On the day Vitória wind up the league phase of what has been a brilliant UEFA Conference League campaign against Italian opposition, Fiorentina, PortuGOAL’s resident football historian Miguel Lourenço Pereira looks back at the northern club’s most memorable achievement in European club competition.
The year is 1996 and Parma, one of the continent’s strongest sides at the time, were in for a rude surprise at the Estádio Dom Afonso Henriques.
There was no bigger powerhouse in European football during the 1990s than Italian football. Among the giants of old and the titans who emerged in those years, fewer sides were as feared and respected as AS Parma. No, they never won the Scudetto but, over the decade, they became serial competitors in cup runs, both domestic and in continental runs. Three European finals in six years tells the tale. It is why, when they visited Guimarães, in the autumn of 1996, many expected a thrashing. But instead, the Portuguese side achieved the club’s most memorable European night.
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