Verona Campione: The Miracle of 85

by Richard Hough

The amazing underdog story of how Hellas Verona conquered the giants of Italian football to become Serie A champions. Published to mark the 40th anniversary of Verona's achievement, this authentic footballing fairy tale is brought to life through exclusive interviews with players, journalists and fans.

By Richard Hough, an experienced writer and historian who has been immersed in Italian life and football for more than a decade.

Read and discover

International stars such as Platini, Maradona, Rummenigge, Sócrates, Júnior, Laudrup, Souness, Hateley and Wilkins were drawn to the peninsula that season, making Serie A the most competitive and prestigious league in the worldInnovative new managers, such as Sven-Göran Eriksson, competed with veterans like Giovanni Trapattoni to get their hands on the coveted Albo d'oro del campionato Italiano di calcio, or 'il Scudetto' as it is commonly knownVerona's idiosyncratic manager Osvaldo Bagnoli patiently assembled a tight-knit squad of accomplished but unspectacular homegrown players, plus two astute foreign the former German pentathlete Hans-Peter Briegel and the mercurial but underachieving Dane, Preben Elkjær LarsenEighties Italian culture forms a compelling backdrop to the storyThe team's monumental triumph still resonates in the city todayPerfect for any football fan with an interest in the game's history – plus anyone who enjoys an underdog story – this gripping book uncovers how a team came from nowhere to shock the footballing world with one of the most remarkable sporting achievements of all time.

Genres: Sports

288 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 5, 2025

About the author

Richard Alexander Hough was a British author and historian specializing in naval history. As a child, he was obsessed with making model warships and collecting information about navies around the world. In 1941, he joined the Royal Air Force and trained at a flying school near Los Angeles. He flew Hurricanes and Typhoons and was wounded in action.

After World War II, Hough worked as a part-time delivery driver for a wine shop, while looking for employment involving books. He finally joined the publishing house Bodley Head, and then Hamish Hamilton, where he eventually headed the children’s book division.

His work as a publisher inspired him to turn to writing himself in 1950, and he went on to write more than ninety books over a long and successful career. Best-known for his works of naval history and his biographies, he also wrote war novels and books for children (under the pseudonym Bruce Carter), all of which sold in huge numbers around the world. His works include The Longest Battle: The War at Sea 1939-45, Naval Battles of the Twentieth Century and best-selling biographies of Earl Mountbatten of Burma and Captain James Cook. Captain Bligh and Mr Christian, his 1972 account of the mutiny on the Bounty, was the basis of the 1984 film The Bounty, starring Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson.

Hough was the official historian of the Mountbatten family and a longtime student of Churchill. Winston Churchill figures prominently in nine of his books, including Former Naval Person: Churchill and the Wars at Sea. He won the Daily Express Best Book of the Sea Award in 1972.