be lifted in December or January, being crowned Campioni d’Inverno is highly significant in Italian football.

That is largely because topping the table at Christmas is seen as a portent of things to come.

In the 92 seasons since Serie A adopted the round robin format, the team that won the title of Campione d’Inverno then won the Scudetto on 60 occasions, a 65 per cent ratio.

The percentage is even higher since Serie A introduced the three points for a win rule at the beginning of the 1994-95 season, with 20 of the 30 teams crowned winter champions going on to win the Scudetto – a 67 percent conversion rate.

Over the past 16 years alone, the team that led Serie A at the halfway stage of the season has gone on to win the Scudetto 12 times.

Napoli in the 2015-16 and 2017-18 campaigns, AC Milan in 2020-21 and Inter Milan the following season were the only exceptions.

The Partenopei led Juventus by two points at the end of the Girone d’Andata (the first half of the season), to claim their first Winter Champions title since the 1989-90 season, when Diego Maradona led them to their second Scudetto in four years.

But Napoli faltered in the second half of the season as Juventus won the title by nine points.

Two years later, Napoli were again a point clear of Juventus as December drew to a close, but then-Azzurri manager Maurizio Sarri warned against premature celebrations.

“The winter champion title is completely meaningless,” he said. “It counts for nothing.”

Sarri’s concerns proved prescient as the Bianconeri ultimately pipped his side to the title by four points.

In 2020, Milan took the winter champions crown by two points over Inter, but their Scudetto hopes vanished as the Nerazzurri won 50 of a possible 57 points in the second half of the season to storm to the title with four games to spare.

A year later, the roles were reversed as Inter claimed their first Campioni d’Inverno title in seven years with a four-point gap over their city rivals after 19 rounds.

But this time it was the Rossoneri who bounced back, taking the title by four points to clinch their first Scudetto in 11 years.

There was no repeat of such a scenario last season, as Inter led Juventus by two points at the halfway stage of the season and then romped to the Scudetto with a 19-point lead over Milan.

With two matches to go until the first half of the season draws to a close, the title of winter champions remains up for grabs, with Atalanta top of Serie A with a two-point gap over Napoli and Inter a point further adrift with a game in hand.

Gianpiero Gasperini has repeatedly dismissed La Dea‘s chances of winning the Scudetto, but Atalanta will be hoping history repeats itself if they were to top Serie A come January 5.

As Sarri rightly pointed, the title of Campioni d’Inverno counts for nothing, but among meaningless titles it is also the most important of them all.