SSC BariSSC Bari has been founded and refounded no fewer than four times in its history - in 1908, 1924, 1928 and, most recently, 2018 - earning it the affectionate Italian nickname 'squadra ascensore', the lift team, for its constant shuttling between Serie A and Serie B. The city's first stable football club, Foot-Ball Club Bari, was established on 15 January 1908 on the initiative of local sportsmen alongside foreign residents including Austrian Floriano Ludwig and Swiss Gustavo Kuhn, only to dissolve during the First World War and be revived, briefly, in 1924. The club's lasting sporting history truly began on 27 February 1928, when two rival city sides, Liberty Bari and Ideale, merged to form Unione Sportiva Bari, which the following season became the first Apulian club ever to compete in Italy's top division.
Bari's greatest and, to this day, only international trophy arrived in 1990, when the club lifted the Mitropa Cup, beating Genoa in the final during a season in which it also recorded its best Serie A finish in over forty years, coming tenth. That triumph coincided with the opening of the club's new home, the Stadio San Nicola, designed by architect Renzo Piano and built to host matches at the 1990 World Cup, with a capacity that once reached around 58,000. The following year, in 1991, Bari sold striker David Platt to Aston Villa for £5.5 million, a fee that for a time stood as a record transfer paid by a foreign club for a British player. The 1990s brought some of the club's most celebrated seasons, featuring players such as Igor Protti, who became Serie A's joint top scorer in 1996 with 24 goals for Bari.
After years of financial instability, the club, then known as AS Bari, declared bankruptcy in 2014 and was taken over by a consortium including former referee Gianluca Paparesta, before being definitively refounded in July 2018 as Società Sportiva Calcio Bari following further financial collapse, this time under the ownership of Filmauro, the film production company led by Luigi De Laurentiis Jr. Rebuilding from the fourth tier, the phoenix club won promotion to Serie C in 2019 and topped that division in 2022 to return to Serie B, where, nicknamed I Galletti (The Cockerels) and playing in their traditional white shirts with red trim, they have remained ever since, still calling the Stadio San Nicola home.