“I want complete transparency and clarity regarding the rules,” Nevio Scala, a famed former coach of Parma who was brought in by the new group to serve as chairman, said in an interview. “This was one of my very first requests, and I want the club to be born and follow specific values that have been lost in a lot of modern football.”

Scala, who came out of retirement to take the job, will be paid nothing for his first year of work (save for two season tickets to the Teatro Regio, the city’s glorious opera house). Carra, who left a sports marketing company to essentially become the club’s chief operating officer, is paid a nominal salary but said that everyone who had signed on to the project recognized that any true glory lay in the future.

This season figures to be humbling, with the reformed Parma playing in a fourth-tier league that is designed for young amateurs. League rules prohibit teams from paying much more than a player’s expenses — the maximum salary after taxes is about €20,000 per year (a little more than $22,000) — and there are numerous age restrictions to ensure that a majority of players on the field at any time are in their early 20s. Many of Parma’s opponents may choose to play “home” games at Parma’s stadium because their own fields seat only a few hundred fans (if that many).

Lucarelli, the team captain, agreed to stay with the club despite an enormous pay cut and will play the final season of his career with the renascent Parma. His presence, along with Scala’s as the club’s figurehead, has helped soothe the concerns of the fan base, which desperately wants the club to rise again.

So far, public reaction to the new group has been positive. Ferrari said the team sold 5,000 season tickets in five days of online sales, and a crowd of more than 1,000 fans waited outside the stadium on the day that in-person sales began. When a group of players — mostly anonymous teenagers trying to win a spot on the team — went through a perfunctory workout on one recent evening, about two dozen fans stood behind mesh fences watching.

Stefano Schianchi, the owner of Bar Gianni, which is popular with Parma fans, said he and most of his friends were not bothered by having to watch what will most likely be a season’s worth of shoddy soccer. After all, he said, there was a period this year when the alternative seemed far worse.

“I’ll go and I’ll cheer, of course,” he said. “It will not be Serie A, but it will be something. For a little while, I thought there might be no Parma at all.”