The Worst Serie A Teams Ever

Last Updated: March 2026

The Worst Serie A Teams Ever: Fraud, Bankruptcy, and the Collapses That Defined Italian Football

Serie A has given the world Juventus, Milan, Inter, Napoli at their peak, and some of the most technically exquisite football the European game has ever produced. But Italian football does failure with the same intensity it does genius. A president arrested by the financial police on the day he should have been planning for the second division. A club stripped of its league place and expelled from professional football. Another that set the all-time record for futility in the very first season three points for a win was introduced — and then, thirty years later, shared that expelled club’s fate.

This is the full story of the worst Serie A teams ever — the records, the collapses, the fraud, and the human stories behind the numbers that defined Italian football’s darkest chapters.

Thirteen points from thirty-four matches. Two wins. A president under arrest for fraud. A club that folded within weeks of the final whistle. Italian football has produced some extraordinary tales of success but it has also gifted us some of the most spectacular collapses in the history of the game.

Serie A introduced the three-points-for-a-win system in 1994-95 and in that very first season, Brescia Calcio set a record that still stands thirty years on. In the decades since, a handful of teams have come close to matching that nadir, each carrying their own story of mismanagement, chaos, and outright failure. This is a ranking and deep dive into the teams that made history for entirely the wrong reasons.

These aren’t just bad football stories. They are stories about what happens when ambition outstrips judgement, when boardroom decisions destroy dressing rooms, when a club built on hope becomes a club built on nothing at all.

The Points Record: What We’re Measuring

Serie A moved to three points for a win in 1994-95. Before that, a win was worth two points, meaning comparisons across different eras are unreliable. This list covers only the three-points-for-a-win era, which is the fairest way to assess true underperformance.

The number of teams in the division also matters. An 18-team league, as used from 1988 to 2004, means 34 games per season. A 20-team league means 38. A side accumulating 13 points from 34 matches is not directly comparable to a side accumulating 13 from 38. Where relevant, points-per-game is used to make comparisons meaningful.

The benchmark for failure is the absolute bottom of the table – not near-misses or unlikely escapes, but the teams who defined the outer limits of inadequacy. These are those teams.

Ancona 2003-04: The Disaster That Ended a Club

The Road to Serie A

Ancona had only once previously played in the top flight of Italian football – a single doomed season in 1992-93 that ended in immediate relegation. Their return, eleven years later, arrived on the back of extraordinary work by president Ermanno Pieroni, who had steered the Adriatic club from the fourth tier all the way to Serie A.

Pieroni was a man who understood football politics. He had worked as sporting director at Perugia alongside the eccentric Luciano Gaucci, and claimed credit for unearthing Hidetoshi Nakata before he became one of the most celebrated players in Italy. He brought that experience, and considerable financial ambition, to his local club. The promotion was genuine. The plan for what came next was not.

Summer 2003: Building a Squad on Sand

The moment Ancona secured promotion, Pieroni moved aggressively in the transfer market. He signed eighteen players in a single summer, many of them expensive, ageing veterans of Italian football. Dario Hübner, who had turned 36, joined from Piacenza. Eusebio Di Francesco – later a Serie A manager of some repute – arrived at 34. The squad that assembled at the Stadio del Conero was a collection of retreads, past-their-best internationals, and journeymen.

The manager who had earned Ancona their promotion was Gigi Simoni, a figure of genuine stature in Italian football, the man who had led a Ronaldo-era Inter to the 1998 UEFA Cup — winning it 3-0 against Lazio in Paris, only to be sacked weeks later in one of Italian football’s more bewildering managerial decisions. Before the season began, Simoni was poached by Napoli. It was the first of many decisions that made no sense.

In his place, Pieroni appointed Leonardo Menichini, a rookie manager with no top-flight experience. Eighteen new players, a squad in flux, a first game at home against AC Milan, and a debutant in the dugout. Menichini lasted four games. One point from a possible twelve.

The Revolving Door of Managers

Pieroni’s next appointment was Nedo Sonetti – a veteran firefighter, a man Italian football turned to when the flames were already consuming the building. Even Sonetti could not arrest the slide. Ancona went eleven matches without a win from the season’s outset. By the time Pieroni cut his losses with Sonetti, they were rooted to the bottom of an 18-team table with a defensive record that suggested the back four were operating on an entirely different planet.

