Finding Mirco — Square Ball 6/12/24

Pumpkin-filled pasta

Words by: Chris McMenamy

Once tickets for Milan vs Juventus went on sale starting at €100 each, it was time to initiate Plan B: a trip to Ferrara to see Mirco Antenucci’s SPAL take on Torres in Serie C, Italy’s third tier. It may lack the glamour of San Siro, but you can sit in a comfy seat behind the home dugout for €20. They’re only asking €4 for a beer, they’ve got fresh sandwiches on sale and there’s even mulled wine on offer since it’s winter. Plus there’s a barista firing out coffee for a euro.

Seeing a 40-year-old Mirco Antenucci in the flesh, however, is priceless. He remains an enigmatic figure in Leeds United’s dark age, but at SPAL, he’s an adopted hero. He left Leeds in July 2016, joining SPAL on a free transfer after two bittersweet years at Elland Road during which he hit double figures twice but also played his part in the Sick Six, refusing to play at Charlton towards the end of 2014/15, and was also kept out of the side on the orders of Massimo Cellino to avoid triggering a renewal of his contract.

SPAL come from the city of Ferrara in Italy’s north-east, a city better known for pumpkin-filled pasta than football. They’d been out of Serie A for almost fifty years when Mirco made them the twelfth Italian team of his fourteen-year career, scoring eighteen times and winning promotion in his first season. Another eleven goals in Serie A helped keep them up against all odds the following season. He left for Bari in 2019 as SPAL attempted to transition the squad into one fit for Serie A, but they failed. Miserably. They were relegated immediately and limped into Serie C in 2023.

Their relegation brings us to where we are at the time of writing. Antenucci must have seen the Bat Signal coming from Ferrara, returning to his old club in their time of need. He was their top scorer with a meagre five goals last season, such was the dearth of promise about the club.

Getting off the train from Bologna, we thought we were either in the wrong place, or had the wrong day. There was nobody around. We walked for a good ten minutes before we eventually encountered human life at Bar La Coccinella, where various members of SPAL’s ultras, Curva Ovest Ferrara, sat outside clad in black drinking in the cool November sun.

We wandered on into Ferrara’s historic town centre, a UNESCO World Heritage site, to see if there was much life about it. The short walk through empty shopping streets at 4pm on a Saturday felt like somebody had left behind a film set, but it all changed when reaching the city square, Piazza Municipio.

Much like the Leeds that Antenucci knew, the football is very much secondary to almost anything else going on in the town that day. We walked out into the piazza to find a bustling Christmas market equipped with a performer who seemed to have been inspired by Vic and Bob’s Club Singer, before stumbling onto the grounds of Estense Castle, where a local charity had put on an auction for crocheted granny squares, over 12,000 of which were laid out on the cobbles. They were raising funds for women’s aid charities as part of International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

The ultras were also collecting money outside the ground for the same charities, although it required a greater level of trust to part money to a guy fully dressed in black shaking a bucket at me. Still, it’s a good cause and the thousands raised is remarkable. There was a moment of severe irony early in the match as Antenucci took exception to being pushed off the pitch without being awarded a free-kick, a decision that he took out on the female lino nearest to him with an explicit tirade.

Walking from the square of granny squares to the ground was an experience in itself. It should have been a ten or fifteen minute trip but the police had blocked off nearly every street, forcing us to detour through a residential area. Their excuse? Away fans. For a third division game against a team that had to take a nine-hour ferry to get from Sardinia to the mainland, before another five-hour drive to Ferrara.

The similarities between SPAL and 2015/16 Leeds are quite remarkable. Both owned by characters, both with angry fanbases and a loveable old stadium that’s barely half full. We had Cellino, they have Joe Tacopina, the former lawyer of Donald Trump and other ‘illustrious’ individuals, including Julian Khater, who was convicted of macing three police officers in the Capitol Hill riots in January 2021, one of whom died. He’s currently representing A$AP Rocky on a gun charge in the US while also trying to convince the rapper to invest in Tranmere Rovers with him, naturally.

Tacopina has been involved in Italian football since 2011, when he joined the group that bought Roma. He has subsequent stints owning Bologna and Venezia, before buying SPAL in 2022 and subsequently overseeing them being relegated and forced to sell the crown jewels of their academy. Hauntingly familiar.

Their stadium, Paolo Mazza, was built in the English style and you could be forgiven for thinking you were watching Leeds back in League One with its rectangular shape and open corners. The espresso and mulled wine offer is where the similarity with League One, and indeed Elland Road, ends. Ordering two beers at the bar left me feeling like an uncultured swine, so I had an espresso to balance it out.

