Forza Parma! The Official Parma Blog is here.

By: Francesco | October 25th, 2007

Welcome readers, I am Francesco, and I am here to bring you all news that is gialloblu.

“How may someone have become a fan of Parma? They are a small little northern team.” you may ask. Well, I’ll explain it to you.

To start out, let me inform you that I am a ’90s kid. But I was a ’90s kid that grew up in a nice Italian family that loved calcio, and I fell in love with it myself. So after watching Zack, Screech, and Slater on Saved by the Bell, and the Power Rangers morph into some tall robot thing that resembled a dinosaur, I watched calcio. And in the 90’s, I became attracted to a team, and that team was Parma. As I look back, I wonder why I was attracted to a team that comes from a city of less than 200,000. Maybe it is because I love Prosciutto di Parma and Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, or maybe it was those cool yellow and blue hooped kits that were clearly the best in Italy:

But most all, the team took hold of me because of the football they played. The club boasted many young, exciting talents (let’s not forget Fabio Cannavaro, Gianluigi Buffon, Gianfranco Zola, Lillian Thuram, Dino Baggio, Hernan Crespo, Faustino Asprilla, and other world class players wore the gialloblu jersey), and these young talents brought results. Let’s remember Parma’s golden years of the ’90s when they won 3 Coppa Italia trophies, 1 Italian SuperCup, 2 UEFA Cups (when the UEFA Cup actually meant something), 1 Cup-Winner’s Cup, and 1 European SuperCup. Not to mention finishing 2 points shy of winning a Scudetto in 1997.

And even though owners Parmalat turned out to be crooked thieves, the squad still kept buying young talents that allowed the team to remain in Serie A until the present day. Under new owner Tommaso Ghirardi (who looks like he also likes to eat Prosciutto and Parmigiano, and lots of it), the squad has more stability and hopes to achieve what the ’90s Parma achieved by letting young talents grow and flourish and make the Gialloblu one of the top teams on the peninsula again. And I am ready for the ride.

I hope you enjoy what I write here, and follow Parma as they hope to achieve another consecutive year in the paradise that is Serie A.

If you don’t know much about Parma, watch this nice youtube video that does a very good job of showing the history of the club: