The WhatsApp group flickers into life at about 6am every day. It is the manager who goes first because, when you are 79, old habits die hard. “Good morning,” Osvaldo Jaconi hails his former players and staff before, little by little, the salutations roll in from across Italy. Maybe it is someone’s birthday or another special occasion; the conversation may be accelerated by an in-joke that recalls why, three decades ago, they were brought together in the first place. Just in case anyone could forget, the group’s title says: “Serie B.”
This is how miracles stay alive. Perhaps it is the point of what Castel di Sangro achieved in 1995-96. A rag-tag bunch from this backwater in mountainous Abruzzo had risen from local amateur leagues and then, in a crowning triumph with little precedent, made it to the second tier. “It’s like 30 years haven’t passed,” says Angelo Petrarca, who was nominally the masseur but often resembled a one-man backroom. “It shows how much love everybody has for each other, and did back then. As if everybody is still right here.”
Their feat shocked followers of the brutal pyramid beneath what was then a world-leading Serie A. It was immortalised in a different way by Joe McGinniss, the celebrated American journalist, who consummated an unlikely love affair with football by embedding with the Castel di Sangro side during that first Serie B campaign. They followed “Il miracolo” with “La salvezza”: the salvation, an equally unlikely survival from relegation. McGinniss’s account, The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, detailed a personal and sporting journey; affectionate and at times exasperating, it became one of the most feted sports books of all time.
McGinniss embalmed that era for a global readership that had few other windows into football’s less explored corners. His journey from bemused newcomer to helpless over-investment, nearing mania by the book’s stormy conclusion, was compelling but the club’s characters stole the scene. Sometimes they verged on caricature. Petrarca, who would have lunch with McGinniss on Mondays, is not especially fond of his own depiction as “a short and rather cunning man … who seemed to have irons in many fires”. Ultimately, though, the extraordinary story of a community thrown into the spotlight shines through.
“There were three of us on the staff and things were really family-run,” says Petrarca, a sprightly 73-year-old surrounded by old team photos in his living room on a hill overlooking the town. “If the kit man wasn’t around I’d take my two sons to the stadium laundry and we’d wash the players’ clothes.
“Some of them had come all the way up with us. Our guys were the lowest-paid in Serie B and perhaps in Serie C. We went to Palermo, Bari, Turin, Genoa, cities with more than 700,000 inhabitants, but we survived. From a qualitative point of view and an economic one, what happened was extraordinary.”
It also, as everyone knew, had little chance of lasting. “We lived a miraculous thing,” Petrarca says. “But it was impossible to think of it continuing. There was a sense at the time that, one day, the history of that Castel di Sangro team would end. It couldn’t carry on forever.”
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Behind the counter, Gabriel Romito prepares the drinks. Bar Pasticceria Serricchio is one of the oldest gathering points in town and calls for safe hands; so does Castel di Sangro’s goalkeeping position and this afternoon he will wear the No 1 jersey against Gessopalena.
Romito is a local hero. Five years ago he saved a penalty from Napoli’s Amin Younes in a friendly, plunging to his right in front of the old Curva Nord where ultras convened in the late 90s. The Napoli keeper Alex Meret, suitably impressed, gave him his jersey. “It’s framed at home with the match date underneath,” Romito says. It is the closest brush with footballing fame any of the current players are likely to experience.
“We’re a team where no one is paid, playing for the love of the sport,” he says. Castel di Sangro were relegated the season after La Salvezza; the elastic had snapped and in 2005, upon demotion to the fifth tier, they were declared bankrupt. There has followed a pattern familiar in Italian football’s lower reaches: a litany of name changes and restarts that settled on the formation of Castel di Sangro Cep 1953, who entered the league structure of the neighbouring region Molise.
To those invested in the history, that never felt quite right. For one thing, it was jarring to compete in Molise; for another, the Cep entity was run from 80 miles away in Naples; finally, a pipeline through which local youngsters could develop had never been fully established. Two years ago Ferdinando Iacobucci headed a local group that founded a new club, Castel di Sangro Calcio. They entered a team in Abruzzo’s third division, Italy’s ninth and lowest level, and started an academy that now holds about 120 children.
Iacobucci was a ballboy in the days of Il Miracolo. “We’re starting with good intentions,” he says. “The miracle is difficult to replicate but we hope to reach a level that Castel di Sangro deserves. Seeing kids from Castel di Sangro unable to play for their home town broke our hearts, so we decided to begin all over again and let them wear the jersey.”
