Why Lazio will celebrate Serie A title before Serie A season begins

It’s been a while since Lazio won its last Serie A title, back in the 1999-00 season.

And it might be a while yet before Rome’s other club wins another, considering that in the last 10 seasons, it has placed third, 12th, 10th, 12th, fifth, fourth, seventh, ninth, third and eighth, respectively. On the field, that is. Because Lazio is on the verge of clinching a third Italian championship – its second one coming in the 1973-74 season.

For the 1914-15 playoff title between the winners of the regional competitions that preceded the Serie A.

Back then, more than 100 years ago, central and southern Italian champion Lazio was to play a winner-take-all game for the national title against northern champions Genoa. Except World War I broke out and the game was canceled. When the war was over and the country began worrying about things like soccer again in 1919, the title was retroactively awarded to Genoa by the Italian federation.

Lazio fans, however, have waged a campaign to awarded a share of that title as co-champions, reasonably – if somewhat belatedly – arguing that since the game was never played, that’s the least their club is entitled to. Some 30,000 of them signed a petition urging the federation to look into the matter and re-assess to whom the title belongs. The federation responded by setting up a committee to revisit the long-lost championship.

“It is a legitimate Scudetto,” Lazio president Claudio Lotito told the BBC. “It was taken away from us by the war.”

The report delivered by the committee seems to back that up, suggesting that Lazio will indeed be getting another championship. “It appears that the Federation, in assigning the 1915 title to Genoa, was slavishly and uncritically inspired only by the contemporary press,” the report declared, per the New York Times.

Significantly, that would tie Lazio with cross-town arch-rivals AS Roma with three national championships.

Genoa’s stake in the title is somewhat controversial as well, since several rounds of games all over the country were scrapped and the league was actually incomplete. Genoa argues, of course, that its sole ownership of the 1915 title is legitimate and that pro-Lazio favoritism in the capital is revising history.

The Italian federation will make a decision on Aug. 4.