Act IX: One More Time
There wasn’t much time to enjoy winning the Coppa Italia because the league still had a little unfinished business. We went away to fourth-placed Bologna knowing a win would put us above them, and instead drew 1-1 in one of those matches Football Manager occasionally produces purely to test whether your keyboard is sufficiently insured. Bologna had one shot. They scored it. We stayed fifth, they stayed fourth, and the gap remained a single point.
That left one final game of the season, back at the Olimpico, and because apparently this save had decided there weren’t enough storylines already, the visitors were Fiorentina. Alex again. Ten days after we’d beaten him 2-0 in the Coppa Italia final, he was back in Rome with second place on the line. He needed a win to guarantee finishing above Napoli; I already had Champions League football secured in fifth, but if we could better Bologna’s result against Juventus, fourth was still available.
Then news came through that Juventus were battering Bologna 3-0. The door was open. All we had to do was walk through it.
For 25 minutes, everything looked perfect. Taty Castellanos set up Aleksandar Stanković — scorer against Fiorentina in the cup final and apparently now developing a taste for tormenting Alex — and we were 1-0 ahead. With Bologna losing, that put us fourth. Another victory over Fiorentina, another strong finish to the season, and a place in the top four was sitting there waiting for us.
Unfortunately, Alex had his own reasons for caring about the afternoon. Albert Guðmundsson equalised seven minutes later and almost immediately Fiorentina struck again, Francesco Esposito making it 2-1 in the 33rd minute. Eight minutes. That was all it took to go from fourth place and another win over Alex to chasing the game.
We did at least have one final response in us. Victor Osimhen, whose first season at Lazio has involved me gradually accepting that the world-class striker I thought I’d bought doesn’t actually exist with anything like the required regularity, came off the bench and equalised in the 73rd minute. Fiorentina had been the better side — 12 shots to our seven and 2.37 xG to our 1.43 — but suddenly it was 2-2 and there was still time to steal fourth.
It never came. Osimhen lasted nine minutes before going off injured, which felt like a fairly appropriate final contribution to his strange first season, and the game finished 2-2. Bologna had lost exactly as we’d hoped, but we couldn’t quite take advantage. They finished fourth, one point ahead of us. Lazio finished fifth.
For Alex, the draw also meant he’d failed to get the win he wanted in his attempt to guarantee second place. More importantly, across our final two meetings of the season he’d come to the Olimpico twice needing something from me and hadn’t won either: 2-0 Lazio when there was a trophy sitting between us, 2-2 when he came back ten days later.
Fifth might not look spectacular after finishing one point behind the champions the previous season, but the league table doesn’t really tell the story of this year. We’d qualified for the Champions League again. We’d reached the Champions League semi-finals after knocking out Manchester City and Inter. We’d taken Liverpool all the way to extra time at Anfield. We’d won the Coppa Italia after surviving one of the most ridiculous semi-finals imaginable. And, after spending the first half of the season trying to work out what this team actually was, we’d ended it with a core I didn’t want to rip apart.
Urbig had justified every penny of the £30m. Boselli, Stanković and Bamba had become a proper defensive unit. Saelemaekers had gone from the free agent Alex also wanted to one of my most important players. Akhomach had developed into a Spanish international. Taty had scored more than 20 goals. Nunes was joining permanently for nothing despite Alex trying to hijack the deal. Simeone was heading to Saudi Arabia for £41.5m, giving us a sizeable profit on a player I actively wanted to sell.
And somewhere among all of that, Lazio had become a cup-winning team.
The rebuild was basically over.
Now I wanted to see what happened if I stopped rebuilding and started trying to win everything.
2025-26 – Injury Review – Alex
(The tape recorder clicks on. I’ve got two medical centre screens open side by side, mine and — through means I won’t disclose — Lazio’s. I already knew this would be depressing. I did not know it would be this depressing.)
I went digging through the season’s injury records out of curiosity more than anything, wanting to see how our physio bill stacked up against Iain’s. I knew we’d had it bad. I did not know quite how bad, relative to the man who spends half his time in my DMs telling me how well things are going for him.
Start with the worst case on each side. Ours is Samu Omorodion, who missed 64% of the entire season — seven months out of a possible campaign, across four separate injuries, capped by a full six months lost to damaged cruciate ligaments. His was Victor Osimhen, at 13%. Not a typo. Thirteen percent. That’s our floor being roughly five times worse than their ceiling.
And it’s not just Omorodion dragging the average down. Ben Doak lost 36% of the season thanks to Iain’s thugs injuring him in our first head to head of the season. Albert Guðmundsson lost 32%, including three months out with a broken ankle. Amir Richardson lost 26% to a broken arm. Simone Pafundi, Nicolò Fagioli and Valentín Carboni all lost between a fifth and a quarter of their campaigns each. Every single one of those individual numbers is worse than Lazio’s single worst case for the entire season. Not one Lazio player missed more than 13% of matches all year.
Here’s the detail that actually stings, though: it’s not that Lazio’s squad is invincible. They racked up 58 separate injuries across the year to our 47 — more incidents, if you’re just counting knocks and niggles. The difference is what those injuries actually cost. Lazio had precisely three major injuries all season, and every single one of them landed in the final week — a double hernia, a broken foot, and Osimhen’s own knee ligament injury against us on the last day — after the title, the European places and everything else that mattered had already been settled. Three season-defining injuries, and none of them were allowed to define a season. Ours arrived on schedule from the very first week: Omorodion did his cruciate ligaments in a pre-season friendly against LC Sailors on 26th July, before a competitive ball had even been kicked, and the treatment room simply never really emptied out after that. Guðmundsson’s ankle in September. Doak’s calf in December, fittingly enough, against Lazio themselves. Richardson’s arm in March. Carboni’s hamstring in April, right in the middle of a Champions League tie.
Iain’s physio bill this year was a rounding error that turned up right on cue for the closing credits. Ours was the plot.
I’m not sure there’s a lesson here beyond “some clubs get lucky and some clubs get us.” Season Four, presumably, will tell us which one we are this time.