The third manager was Giovanni Galeone – affectionately known as the ‘Prophet of the Adriatic’, a man with a reputation for winning promotions. But getting to Serie A and staying in Serie A are very different skills. Galeone inherited a disintegrating squad and a club already in freefall. He would oversee one of the most complete collapses in Italian top-flight history.

January: The Chaos Deepens

By the winter window, Pieroni had offloaded eighteen players, some of whom had only just arrived in the summer. In came another wave of underperforming recruits. Magnus Hedman, on the periphery at Celtic but keen to cement a place in Sweden’s Euro 2004 squad. Mario Jardel joined and was introduced to supporters at half time of a match against Perugia. He turned to greet the home fans and walked directly towards the away end, whose Perugia supporters happened to be wearing the same red and white colours. He had to be redirected by a club official. It was a fitting metaphor for the season.

Of the 46 players Ancona used across the entire campaign, one emerged with genuine credit: Goran Pandev, a 20-year-old Macedonian forward on loan from Inter Milan. While everything around him collapsed, Pandev performed with composure and quality that would carry him to a Champions League winner’s medal in 2010. He was the only player to walk away with anything in the bank.

The Statistics of Disaster

Ancona’s final record: 2 wins, 7 draws, 25 defeats. 13 points from 34 games. 21 goals scored – the worst attack in the division. 70 goals conceded – the worst defence. Their winless run of 28 consecutive matches stretched from the opening day. They finally broke it – almost poetically – only once relegation had already been confirmed. Relegated in spring with six games still to play, they finished 15 points adrift of safety. In a league with three relegation places, they were not close to escaping any of them.

On a points-per-game basis, Ancona returned 0.38 per match – marginally better than Brescia’s 0.35 the decade before, though from the same number of games. Brescia remain the statistical record holders. Ancona hold the infamy.

After the Final Whistle: Fraud, Bankruptcy, and Extinction

The football was catastrophic. What came next was worse. In the weeks following relegation, it emerged that Ancona’s finances had not merely been mismanaged, they had been systematically looted. On 7 August 2004, Ermanno Pieroni was arrested by the Guardia di Finanza, charged with fraud. He had allegedly obtained up to €12 million through irregular means to cover the hole in the club’s accounts. He was eventually convicted of fraudulent bankruptcy and sentenced to four years in prison.

Players went unpaid. Staff went unpaid. The squad disintegrated. Ancona were denied entry to Serie B due to entering administration. The club folded entirely. A phoenix club was placed in Serie C2 – the fourth tier of Italian football – and spent years clawing back towards respectability. They never returned to Serie A.

Ancona 2003-04 is not simply the second-worst season in Serie A’s modern history. It is a study in what happens when a president mistakes ambition for strategy, and mistakes financial creativity for sound governance.

Salernitana 2023-24: Four Managers, One Relegation

The Great Escape That Created a Dangerous Illusion

Two seasons before their 2023-24 collapse, Salernitana had achieved something genuinely remarkable. In 2021-22, they survived relegation with 31 points – the lowest total any side had accumulated and still remained in the division – after an extraordinary run of 18 points from their final 15 matches under manager Davide Nicola. It was the kind of escape that forges legends.

It also created a dangerous illusion. The near-miss had been so dramatic, so improbable, that it was tempting to believe the same magic could be conjured again when the situation demanded it. When Salernitana returned for 2023-24, having survived a calmer second season with 42 points in 2022-23, some optimism seemed reasonable. What followed bore no resemblance whatsoever to a comeback.

A Season of Four Managers

Salernitana began 2023-24 under Paulo Sousa, the experienced Portuguese manager. By October, Sousa was gone. His replacement, Filippo Inzaghi – the legendary Italian striker and brother of former Inter manager Simone – guided the Granata to their only two league victories of the entire season: a 2-1 win over Lazio in November, and a 1-0 win away at Hellas Verona on 30 December.

