Serie A – Business End
By the end of April it had become increasingly clear that the league title wasn’t going to be returning to Rome.
Inter had been relentless. Every time it felt as though they might finally stumble, they simply won again. There are title races where every weekend feels like a dramatic swing in momentum. This wasn’t one of them. It felt more like trying to chase a train that had quietly left the station several months earlier.
Oddly enough, I didn’t find it nearly as frustrating as the previous season.
Losing the Scudetto by a single point still lingered in the back of my mind, but this campaign had taken on a very different character. We weren’t chasing one dream anymore—we were juggling three. Every Wednesday seemed to bring another European night or another cup tie, and before long I realised I was checking the Champions League fixtures more often than the Serie A table.
That isn’t to say the league had become unimportant.
Far from it.
The race for the Champions League places was as chaotic as ever. Fiorentina, Napoli, Bologna and ourselves spent weeks exchanging positions almost every Saturday, with every dropped point immediately punished by someone else taking advantage. On paper we sat fifth, but with five Champions League places looking increasingly likely for Serie A, our fate remained firmly in our own hands.
The consistency of the squad deserved enormous credit. Since the defeat to Manchester City at the Etihad—a defeat that somehow still sent us through—we’d quietly put together another impressive domestic run. Venezia were comfortably dispatched, Cesena were held away from home after one of those afternoons where the ball simply refused to go in, and Inter were eliminated from both the Champions League and the Coppa Italia within the space of two unforgettable weeks.
It wasn’t the title challenge I’d imagined back in August.
In truth, it had become something rather different.
The league had become the foundation that allowed everything else to happen.
Every victory kept us firmly in the Champions League positions, every point removed a little more pressure, and with Europe and the Coppa Italia still very much alive, the season had reached the point where every few days seemed to offer another opportunity to create a memory.
Looking back, I don’t remember worrying about Inter anymore.
I remember wondering just how much further this Lazio side could go.
Looking back now, I think the transfer window deserves a little more credit than I gave it at the time.
When Jonas Urbig arrived from Bayern Munich for thirty million pounds, it felt like another expensive gamble from a manager whose relationship with the club’s accountants had long since become irreparable. By April, nobody was mentioning the transfer fee anymore.
He’d justified it many times over.
There are goalkeepers who make routine saves look spectacular, and then there are goalkeepers who make spectacular saves look routine. Urbig belonged firmly in the second category. Whether it was saving Lautaro Martínez’s penalty against Inter or repeatedly rescuing us in Europe, he’d quietly become one of the first names on the teamsheet. If we reached the latter stages of every competition, a sizeable portion of the credit belonged to the man wearing number one.
Victor Osimhen, meanwhile, had proved to be a far more complicated puzzle.
When I signed him, I’d imagined building the attack around him. He was supposed to become the focal point of everything we did, the striker who would decide the biggest matches almost single-handedly. Instead, he became something rather different.
He still scored goals. Plenty of them, in fact.
The problem was that every goal seemed to arrive alongside two misses that left me staring blankly at the screen wondering whether somebody at Sports Interactive had secretly swapped his finishing attributes while I wasn’t looking. Eventually I accepted that the problem wasn’t Osimhen.
It was my expectations.
Rather than forcing the entire team to revolve around one striker, I adjusted the system instead. Goals began coming from everywhere, the football became less predictable, and, ironically, Osimhen started looking more effective once he stopped carrying the responsibility of being our only source of them.
Sometimes the best tactical decision isn’t improving a player.
It’s accepting who they actually are.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of the season, though, was Alexis Saelemaekers.
At the beginning of the year he’d effectively chosen Lazio over Fiorentina after both Alex and I had tried to sign him as a free agent. At the time it felt like a satisfying little victory over my friend.
Neither of us realised quite how significant that decision would become.
He made the right wing-back position his own, contributing goals, assists and endless energy, while somehow managing to become one of the most important players in the squad. He’d endured nights of complete chaos—gifting Inter a goal before scoring twice himself in the same match—but that seemed to sum him up perfectly. You never quite knew what he was going to do next.
You just knew he’d be involved.
As for the next generation, this wasn’t really their year.
There were no teenage sensations dragging us through Europe or wonderkids forcing their way into the starting eleven. That story can wait.
This season belonged to a squad that had quietly grown up together, learning from last year’s heartbreak and somehow turning themselves into a team capable of competing with anyone left in Europe.