The ticket office at Sassuolo’s train station was closed. On the front of one of the windows, someone had stuck a piece of paper with the words “back at 5pm” scribbled across it.

On the other side of the room an overweight middle-aged man coughed in his sleep in one of a handful of seats against the wall of the tiny, solitary room that makes up the station.

Through the doorway and 50 metres up the road there’s a Halal butcher that, despite its primary trade, has racks of Italian pasta on sale either side of the shop’s entrance.

Beyond the butcher, the road begins to twist away from the train tracks towards the city centre, past another example of the pizza and kebab shops that have become so common in Italian cities over the last 10 years, before eventually ending at the opening of a large grey piazza.

On one side of the square is a café filled with photos and merchandise of Unione Sportiva Sassuolo Calcio. Out the front an old Chinese man shows off his almost toothless grin to the uniformed police officers who have stopped by for a shot of Italian espresso.

Next to the café is the entrance to Sassuolo’s tiny home ground. From here you can just see a snippet of the green pitch, which lies in perfect condition, despite having been unused since 2008 when the club won promotion to Serie B for the first time in their 76-year history.

Welcome to Sassuolo, a mostly forgettable industrial town of 40,000 people, a mix of locals and immigrants from across the globe, stuck right in the heart of Italy and home to what could be one of the most important stories in Italian football at the moment.

For almost 24 hours last weekend Sassuolo, a club that often attracts hundreds rather than thousands of fans to its “home” games at Modena’s Stadio Alberto Braglia, was sitting on top of the Serie B standings.

Naturally the neroverdi’s rise to the top has a lot to do with money, but with a slight twist.

Unlike the plaything investment of Middle Eastern sheiks or Russian billionaires, Sassuolo’s owners Mapei have an ulterior motive for funding Sassuolo.

The company makes industrial strength glue and Sassuolo is right in the middle of the heartland of Italy’s tile industry. Propping up the local club is an ideal way to market their product.

This is only half the story however. The rest of Sassuolo’s success has come from a football department that has shown the vision and intelligence to use Mapei’s Euros wisely.

Not only has the club recruited well, they protect their investments. Players all have detailed individually tailored training programs – a rarity for a country that has largely struggled to embrace best practice in sports science.

Australian Carl Valeri, a product of Inter Milan’s youth system, is the only Sassuolo player with international football experience and claims it’s “the most professional club” he’s ever played at.

Certainly it’s not the social life which attracts footballers to the area - eight players at the club are expecting children and as one remarked with a grin, “there’s nothing else to do” – but the benefits for playing for Sassuolo extend even further than the club’s approach to training.

Italian football is rife with financial problems and at Sassuolo players find a club who might not pay the biggest wages, but always pays them on time, a rarity in the wastelands of lower division football on the peninsula.

Most importantly it’s a story that is starting to be copied across Italy.

About 50 kilometres outside of Venice, a large furniture company with similar motivations to Mapei supports the even smaller Portogruaro Summaga. The granata enjoyed their first ever spell in Serie B last season.

In the outer suburbs of Milan you’ll fine AC Pavia, a club surrounded by Inter and AC Milan supporters whose most recent claim to fame was as the place Benito Carbone ended his playing career.

Yet Pavia’s approach of paying small but affordable wages - and always on time – makes them an attractive destination for third division players and helps keep them competitive.

Serie A regulars Chievo Verona, owned by the cake company Paluani, were one of the earlier modern examples of this approach, though comparatively Sassuolo make the flying donkeys look like a European giant.

Take a cursory glance at the standings of any of Italy’s lower leagues and you’ll find a raft of clubs with point deductions due to financial mismanagement. It’s why Sassuolo’s story is so important.

Italy has almost perfected the cyclical nature of football bankruptcy – climb to the top on borrowed funds, drop all the way back down after defaulting on your repayments, rinse and repeat.

It might not be the solution, but in Sassuolo and its growing number of contemporaries, Italian football might have found a more efficient way to manage its financial troubles until a long-term resolution is found.