Costa D’amalfi FC

This club takes the award for the most Instagrammable of hometowns. And in Italy, the competition is fierce. The Amalfi Coast is famously beautiful, with dozens of natural harbours and bays, colourful medieval housing running up the cliffs, and the sparkle of the sun off the Mediterranean. Many a model has been photographed with these iconic views in the background – and many a tourist has drunk more than their fair share of the local delicacy, limoncello, made from the area’s famously large and delicious lemons.

The club itself is relatively small-scale. Competing in the lower tiers of Italian football, they have recently been bought out by a CEO who made his money digitising and upgrading medical clinics - and you can see his influence immediately, as the brand and products associated with the team have suddenly become far more visible and accessible. As part of this drive has been a conslidation of footballing power along the coast. The current club emerged from the merger of several long-standing local teams from across the Amalfi Coast, including Maiori, Minori, Scala and Amalfi itself. Accordingly, the badge itself was changed to include the red stripe from the wider region's coat of arms - incorporating more than just the town itself. They play just up the road at the Campo Maiori ground, which is itself cut out of a cliff face.

Despite Amalfi itself being a tiny town of just over 4,000 people, the wider coastal region is one of the world’s most famous tourist destinations - and the heritage and history, as we will see, are absolutely mind-blowing.

Long before tourists arrived clutching their cameras and sun hats, Amalfi was one of the great maritime powers of the Mediterranean. It was known as one of the “Big Four” - Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Amalfi. And the flag it flew? Well, that sits proudly on the team’s badge today: the eight-pointed cross of the Amalfi Republic.

Amalfitan merchants brought the cross to Jerusalem in 1048 AD, where they founded the hospital that became the Order of St John. When the Order relocated to the island of Malta in 1530, the symbol became universally known as the Maltese Cross - but its origins lay in Amalfi.

From around the 9th to 11th centuries, Amalfi became an independent maritime republic and one of Europe’s great trading hubs. Amalfitan merchants sailed across the Mediterranean exchanging grain, timber and salt for gold dinars from Egypt and Syria, before buying valuable Byzantine silks to sell across Western Europe. At a time when much of medieval Italy still relied on barter, Amalfi’s traders were already using gold coinage and operating something akin to early capitalism. The town grew enormously wealthy and, at its peak, may have held as many as 70,000 people - huge for the period.

Its sailors became so respected that Amalfi even produced its own maritime law code, the Tavole Amalfitane, which helped govern trade and shipping across Christian ports for centuries. In many ways they are the precussor to today's UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) which governs ships today. The Amalfitine laws stated things such as the need to save crew and cargo before a ship - and the right of a sailor to compensation from the owner if injured on duty. The sort of thing I can imagine today's world labelling as 'woke nonsense' - but was instead adopted and enforced by medieval slave trading ships - because even they could see it was common sense and the decent thing to do. Which says something.

The city was also associated with the mariner’s compass, with local tradition claiming that Amalfitan Flavio Gioja (born in next door Positano) helped introduce it to Europe. He is supposed to have perfected the use of a magnet to ensure the needle always pointed North - and for building them inside glass boxes with a compass rose pattern beneath. A statue of him stands today on the Amalfi coastline. From their beautiful home shores, the men and women of Amalfi were having a massively outsized impact - a tradition I suspect the current owners of the football team wish to tap into once more.

However, like many an Italian maritime state, Amalfi’s golden age eventually faded.

The Norman conquest in 1073 weakened the Republic - and it does make you wonder whether anyone at Hastings ten years earlier felt slightly short-changed when allocated rainy England instead of this picturesque stretch of Mediterranean coastline. Amalfi struggled to recover from Norman intervention and soon its fierce rivals from Pisa repeatedly attacked and sacked the city.

Then came disaster. In 1343, a devastating tsunami destroyed much of Amalfi’s harbour and lower town. The once-mighty trading republic never truly recovered, slipping from Mediterranean superpower status to a quiet provincial town nestled amongst the coast’s cliff faces.

Traces of that lost power remain everywhere. The enormous cathedral dedicated to Saint Andrew dominates the town centre, holding relics brought back from Constantinople during the Crusades. Nearby stand the great medieval arsenals where Amalfitan warships were once built beneath huge stone arches. These galleys helped make Amalfi one of the naval powers of medieval Europe and their build quality, strength and speed were famous across the sea.

That long maritime story still fits Costa d'Amalfi FC perfectly. A club representing a coastline built on sailors, merchants and sea trade. The name itself, clearly adopted for wider appeal, is less about one single town and more about an entire historic coastline whose identity has always been tied to the Mediterranean.

Like the medieval republic that once dominated the seas from its small coastal base, today’s football team dreams of punching above its weight once again.