Genoa CFC – rankings, club Elo rating and UEFA coefficient

Genoa CFC, founded on 7 September 1893, is the oldest continuously active football club in Italy. It began life as a cricket and athletics society, Genoa Cricket & Athletic Club, set up by a group of Englishmen living in the city; football was initially a secondary pursuit, and Italians were not admitted as members in the club's earliest years. The football section became independent in 1897.

A year later, Genoa won Italy's first-ever official national football championship, the first scudetto in Italian football history. Over the following decades the club dominated domestic football, winning nine titles in total between 1898 and the 1923–24 season, including three in a row around the turn of the century. Under William Garbutt, appointed in 1912 as Italian football's first professional manager, the club claimed its final two championships, in 1922 and 1924. This record makes Genoa the fourth most successful club in the country by titles won, although the team has not repeated that success in the century since.

The club's colours have shifted over the years, from an original white kit echoing the England national team, through blue-and-white stripes, to the red-and-navy colours adopted in 1901, which gave the side its nickname Rossoblù, still used today alongside Il Grifone (The Griffin). In 1937, the club won its only Coppa Italia.

Since 1911, Genoa has played its home matches at Stadio Luigi Ferraris, shared with local rivals Sampdoria — one of Italy's oldest and most recognisable grounds, renovated several times over the decades, including ahead of the 1990 World Cup. The club's post-war history has swung between Serie A and Serie B, with six second-tier titles, a record shared with Atalanta. Despite its many ups and downs, Genoa remains one of the founding symbols of Italian football and the only club to have won the national championship in three different centuries.

A crazy autumn in Genoa: How Krzysztof Piątek turned Serie A upside down

When he moved from Cracovia to Genoa in the summer of 2018 for around €4 million, Italian journalists asked hesitantly: “Who is this guy?” Six months later, defenders across Italy were asking themselves the same question — but with sheer panic in their eyes.

The warning sign came absurdly quickly. In his competitive debut, in the Coppa Italia against Lecce, Krzysztof Piątek needed just 37 minutes to score four goals. It was not a flash in the pan, but the beginning of a ruthless scoring run. In Serie A, he found the net in each of his first seven matches — a feat not seen in Italy since Gabriel Batistuta achieved the same in the 1994/95 season.

It took just six months for his trademark celebration, with crossed pistols, to become one of the defining images of the entire league. Piątek's spell at Genoa ended with an astonishing record of 19 goals in 21 appearances. In January 2019, AC Milan paid €35 million for him, bringing an end to that crazy few-month spell during which a boy from Dzierżoniów briefly became the most lethal No. 9 in Europe.