Ancona: Risen and Fallen
Ancona might be a cursed football club. They’re one of the only clubs in the world that have been bankrupt quite so many times that they boast a lineage of team names. Four bankruptcies and a reformation since 2004, a fate so dire that not even divine intervention could save them.
Ancona peaked when they reached the Coppa Italia final thirty years ago as a Serie B club, a year after they were relegated in their first ever Serie A campaign. Sampdoria smashed them 6-1 after a 0-0 draw at Ancona’s Del Conero stadium in the first leg.
Two years later, they were facing bankruptcy in Serie C1. This is the point in the movie where a record would scratch and the narrator would provide some foreboding tale.
They survived in C1 from 1997 until 2000 when they gained promotion back to Serie B and went one further a couple of years later, rising to Serie A for only the second time in their 97-year history.
Ancona’s 2003-04 season remains the worst from any team in Serie A history, picking up only 13 points having won only two games all year.
The president was later sentenced to almost five years in jail for fraudulent activity.
And then their misery was compounded by bankruptcy. Ancona were skint. Their president Ermanno Pieroni had run the club into the ground through reckless spending, maintaining a large wage bill full of experienced players with no resale value and having made bizarre signings, such as an unfit Mario Jardel after he’d failed to score during four months at Bolton.
The club were unable to register for the 2004-05 Serie B season due to their disastrous financial situation, and in August 2004 their president Pieroni was arrested on suspicion of fraud.
It turns out he had been forging the company books to hide the debt problem and ensure the club continued to receive league registration payments from the FIGC, the Italian football association, payments he was alleged to have pocketed himself to the tune of almost €12m. He was later sentenced to almost five years in jail for fraudulent activity.
The club were refounded in Serie C2, the fourth tier, where they finished 11th and 5th the following two seasons before being admitted to Serie C1 by the FIGC after Fermana were declared bankrupt.
In October 2007, Ancona announced that 80% of the club’s shares had been sold to Centro Sportivo Italiano (CSI), an organisation run by the Conference of Bishops in Vatican City, the state of the Catholic Church.
"It is a way to moralise football, to bring some ethics to a sector that is going through a deep crisis of values,” said Edoardo Menichelli, Archbishop of Ancona, in a press release. CSI called it “Project Soccer” and received plaudits from senior figures within the Vatican, such as its Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.
Yet within a few days of the project’s announcement, the Vatican were ‘officially’ distancing themselves from the CSI, an organisation that they stated was run by “solely lay Catholics”.
They were keen to point out that the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI) was not directly involved in the Ancona purchase. However, the CSI’s ecclesiastical leaders are appointed by the CEI, which is directly tied to the Vatican.
Obviously the Church is an organisation known for being shrouded in secrecy. It’s nigh on impossible to definitively tie them to the CSI. There’s no corporate structure to identify. After all, it’s a religious organisation.
CSI stated that “fans will have to give up incorrect behaviour with opposing fans and display offensive banners”. The concept of a “Catholically correct football club”, as CSI put it, and the fact that Pope Benedict XVI held an audience with the Ancona stakeholders seemed to suggest that this was a move endorsed by the Vatican.
However, within a few months of purchasing the club, CSI had sold its shares off to Terzo Tempo, a company without any religious ties and there ended the Vatican’s brief flirtation with football club ownership.
After surviving a second season in Serie B, the club once again found themselves unable to register for the following league season, this time due to unpaid tax bills and a lack of clarity as to where the required finance would come from.
Ancona were declared bankrupt for a second time in six years and consigned to amateur football, playing in the fifth tier Eccellenza. They were immediately promoted to Serie D and found themselves back in Serie C by 2014.
However, financial stability was never anything but a pipe dream in Ancona. They came close to promotion to Serie B in 2015, a run that only served to get fans’ hopes up and pile pressure onto a management team that had no grasp on how to balance the books.
Two years later, they were bankrupt again. A €2m hole in their accounts was enough to send them back into footballing oblivion after relegation to Serie D and yet another phoenix club was formed.
Unione Sportiva Anconitana Associazione Sportiva Dilettantistica began in the Prima Categoria, Italy’s seventh tier, which they duly won. They won Promozione the following season, returning to Eccellenza (fifth tier).
Canil’s late intervention appeared to be a fabrication designed to placate the fans, who had surrounded the club’s headquarters, breaking windows and refusing to leave without an explanation as to where their beloved Ancona was headed.
This breathless game of snakes and ladders stalled in the fifth tier, where Ancona failed to achieve promotion back to Serie D in consecutive seasons. This lack of progress displeased the fans, most of whom expected the journey up the leagues to continue back to Serie C, at least
Sensing discontent among the ranks, Serie C club Matelica’s owner Mauro Canil approached Ancona about a possible merger.
Matelica’s name lacked the gravitas of Ancona, even if the club Canil wanted to buy possessed an identity that had seen enough riches to rags stories for a lifetime.
Canil’s proposal to buy Ancona required him to keep the current edition of the club alive as Anconitana, which would be kept as the youth wing of the new Ancona-Matelica merger club, one which would play in Serie C 2021-22 and be renamed to just Ancona a year later.
All was well in the city of Ancona. They had their old club back, even if it had been created like Frankenstein’s monster, and they were back in the professional ranks. What could go wrong? Well, meet Tony Tiong.
Tiong purchased 95% of the club’s shares in summer 2022 and garnered some early brownie points by restoring the ‘official’ name of US Ancona, as well as reaching the Serie C play-offs in their first season.
Ancona struggled last season, narrowly avoiding relegation to Serie D, and things quickly went south once the season ended.
It was clear that the club were in serious financial trouble by late May 2024. Salaries for March and April had gone unpaid and Tiong was nowhere to be found. Well, not nowhere. He was in Malaysia, hiding from the mess he’d made in Ancona.
Canil still owned 5% at this point, and it was him that stumped up the cash right before the 5 June deadline set by CoViSoc, the body that assesses and regulates clubs’ financial situations. It was a move that seemed to save Ancona’s place in Serie C, but it was all a lie.
The money was ‘withdrawn’ and the players went unpaid. The story of Canil’s late intervention appeared to be a fabrication designed to placate the fans, who had surrounded the club’s headquarters, breaking windows and refusing to leave without an explanation as to where their beloved Ancona was headed.
Tiong was nowhere to be found, not picking up the phone until after the deadline had passed. He made a brief media appearance, threatening: “Everyone shut up or I'll talk”. But he handed the club over to the city’s mayor within a few days and disappeared into obscurity, leaving behind one shell of a football club and a queue of unpaid creditors.
The latest Ancona rebirth project is underway in Serie D. SSC Ancona started again in the semi-professional fourth tier and sit 9th after nine games, having won four and lost five. They could rise. They probably will, eventually. But that’s not the issue.
They’ve been here before, four times. Are they cursed, or can they put two decades of bad luck behind them?