There was a particular irony to the appointment. Filippo arrived at one of Serie A’s most embattled clubs while his younger brother Simone was managing its dominant force – Inter Milan, on their way to a 20th Scudetto that season.

By February, Inzaghi had been sacked. Fabio Liverani arrived as the third head coach. He lasted little over a month. The fourth appointment was Stefano Colantuono, a manager with previous Salernitana experience, who oversaw the final weeks of an already-confirmed relegation. Four managers. Two wins. Relegated on 26 April 2024 after a 3-0 defeat to Frosinone, with four games still to play.

The Character of the Collapse

What distinguished Salernitana’s 2023-24 season from the other disasters on this list was not scandal or spectacle – it was relentlessness. No explosive fraud, no surreal transfer window, no weeping manager. There was simply a team that was not good enough, managed sequentially by four coaches who could not improve it, sinking quietly and steadily until the mathematics made it official.

Eleven draws in 38 games – an unusually high count – spoke to a side capable of competing without being capable of winning. The 27 defeats were largely expected. They finished with 17 points, still 11 points from safety, one of the lowest tallies in the history of the 20-team Serie A format.

The Human Detail: Jerome Boateng and the Squad That Couldn’t

Salernitana’s January transfer window produced the kind of signing that tells you everything you need to know about a desperate situation. Jerome Boateng – the former Germany international and Bayern Munich centre-back, once one of the finest defenders in European football – joined as a free agent. He was 35 years old. It was his last professional club before retirement. Salernitana had gone from 31-point great escape survivors to signing players at the end of their careers as a measure of last resort. The gap between those two moments was two seasons.

Chievo 2018-19: The Flying Donkeys Come to Earth

The Scandal Before a Ball Was Kicked

Chievo Verona entered the 2018-19 season with a problem that had nothing to do with football. On 13 September 2018, just weeks into the season, the Italian Football Federation docked them three points after finding them guilty of false accounting. The club had inflated the value of player exchanges with Cesena to manipulate their financial records, overstating transfer fees by amounts later described in the press as up to 9,000 per cent of their real worth. President Luca Campedelli was banned for three months.

Chievo had already lost their opening two matches and drawn the third. They entered the season on minus three points. In a 38-game league, that is a hole very few clubs could realistically escape.

Gian Piero Ventura Walks Into the Fire

Lorenzo D’Anna had managed Chievo to a respectable 13th-placed finish the previous season. He was kept on for 2018-19 but lasted only eight games, earning one point from eight matches. Chievo then appointed Gian Piero Ventura, who had recently acquired the status of most unpopular man in Italian football after managing the national team to their failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup – Italy’s first such absence since 1958.

It is a mark of how desperate the situation was that they thought Ventura was the answer. He lasted barely a month before his contract was mutually terminated. Domenico Di Carlo – a manager with genuine experience of keeping Chievo in Serie A from a previous spell – took over in November. Di Carlo could not arrest the decline. The Flying Donkeys, the Mussi Volanti – nicknamed by rival fans who once mocked their working-class origins by saying donkeys would fly before Chievo reached Serie A – remained firmly anchored to the bottom of the table.

The club’s nickname tells you everything about what made their story so compelling. Hellas Verona fans had long mocked Chievo’s working-class origins with a chant: donkeys would fly before the club from that suburban corner of the city ever reached Serie A. When Chievo earned promotion in 2001 and immediately finished fifth in their first season — qualifying for the UEFA Cup — they reclaimed the taunt with pride. The Mussi Volanti, the Flying Donkeys, became Italian football’s great underdog story. That made their eventual expulsion from professional football all the more difficult to watch.

Relegated, Then Expelled

Chievo were officially relegated on 14 April 2019 after a 3-1 home defeat to Napoli ended their eleven-year consecutive spell in Serie A. Their final tally of 17 points, having started on minus three, represented only 20 actual points earned across the season. They finished bottom of a 20-team table.

