The Roman Report — 14 September 2026 – 20 September 2026

There is something almost fitting about the date itself. Exactly one year ago, on 14 September 2025, Giovanni Simeone slid home a 59th-minute winner at the Olimpico to give Torino a 1–0 victory over Roma that stung long after the final whistle. Tonight, Gasperini's side cross the Apennines and descend on the Grande Torino carrying ten goals from three Serie A matches, an eight-game winning league run stretching back into last spring, and the kind of collective belief that transforms a football team into something genuinely frightening to face. The symmetry of the calendar feels less like coincidence and more like an invitation. Roma have already answered it once, winning 2–0 in Turin back in January through Malen and Dybala. They will try to answer it again this evening, and the numbers suggest they travel in remarkably good health: no side in the three-points era has opened a Serie A season by scoring more than Roma's ten goals in three games, surpassing a record that had stood since 2021–22. That is not a stat to be recited politely — that is a statement of intent.

Donyell Malen is the number that refuses to be ignored. Nineteen goals in twenty appearances since the turn of the year in Serie A, averaging one every 92 minutes, Serie A's leading scorer in the 2026 calendar year — and now Gasperini has pointed him toward the record shared by Totti and Manfredini of six goals in the first four matchdays of a season. If you had told anyone in the summer of 2024 when Roma spent €38 million on Artem Dovbyk that the more lethal finisher in this squad would be the Dutchman, the reaction would have been politely sceptical. And yet here we are, with Malen playing with the certainty of a man who has found exactly the right manager at exactly the right moment. Gasperini's handling of him has been instructive: when pressed about resting players or rotating Castro into his place, the coach swatted the question away with characteristic directness. "If he is well, do you put him to sleep?" It sounds simple. It is simple. And when the manager's instinct and the player's form align so cleanly, even the simplest decisions carry a kind of quiet wisdom.

The question of Dybala is the other great talking point heading into Turin, and it has ignited the usual spirited debate across Roma's radio stations. Nando Orsi captured something real when he said that Roma have become fully "gasperinised" — that the system works as long as the bodies hold — but the more revealing insight came from those pointing to what Gasperini is doing for Dybala psychologically. The Argentine has four assists in the opening three league matches, yet is still hunting his first league goal since that very fixture in Turin back in January. Gasperini's response to that? He starts him again, every time, unconditionally. David Rossi put it well: the coach is sending Dybala a daily message that says you play, you are fine, you must play. For a player of Dybala's extraordinary quality and equally complicated injury history, that kind of absolute trust from a manager is not a small thing. It is the difference between a player who enters a challenge tentatively and one who goes in full. Fabio Petruzzi saw the change too, and he is right that it shows in Dybala's running. Manu Koné's knee problem adds another layer of intrigue to the midfield shape — with Niccolò Pisilli waiting for precisely this kind of opportunity — and the doubt over Wesley's fitness from a training knock means Gasperini is managing more moving parts than the perfect-record headlines might suggest.

But then look at the subplot that the mainstream noise risks drowning out: Emanuele Lulli against Alessio Cacciamani on the same flank this evening, and what that duel represents. Roma spent the summer chasing Cacciamani, who has since committed to Torino until 2031 and started every one of their opening fixtures. What Roma found instead, partly through circumstance, was a player already at Trigoria whom Gasperini refused to send to Avellino on loan and chose to believe in instead. Lulli has been one of the revelations of these early weeks, and the irony is not lost that had Roma signed Cacciamani, the space for Lulli might have been closed before it opened. It is a lesson this club has needed to absorb for years: sometimes what you are looking for exists in the building. Gasperini seems to understand that instinctively, and his refusal to treat the squad as a rigid hierarchy of starters and squad players — "even against Torino, sixteen players will take the field as starters, not eleven" — is not mere man-management rhetoric. It is the structural reason why a player like Lulli gets a proper chance.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the week's news, Alessandro Romano is quietly becoming a story that belongs to someone else. The 20-year-old midfield left Turin — in the footballing sense — on a loan with an obligation from Roma to Cagliari, impressed at Spezia, and is now playing all ninety minutes against Atalanta and attracting scouts from Inter. Roma allowed him to leave permanently. That is the reality. Romano is at Cagliari because Roma decided they did not need him, and now Inter are filing reports on a player Roma developed. Whether that constitutes a significant miss depends on how Romano develops further, but the trajectory is uncomfortable enough to note. Roma's loanee news is not all that shade, of course — Robinio Vaz, born in 2007, made his Premier League debut for Hull City against Chelsea this week at the age of just nineteen, and that is the kind of detail that makes you lean forward. Neil El Aynaoui at Leipzig, Mattia Mannini getting his first Benevento minutes, the youth system producing across multiple countries simultaneously — there is depth in this club that extends well beyond the first team.

And then there is Francesco Totti, because there is always Francesco Totti. The announcement of 'Oltre', his new memoir written with Alessandro Alciato, arriving in bookshops on 22 September, reminded us again that the relationship between Roma's greatest number ten and his club is something still unresolved, still building toward something — the centenary in 2027, the discussions ongoing, the emotional charge entirely undimmed. Walter Sabatini, reflecting on his own Roma years with the kind of rueful tenderness that only true love produces, put it simply: "At Roma. It's my life." That sentence contains more than most paragraphs could. Sabatini also said, with characteristic honesty, that Inter remain a step above in terms of squad quality and depth — and Roma's radio stations, to their credit, largely agreed that the coming clash with Inter is the real benchmark, the match that will tell us whether this perfect start reflects genuine title credentials or a brilliant opening run against winnable opposition. What happens in Turin tonight — whether Malen edges closer to Totti's record, whether Pisilli seizes the midfield stage, whether Lulli makes Cacciamani feel the weight of the summer that got away — will set the emotional temperature for everything that follows.