One of the first team, the right-back Angelo Bonomi, has the glory years running through his veins. In the town’s main stadium his father, Claudio, scored the ferocious left-footed winner against Pescara that secured La Salvezza. Nowadays the facility is run by Italy’s football federation and has hosted the Azzurri’s Under-21s. Claudio moved upwards to Torino, later playing for Sampdoria and Fiorentina. He lives in Sardinia but is visiting and joins the crowd of about 50 as half-time in the Gessopalena game nears.
Castel di Sangro have missed chances and Romito, who joined several others in transferring to the new club from Cep, has been bothered by a long-range shot against the bar. Petrarca, still performing every conceivable odd job, stands next to the dugouts. In the changing room he has filled out the team sheet and collected every player’s identity card. The side score twice just before the interval and Claudio Bonomi, separated from the pitch by a wire fence, follows Angelo up and down the right flank during the second half.
“It’s an honour to see a member of my family wearing the Castel di Sangro shirt,” he says. “It’s a great town and a great club, and these guys need to be aware of it. Football has changed and it’s really tough now, the sport has become about politics at all levels. It’s very unlikely we can repeat our climb, but you never know.”
Bonomi remembers the jubilation, shared with the thousands from neighbouring towns and villages who would fill the stadium, after his thunderbolt in June 1997. “The perfect Sunday,” he says. “We celebrated a little too much, but that was normal. It was like we had won the Serie A title.”
Angelo and the current crop win 3-1. They are top and enjoy a celebration in La Lanterna, a pizzeria in town. In the 1990s this was Marcella’s, a central location in McGinniss’s book: the venue for team meetings, meals, gossip and conspiracy.
Iacobucci spent the game in the tiny club shop, pouring coffee and selling flame-coloured replica shirts. “We’ve started over with the legacy of the old,” he says. “And we’re seeking a glimmer of light in the new.”
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Petrarca makes a video call and pulls up a smiling Jaconi on the screen. It is evidently a frequent occurrence. Jaconi still works with an amateur club in the coastal town Porto San Giorgio. McGinniss moved in next door to him and it was a rollercoaster relationship, the American despairing and marvelling at the manager’s bullish, bloody-minded conservatism.
“The friendship was good,” Jaconi says. “Up until the end there weren’t any particular problems.” That changed when McGinniss travelled with the newly safe team to Bari on the final day of 1996-97. Bari needed a win for promotion and McGinniss, perturbed by a change in atmosphere, believed he heard the players discuss how to lose 3-1. It appeared they had been ordered to do so, although that is strenuously denied. Il sistema, the practice of arranging outcomes, was commonplace then but an enraged McGinniss branded the team “traitors” and would leave Castel di Sangro under a cloud.
“A writer who doesn’t understand football could clearly have misinterpreted some banal things,” Jaconi says. “It would be the same if I went to report on fashion shows. I would also not understand anything and take into account things that have no importance.”
It was far from the only drama McGinniss stumbled into. During the 1996-97 season two players, Danilo Di Vincenzo and Pippo Biondi, were killed in a car accident; another, Gigi Prete, was detained by police investigating an international cocaine smuggling operation. Prete was acquitted. The high-profile signing of Robert Ponnick, supposedly a Nigerian star from Leicester City, turned out to be a publicity stunt. “If anyone wanted to make a story, all the characters were there,” Jaconi says. “There was no need to expand the discussion on things that seem farcical to me.”
In the book McGinniss sketches the club’s then owner, Pietro Rezza, in the fashion of a James Bond villain. He has an awkward relationship with the president, Gabriele Gravina, who now heads the Italian FA and is the Uefa first vice-president. A bridge-burning confrontation between the pair concludes his stay in Italy.
The word “chaos” arises most frequently when anyone in town is asked about the reaction to the release in 1999 of The Miracle of Castel di Sangro. “There were some stories that genuinely didn’t exist,” says Petrarca. But he stayed on good terms with McGinniss, who sent champagne to his hotel when he visited New York the following year.
That is because, for all the ups and shuddering downs, Castel di Sangro and McGinniss both told tales of love. Jaconi offers another: the old team’s adored goalkeeper, Roberto De Juliis, had a brain haemorrhage in October 2024 and Jaconi visits him every 10 days. De Juliis is well enough to be back on the WhatsApp chat, his presence a source of joy. Maybe he will be able to attend this summer’s 30th anniversary celebration of Il Miracolo.
Jaconi, the soft-centred bulldog, has a go at playing their achievements down. “I never thought anything of it,” he claims. “We won, we did it, then everyone went their own way. The fact it still causes a stir makes us happy, and it’s you who keep it going.” The stream of messages popping up on Petrarca’s screen as he speaks tell a different story.