The story did not end with relegation. In July 2021, Chievo were expelled from Serie B entirely after failing to prove financial viability – unpaid tax debts that the club argued were covered by a COVID-19 payment deferral agreement. The FIGC disagreed, upheld the decision after three unsuccessful appeals, and excluded them from professional football. Former captain Sergio Pellissier led the search for new ownership. A phoenix club eventually emerged, but AC Chievo Verona – the club that had become a byword for the underdog story, a working-class suburb of Verona that had reached Serie A and earned a UEFA Cup place – ceased to exist as a going concern.

Pescara 2016-17: The World Cup Winner’s Nightmare

The Ghost of 2012-13

Pescara had been here before. Their 2012-13 Serie A season – which had produced a team containing Marco Verratti, Lorenzo Insigne, and Ciro Immobile under the attacking visionary Zdeněk Zeman – ended in relegation once those players departed for bigger clubs. The magic could not be replicated with a diminished squad.

Three years in Serie B followed, during which Massimo Oddo – a 2006 World Cup winner with Italy, now a manager – rebuilt the club and guided them back. In June 2016, Pescara won the Serie B play-off and returned to the top flight. Oddo had earned them their place. What followed was not his fault, but it became his problem.

The Stars Leave, the Problems Stay

The pattern that had undone them in 2012-13 repeated itself. The players who had driven promotion were sold or returned to parent clubs. Oddo was left managing a squad stripped of its best elements, attempting to survive in Serie A with resources that would have been modest even in Serie B. The mathematics of Italian football’s promotion system can be brutally indifferent to individual merit.

By December 2016, Pescara’s only points from a genuine win had not even come on the pitch. Their 2-1 defeat to Sassuolo was overturned to a 3-0 victory after Sassuolo were found to have fielded an ineligible player, Antonino Regusa. Fan frustration was deepening – ultras stormed the club’s Christmas dinner, arriving with banners calling the club to account for its performances.

In February 2017, Pescara were beaten 6-2 at home by Lazio. Two days later, an arson attack took place at the home of president Daniele Sebastiani. Pescara then lost 5-3 to Torino, having been 5-0 down, with Oddo visibly in tears in the visitors’ dugout. He was dismissed on Valentine’s Day.

Zeman’s Return and the Final Tally

Zdeněk Zeman – the chain-smoking, ultra-attacking Czech tactician who had managed Pescara’s glorious 2011-12 promotion campaign – returned to the club. His first game back produced a 5-0 demolition of Genoa that briefly revived hope. But the squad’s limitations were too profound. Zeman guided them to one further win, against already-relegated Palermo on the final day, before the season ended.

Final tally: 18 points from 38 games. Three wins, one of them never played. Pescara dropped back to Serie B, then eventually to Serie C. Oddo would go on to manage in Serie A and Serie B in subsequent years, though the Pescara season remained a painful chapter. The Biancazzurri have spent the years since working their way back through the lower divisions.

Why the Adriatic Coast Dominates This List — and What It Tells Us About Italian Football

The geography of this list is striking. Ancona, Pescara, and Salernitana are all clubs from the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian coastlines of central and southern Italy – away from the established powerhouses of Milan, Turin, and Rome. Chievo are from Verona, technically the north, but from a working-class suburb that might as well have been operating in a different economic universe from the clubs they were sharing a league with.

These clubs share something deeper than geography. For communities like Ancona, Pescara, and Salerno, reaching Serie A is not merely a sporting achievement – it is a declaration of civic identity, a statement that this city, this community, belongs at the same table as Juventus and Inter. That emotional weight is part of what makes promotion feel so significant. It is also part of what makes the temptation to overextend so irresistible.

The clubs on this list did not fail because they were incompetent. They failed, in most cases, because they tried too hard – signing players they could not afford, appointing managers on the basis of reputation rather than fit, spending beyond their means in the hope that survival would follow. When it did not, the financial consequences were often catastrophic.

Serie A’s structure amplifies this problem. A 20-team top flight with automatic promotion from Serie B means clubs arrive in the division with a single season of excellence behind them and face an immediate gulf they were never equipped to bridge. The records set by these clubs are not aberrations. They are the predictable consequence of a system that promotes ambition without protecting it.

That is what makes these stories worth telling. Behind every low points total is a community that believed, a president who overreached, a squad that wasn’t ready, and a set of supporters left to pick up the pieces of something they had no hand in breaking.

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