Carmelo Di Bella
| Carmelo Di Bella | ||
| Personnel | ||
|---|---|---|
| birthday | January 30, 1921 | |
| place of birth | Catania , Italy | |
| date of death | September 9, 1992 | |
| Place of death | Palermo , Italy | |
| position | midfield | |
| Men's | ||
| Years | station | Games (goals) 1 |
| 1938-1941 | AC Catania | 35 (7) |
| 1941-1949 | US Palermo-Juventina / US Palermo | |
| 1949-1951 | Igea Virtus | |
| 1951-1952 | SC Marsala | |
| 1952-1954 | US Akragas | |
| Stations as a trainer | ||
| Years | station | |
| 1950-1951 | Igea Virtus | |
| 1951-1952 | SC Marsala | |
| 1952-1954 | US Akragas | |
| 1954-1955 | Terranova Gela | |
| 1956-1957 | AS Termini Imerese | |
| 1958-1966 | CC Catania | |
| 1966-1967 | US Catanzaro | |
| 1967-1971 | SSC Palermo | |
| 1971-1973 | Catania Calcio | |
| 1974 | US Catanzaro | |
| 1974-1976 | AC Reggiana | |
| 1976-1977 | Catania Calcio | |
| 1981 | SSC Palermo | |
| 1 Only league games are given. | ||
Carmelo Di Bella (born January 30, 1921 in Catania , † September 9, 1992 in Palermo ) was an Italian football player and later coach.
Even as Active regionally successful, he later rose to become one of the most successful coaches in southern Italy and received in reference to a famous coach of Inter Milan , Helenio Herrera , nicknamed Herrera del sud .
Player career
Carmelo Di Bella was born on January 30, 1921 in the Sicilian city of Catania . There he also learned to play football and has been with the local club AC Catania since his youth . In 1938, Di Bella made his debut at the age of seventeen in the first team of the then third division. Already in his first season there, the young midfielder and his team made it to the second-class Serie B , where they could not hold out for long and had to go back to third-class after only one year. Carmelo Di Bella remained loyal to his employer after relegation and played another year in Serie C for AC Catania, but it was only a disappointing sixth place in the table.
In 1941 Carmelo Di Bella joined the Sicilian local rival US Palermo , which was then known as US Palermo-Juventina . In Palermo , Di Bella spent many years of his footballing career, he stayed there until 1949. As with AC Catania, the midfielder managed to rise from league three to league two in his first season at the club. Once there, however, you were immediately excluded from the game. In the turmoil of the end of World War II , Palermo experienced a re-establishment of its football club, accompanied by a restart in the highest Sicilian league. From there, the club, now renamed US Palermo , slowly but surely worked its way up after the end of the war. From the Campeonato Siciliano, the path led through Serie D, Serie C and Serie B to the first Italian football league, Serie A, for the second time in the club's history . Carmelo Di Bella was part of this promotion team and completed all possible thirty league games in Serie B 1947/48. After promotion to the first division, Di Bella lost his regular place and only made nine league games in Serie A in 1948/49 . His team, however, achieved a place in the absolutely secure midfield of the Italian elite league as a climber with eleventh place.
In the summer of 1949 Carmelo Di Bella turned his back on US Palermo and switched to Igea Virtus . Di Bella played for two years with the then third division club, which has now disappeared into oblivion, and was relegated from Serie C in the second year. He then joined the former league competitor SC Marsala , with whom he was also relegated. Di Bella then played for the US Akragas for two years before ending his football career in 1954 at the age of 33.
Coaching career
Carmelo Di Bella already worked at Igea Virtus, Marsala and Akragas as a head coach in addition to his playing activities. After he had ended his football career at Akragas in 1954, he was the next season trainer at Terranova Gela , which he led to a fifth place in the Promozione Siciliana. The following year he coached AS Termini Imerese in the same league and reached a respectable third place in the table.
In the summer of 1957 Carmelo Di Bella returned to his hometown club in Catania, which now ran under the name CC Catania . Here he only trained the youth team for a year before he took over the coaching of the first team during the second division season 1958/59 from the dismissed Blagoje Marjanović . As a result, Di Bella worked for eight years from the end of 1958 to the summer of 1966 as the coach of CC Catania and had a very successful time with the club. After he had managed to stay in the league in 1958/59, Di Bella led his team in the following year as third in Serie B, only behind AC Turin and AC Lecco for the second time in the club's history for promotion to Serie A. There they knew each other this time, in contrast to the first, only one-year intermezzo in the Italian elite league, also to be established. As a newcomer, Carmelo Di Bella's Catania took a surprisingly good eighth place in the table in Serie A 1960/61 and had nothing to do with the relegation battle for the entire season. After places eleven and fourteen in the two following seasons, Di Bella led his team again to eighth place in the 1963/64 season , and this success was repeated the following year. The Serie A 1965/66 then turned out to be a less successful season for CC Catania. The team played against relegation from the start and had to go into the second division after the end of all game days as the penultimate of Serie A with only 22 points. After relegation Carmelo Di Bella CC left Catania and was replaced by Dino Ballacci in the coaching office . Looking back, it can be said that football in Catania experienced a significant upswing under the aegis of Carmelo Di Bellas, which brought the club to the top floor of Italian football for the first time in the long term. Due to his success with CC Catania and a comparable game philosophy, Di Bella was nicknamed Herrera del Sud in reference to Helenio Herrera , then coach of the globally successful Inter Milan team .
After a year with the US Catanzaro , Carmelo Di Bella became the new coach of SSC Palermo in 1967 . In his first season he was first in Serie B with a lead of four points over Hellas Verona and managed to move up to Serie A with Palermo. There they held eleven in the first year, in the second year they had to be penultimate with four points After falling behind on the saving bank, however, the transition back to Serie B must be started. After the start of the season completely failed there, Carmelo Di Bella was dismissed after the eighteenth matchday, which meant the first expulsion in his now almost twenty-year coaching career. Thereafter, Di Bella returned to Catania and led the club to two decent Serie B placements.
From 1973 to 1974 he worked as a so-called firefighter with the US Catanzaro, when he saved the club from relegation from Serie B. He then worked for two years as a coach at AC Reggiana , which was his only coaching position in northern Italy. With Reggiana, Carmelo Di Bella rose from Serie B in 1976. The same happened to him in his third job in Catania in the 1976/77 season, when they were also relegated to Serie C at the end. With these relegations, the coaching career of Carmelo Di Bella slowly ended. After 1977 he didn't take a job, apart from a brief stint at SSC Palermo in 1981, with which he still managed to stay up on the home stretch of the second division season.
successes
As a player
- Series B : 1 ×
- 1947/48 with the US Palermo
- Series C : 2 ×
- 1938/39 with AC Catania
- 1941/42 with Palermo-Juventina
As a trainer
- Series B : 2 ×
- 1959/60 with CC Catania
- 1967/68 with the SSC Palermo
- Italian coach of the year : 1 ×
- 1967/68 as coach of SSC Palermo
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Di Bella, Carmelo |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Italian soccer player and coach |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 30, 1921 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Catania , Italy |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 9, 1992 |
| Place of death | Palermo , Italy |