‘L’ultima bandiera’: Domenico Berardi raises final flag for loyalty in football | Nicky Bandini

The man with the moustache held his teammate in a headlock and stared down the TV camera lens. “Berardi!” he yelled, jabbing a finger at the back of his colleague’s bonce. “BE-RAR-DI!”

It felt like that moment in a kids’ movie when the big brother drags his meek sibling back into frame after beating up the school bully. Mess with him again and see what happens. Only, Tarik Muharemovic is nine years younger than Domenico Berardi. And it was the older player, again, who had spent this afternoon tormenting his peers.

Berardi had just scored the final goal of Sassuolo’s 3-0 win away to Atalanta. An astonishing result, on the face of it. Atalanta won the Europa League a year ago and have qualified for the Champions League in four of the past six seasons. Sassuolo played last season in Serie B.

That is not the whole picture. Atalanta also changed manager in the summer, Gian Piero Gasperini leaving after nine years to take over at Roma, with whom he now sits top of Serie A. His were tough shoes to fill, and so far Ivan Juric has struggled to do so. Atalanta and Sassuolo began the weekend level on points, joint-11th in the table.

Still, the Bergamo club had only lost one of their first 10 league games and owned one of the stingier defences in the division, before Berardi turned up and tore them to ribbons.

Berardi knee slides in front of a sign that reads: ‘This is important.' Photograph: Michele Maraviglia/EPA

He had opened the scoring with a first-half penalty, after Andrea Pinamonti was brought down by Atalanta’s goalkeeper, Marco Carnesecchi. Berardi then set up Pinamonti for Sassuolo’s second just after the interval, driving down the right flank before cutting back inside, shedding both opponents who attempted to track him and squaring the ball for his teammate to finish.

The final goal arrived at the end of a lovely team move, Sassuolo navigating out from the back. Berardi was involved in the buildup, dropping in to give Ismaël Koné an option. His return pass was clumsy, but Koné and Kristian Thorstvedt made it work between them. Berardi dashed on through the middle, getting the ball back from the Norwegian and dispatching it beyond Carnesecchi.

It was the 126th Serie A goal of his career – one more than Gonzalo Higuaín ever scored and only one fewer than Andriy Shevchenko. Not bad for a player who mostly lines up on the wing, and who also has 86 assists. Only two active players, Ciro Immobile and Paulo Dybala, sit ahead of Berardi on the league’s all-time scorers’ list. He is the only member of that trio never to have played in the Champions League.

Berardi remains that rarest of footballing beasts, a one-club man. He joined Sassuolo’s academy aged and never left. After signing a contract extension in the summer through to 2029, he was celebrated in the Italian press as “l’ultima bandiera” – literally the last flag, or banner. In football parlance, one final example of a form of loyalty that no more place in the modern game.

A charming story, and an incomplete one. It was only last October that Berardi gave an interview to La Gazzetta dello Sport in which he confessed that he had wanted to join Juventus a year earlier but was let down by the clubs failing to agree terms. He said that playing in the Champions League was his enduring dream, and that for “for three years it’s all I’ve thought about”.

“I want to hear that Champions League music from the pitch,” he continued. “It’s a profound ambition that I want to satisfy.”

Berardi is more than good enough to have deserved that stage. The one time he did get the chance to test himself in continental club competition, when Sassuolo qualified for the Europa League in 2016, he scored five times in four games. He has eight goals in 28 appearances for Italy. Again, we are not talking about a centre-forward.

Perhaps his story would have gone differently without the achilles tendon tear he sustained last March, less than a week after returning from a knee injury. In another timeline, a healthy Berardi might have insisted it was time to go when Sassuolo dropped down to Serie B in the summer of 2024.

Atalanta's Ademola Lookman looks disappointed as Sassuolo celebrate Berardi’s opener. Photograph: Spada/LaPresse/Shutterstock

Then again, maybe not. By the time Sassuolo were relegated, Berardi was weeks away from turning 30. A decade had passed since he burst on to the scene with 16 goals in his first Serie A season. He could, and did, blame his club’s directors for the most recent collapse of negotiations with Juventus, but a move would have happened much sooner if he had pushed for one. The Bianconeri held an option to sign him for several years, agreed as part of other player trades between the clubs.

Timing is everything. “Right up to 26 or 27 years old, I didn’t feel mature,” said Berardi last year. “I always wanted to play, so I rejected the idea of playing for a team where there would be turnover and I’d have to sit on the bench. Maybe that was a lack of faith in my own ability. I didn’t believe in myself 100%.”

That, too, is understandable, when you remember that Berardi was not one of those kids whose talent was recognised and lauded from a young age. At 16 years old, he was bouncing between local amateur teams near to where he grew up in Cariati – a tiny town tucked away at the back of platform of Italy’s boot.

Cosenza, one of few nearby professional sides, had shown an interest but a change of ownership there led to a shift in priorities. A formal offer to join their academy never materialised.

His big chance arrived by chance. During a visit to see his older brother Francesco, studying in Modena, Berardi joined in a game of five-a-side with the older boys. He dominated it so thoroughly that someone took notice. Pasquale Di Lillo called up his friend Luciano Carlino, a coach at the time with Sassuolo’s youth team. A trial was arranged. The rest, as they say, is history.

And present, and future as well. Perhaps Berardi will yet have his chance to play in the Champions League, but the decision to sign such a long deal in the summer suggests it is no longer his top priority. He has spoken more recently about Sassuolo as a family. “This is home,” he said after putting pen to paper. “It makes me proud to be the bandiera, because they don’t exist any more.”

Certainly, he hopes to get back to representing Italy, something he has not done for two years. Berardi might never have played in the Champions League, but he did earn a winners’ medal with the Azzurri at Euro 2020. In present form, he could only be an asset to a side whose path to the 2026 World Cup is now almost certain to go through the playoffs. His tally for this season is already at four goals and three assists.

Numbers are never the whole story, but Berardi’s do only look more impressive when you remember that he has never had the supporting cast that the best of his peers have enjoyed at clubs competing for trophies. Sassuolo this season have some interesting young talents – Muharemovic among them – and have played with cohesion under Fabio Grosso.

Still, Berardi – BE-RAR-DI! – continues, as he always did, to stand apart.