Hellas Verona FC
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| Full name | Hellas Verona Football Club |
|---|---|
| Nickname(s) |
Gialloblu (Yellow-Blues) Mastini (Mastiffs) gli Scaligeri (The Scaligers) i butei ("the boys" in Veronese dialect) |
| Founded | 1903 |
| Ground | Stadio Marc'Antonio Bentegodi, Verona |
| Capacity | 39,371 |
| President | Maurizio Setti |
| Manager | Fabio Pecchia |
| League | Serie B |
| 2015–16 | Serie A, 20th (relegated) |
| Website | Club home page |
Hellas Verona Football Club (commonly known simply as Hellas Verona, Verona, or Hellas within the city of Verona itself) is a professional Italian football club, based in Verona, Veneto. The team won the Serie A Championship in 1984–85, and currently plays in Serie B.
Founded in 1903 by a group of high school students, the club was named Hellas (the Greek word for Greece), at the request of a professor of classics. At a time in which football was played seriously only in the larger cities of the northwest of Italy, most of Verona was indifferent to the growing sport. However, when in 1906 two city teams chose the city's Roman amphitheatre as a venue to showcase the game, crowd enthusiasm and media interest began to rise.
During these first few years, Hellas was one of three or four area teams playing mainly at a municipal level while fighting against city rivals Bentegodi to become the city's premier football outfit. By the 1907–08 season, Hellas was playing against regional teams and an intense rivalry with Vicenza that lasts to this day was born.
From 1898 to 1926, Italian football was organised into regional groups. In this period, Hellas was one of the founding teams of the early league and often among its top final contenders. In 1911, the city helped Hellas replace the early, gritty football fields with a proper venue. This allowed the team to take part in its first regional tournament, which until 1926, was the qualifying stage for the national title.
In 1919, following a return to activity after a four-year suspension of all football competition in Italy during World War I, the team merged with city rival Verona and changed its name to Hellas Verona. Between 1926 and 1929, the elite "Campionato Nazionale" assimilated the top sides from the various regional groups and Hellas Verona joined the privileged teams, yet struggled to remain competitive.
Serie A, as it is structured today, began in 1929, when the Campionato Nazionale turned into a professional league. Still an amateur team, Hellas merged with two city rivals, Bentegodi and Scaligera, to form AC Verona. Hoping to build a first class contender for future years the new team debuted in Serie B in 1929. It would take the gialloblu 28 years to finally achieve their goal. After first being promoted to Serie A for one season in 1957–58, in 1959, the team merged with another city rival (called Hellas) and commemorated its beginnings by changing its name to Hellas Verona AC.
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