Having a quick pre-match coffee heightened the senses and allowed me to truly experience a third tier Italian match. The 16,000 seater stadium was pretty much empty ten minutes before kick-off. It was almost as though York City were to walk out and face a Leeds United reserve side, but it turned out the locals were just avoiding the ‘bitter’ cold — it was eight degrees — and topping off their mulled wines just before settling in for the main event. The ultras piled into their stand behind the SPAL goal moments before kick-off and it started to feel like a real game of football. The drum began to beat, the flares were lit, and the young ones started to get loud.

Antenucci led SPAL out from the tunnel just in front of us and received adulation from four Leeds fans, plus generally apathetic applause from the other 5,000 in attendance. He’s retiring at the end of the season and most of his final campaign will play out in front of an embittered crowd who hate their owner and think they should be in a better division. Quite fitting, in the eyes of Leeds fans. Maybe that’s what he took home with him from his time in England.

The ultras unfurled a banner that read simply ‘BASTA!’ or ‘ENOUGH!’, which may have been tied to their initiative regarding violence against women, but there was enough room for interpretation that it might be a dig at their ownership.

Though we came to see Mirco, another man stole the show. SPAL centre-back Steven Nador was entertainer-in-chief, a defender with a keen eye for an interception but a fetish for going on dangerous solo runs through the middle of the pitch. He evoked memories of the late great Sol Bamba with his adventurous style, albeit a poor imitation. I’d like to think Antenucci showed him a Bamba highlight reel and asked him to play a bit more like his old team mate, only to be alarmed at the sight of him beating four players before passing it directly to a Torres winger.

The first half was an entertaining affair, though lacking in quality. For every time Nador ambled into midfield, there was a misplaced pass or a cross ballooned into the stands. Antenucci was mostly anonymous in the final third, receiving almost no service and having to drop deep to pick up the ball, but he couldn’t get up the pitch quick enough to join the young wingers on the counter.

It was 0-0 after 45 minutes and SPAL manager Andrea Dossena looked like a man who knew his job was on the line, with his side 15th, 22 points off the top. He ran up and down the touchline, gesticulating and throwing a tantrum each time an attack broke down (which was every time). You may remember Dossena from his brief stint at left-back for Liverpool in the late 2000s. He gets a thumbs up from me for scoring a hilarious chip at Old Trafford when they beat Scum 4-1 in 2009, so he had our support on this night.

SPAL had done well to get to half-time at 0-0 against a side 4th in the table and fifteen points ahead of them. They had to deal with a Torres onslaught early in the second, though none of the away side’s attackers could imitate their greatest ever player, Gianfranco Zola. More crosses ballooned. More final passes gone astray. Then, in a moment of madness, Antenucci leant into his marker with an outstretched elbow, shall we say. He looked pretty relieved when the referee rushed over only to produce a yellow card. It didn’t take long for him to revert to his usual self and hurl abuse at the Torres players who had surrounded the ref, begging that Mirco be sent off.

That near miss gave him a new lease of life and a welcome energy boost going into the final twenty minutes. It came in handy when Torres’ attempts to play out from the back failed miserably and Mirco applied some ‘pressure’ that prompted his opponent to panic and, inexplicably, flail out at the SPAL attacker chasing him from the other side. Free-kick. Yellow card, possibly to even out the one given to Antenucci. Ten minutes left, a free-kick in shooting range with the game at 0-0. It was Mirco time.

Or so we thought. He wandered off and left it to Marcel Buchel, a 33-year-old Liechtenstein international with a questionable Gen Z mullet. He stepped up and struck the ball directly into a wall that had parted like toilet paper in the rain, which deflected the ball past a stranded Torres ‘keeper and into the far corner. Quite incredibly, SPAL were ahead. This enjoyable yet low quality match was to end in the most hilarious way possible, with a woeful free-kick that came about from a defender panicking in the face of ‘pressing’ from a 40-year-old who’d been on the pitch for eighty minutes.

SPAL were good value for their lead, creating more half-chances than the away side, who didn’t like the team their position in the table suggested they might be. A little like the Leeds that Antenucci knew, this SPAL side appear to be frustratingly inconsistent, often terrible but sometimes capable of showing up and causing an upset. Much like that team, leaving a home game is a straightforward process. There’s no mass crowd to wade through and no traffic jam, though that’s helped by the train station a short walk from the station. Imagine that, a decent public transport link near a football ground. It’ll never catch on.

Antenucci says he’ll stick around in the game after he retires at the end of the season, preferably as a sporting director. Hopefully he’s learned more from his time at SPAL than he did in Leeds, surrounded by geniuses like Massimo Cellino, Nicola Salerno and Andrea Iore. Who knows, maybe he’ll pop up back at Leeds some day. At least he’ll have learned not to offer incentives he can’t afford. For now, he’s back to square one, playing for a team who hate the owner and wish they weren’t where they are. He could have ran off to Saudi Arabia and retired in style, or maybe even the MLS. Better the devil you know, I suppose.