Parità dei sessi 1: Prologue and index of chapters

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Too long, didn’t read? Scroll to the bottom to skip the prologue and go straight to the links to the newer chapters.

Welcome to Sassari on lovely Sardinia. This is the hometown of one of the greatest football teams in Italy: ASD Torres.

This is a club that’s won seven Italian championships—as many as Roma, Napoli, and Fiorentina combined. As well as eight Coppa Italia titles and seven Supercoppa Italiana wins. They’ve also made their mark on Europe, reaching the quarter-finals of the Champions League on three occasions.

Well, the ladies team, that is. The men are absolutely rubbish. Obviously this need to change.

Here we are. Just an hour and a half from Berlusconi’s bunga-bunga mansion.

Founded in 1903, Torres is one of the oldest football clubs on the island of Sardinia. But unlike the ladies, the men’s team of Torres have lived most of its life in obscurity in the lower levels of the Italian football leagues.

Arguably the best performance was in 1989 in Serie C1/B (third tier in the league) when a rock solid defence and a brilliant young man named Gianfranco Zola led the team within reach of the Serie B. That year the club were unbeaten against giants Foggia, Palermo and the bitter rivals Cagliari. However a bad run in April saw Torres drop in the table and in the end they finished fourth within three points of promotion to Serie B. To make matters worse, Cagliari won the league.

After that, Gianfranco Zola left the team to be Diego Maradona’s understudy at Napoli. As for Torres, it all went downhill from there.

Financial trouble has since led to no less than three reconstructions of the club. The latest in the early summer of 2017 after being relegated from Serie D. The Federazione Italiana Giuoco Calcio (the Italian FA) refused to issue a licence to keep playing and our chairman had to take over and merge in a second club to gain their licence to play in the Eccellenza Sardegna.

So this is where we’ll find Torres today. For those not familiar with the Italian leagues, Eccellenza is level 5 – comparable to the National League in the UK. In other words: we have a long way to go to catch up with the ladies.

Hence the title: parità dei sessi. Gender equality. It’s time to turn the men’s team into a winning side.

I’ll write a post on my ambitions and plans for the club later. For now, all you need to know is this: We are going to match the ladies. That means 7 scudetti, 8 Coppa Italia, 7 Supercoppa Italiana, and 3 quarter-final appearances in the Champions League.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to get feedback from you, so please reach out with questions, comments, suggestions or whatever else you feel like. You can reach me on Twitter at @FM_Ponzie or in my Slack channel #Torres.

Don’t know what Slack is? Neither did I until recently. It’s an amazing forum for FM players. Click here to join the conversation.

READ THE NEXT CHAPTERS HERE: 

Parità dei sessi 2: The marvellous injury and the two-stroke lightning

Parità dei sessi 3: We’re in the cup final!

Parità dei sessi 4: Stupid is as stupid does

Parità dei sessi 5: Delivering the unthinkable

Parità dei sessi guide: What to do after an unexpected promotion?

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