Once again, the best European men's water polo team is Italian, and it comes from a small Ligurian town: it is Pro Recco, which on Saturday night beat the Serbian side Novi Beograd on penalties in Belgrade in the final of the LEN Champions League, the most important continental tournament, winning it for the second consecutive time and for the tenth time since 1965.

Novi Beograd was described as a team built specifically to win the tournament, backed by the large investments of its president. Yet Pro Recco won, which this season, coached by its former Croatian player Sandro Sukno, had already won the Italian championship and cup. Because of what it has managed to create over the past decades, Pro Recco is for all intents and purposes a special team, the most titled in the world in water polo.

The trophies won this season have further increased the gap between Pro Recco and other teams, both in Italy and abroad. The last championship won was the thirty-fourth, twenty-three more than the second most titled Italian team, Posillipo. The gap has also increased in the Champions League, where the only two teams currently keeping pace are Serbia's Partizan Belgrade and Croatia's Mladost, both at seven wins.

Over the years in Recco, a small town of ten thousand inhabitants on the Riviera di Levante, not far from Genoa, a kind of ecosystem has been created almost in which players, former players, managers, and coaches with a past with the team follow one another in assignments without any change in results.