Last weekend, Parma’s scheduled Serie A home game against Udinese was cancelled. Not because of a water-logged pitch, floodlight failure or crowd trouble, but because the club literally couldn’t afford to put the match on.
This weekend they’re away to Genoa, and players – who haven’t been paid in months – will likely have to drive themselves to the match. "When we didn't play on Sunday, it left me with a bad feeling,” says Parma’s 37-year-old captain Alessandro Lucarelli. "If there isn't a bus to go to Genoa, we'll get five or six cars together and travel in them. We're prepared to pay for the trip ourselves." They still don't have anywhere to stay.
While the modern footballer is oft-lampooned as spectacularly out of touch with reality, so handsomely do they live from the riches of the game, it’s worth seeing this situation for exactly what it is: workers dipping into their own pockets to do a job for which they haven’t been paid in over six months. If your boss hadn’t paid you since August, would you still turn up for work? As Sampdoria’s president Massimo Ferrero has so eloquently said: "Italian football cannot remain indifferent to the serenity, the professionalism and the maturity with which the Parma players have faced an extremely difficult situation… I consider them to be heroes."
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Parma’s current malaise is a sad and dizzying fall from grace for a team that, less than 15 years ago, could boast a player roster including the likes of Hernan Crespo, Juan-Sebastian Veron, Fabio Cannavaro, Lilian Thuram and Gianluigi Buffon. Hell, even last year they managed to finish sixth in Serie A; this season they’ll be lucky if they play their remaining fixtures.
So what, exactly, has happened to the team which won the UEFA Cup in 1999 and the Copa Italia in 2002, but have had five different presidents in the last 12 months? In broadly chronological order:
2007: Tommaso Ghirardi buys Parma FC from administrators for approximately €3 million, following the collapse of Calisto Tanzi’s Parmalat dairy conglomerate, the former owner who built the club from Serie C obscurity to UEFA Cup champions. Parma’s gross debt – and this is important – stands at circa €16 million at this point.
2013-14: Under Ghirardi's direction, Parma involved in over 450 player transactions between the summers of 2013 and 2014, with a literal s*** ton (honestly, we lost count) loaned to other clubs. Nobody knows entirely why.
May 2014: Parma finish the 2013-14 Serie A season in 6th, qualifying for the Europa League.
May 2014: Days later, Serie A officials ban Parma from competing in the Europa League due to unpaid income tax on the wages of all those players out on loan.
August 2014: Parma stops paying its staff's wages
December 2014: Ghirardi sells the club to a Cyprus-domiciled conglomerate for €1. Not million. A single Euro. Wages still go unpaid.
January 2015: Antonio Cassano's contract torn up after he demands to be paid.
February 2015: The Cypriot conglomerate sells the club to a Slovenien-based group, again for €1. It transpirse that the club's debt now stands at nearly €200 million, and a bankruptcy hearing is scheduled for March.
Which - 3 owners, 450 play transfers and €180 million of additional debt later - brings us back to the present day.
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It’s a desperate situation for a once-mighty club. Crespo, who scored 72 goals for Parma during two spells and is now a youth team coach, says they can’t even afford hot water: "We are having to take showers with cold water and many times my players have gotten ill." Yesterday, Inter Milan lent them one of their own team busses so the youth side could travel to a tournament in Pescara.
Not that borrowed busses will save Parma now. The best they can realistically hope for is to finish the season before bankruptcy likely takes them to the very bottom of the league structure. Lucarelli, Crespo and others are doing their level best to see Parma get to the end of May in one piece, but unless the club can scrape together the euros to pay the electricity bill, the groundsmen, the stewards, the police, the cooks and cleaners for their next home fixture, this weekend's away trip to Genoa may be the last time Serie A sees Gialloblu for a very long while indeed.
