The Roman Report — 28 September 2026 – 4 October 2026

There are days in Rome when you feel the city shift beneath your feet, when something that has lived only in the imagination for decades suddenly becomes real enough to touch. Monday was one of those days. The Services Conference met at ten-thirty in the morning, Commissioner Massimo Sessa took his seat, the favourable opinion was issued, and just like that, after forty-odd years of dreams deferred and plans abandoned and promises broken — from Dino Viola's first vision in the 1980s all the way through to the Friedkin Group's long slog through Roman bureaucracy — AS Roma have a stadium coming. A proper stadium. Their own stadium. Sixty thousand, six hundred and five seats in Pietralata, a Curva Sud big enough to house twenty-three thousand passionate souls, a foundation stone to be laid in March 2027 and walls, all going well, rising to completion by the end of 2029. Mayor Gualtieri called it a historic day, and for once that word carries genuine weight rather than the usual hollow political grandeur. The financial implications alone are staggering: Roma's current revenues sit somewhere between two hundred and seventy and three hundred million euros annually, roughly half what Inter, Juventus and Milan generate, and the new stadium is projected to push that figure up toward four hundred and sixty or four hundred and seventy million. Put simply, this club, with its history and its hunger and its Gasperini, is about to stop playing in someone else's house and start building a future commensurate with its ambition. That is not a small thing. That is everything.

And yet — and this is what makes supporting Roma so endlessly, infuriatingly wonderful — even on the day the stadium news broke, the football itself refused to be overshadowed. Because on the pitch, Gian Piero Gasperini has been doing something that feels almost as improbable as getting Roman bureaucracy to approve anything in less than a generation: he has turned this club into genuine, credible Serie A title contenders. Thirteen points from four wins and a draw, level at the top with Inter and Lazio, and the evidence of the football suggesting this is no fluke. Walter Sabatini, who knows this club as well as anyone alive — Roma became the story of my life, he said, with that characteristic blend of sentiment and bluntness — put it plainly to Tuttosport: "Roma really seems to be a serene candidate to fight all the way for the Scudetto." Serene. That word in connection with Roma feels almost transgressive, but Sabatini means it as the highest compliment, and he is right. There is a cohesion about this group, a shared understanding of what Gasperini wants and how to deliver it, that is genuinely new. Roberto Donadoni still backs Inter as outright favourites, and Simone Tiribocchi agrees — the Champions League will drain energy, depth is a concern, and only if Inter falter in the way they have done in recent seasons could Roma capitalise. These are fair observations. But they feel like caveats about a team that has already earned the right to be taken seriously, and that is itself a kind of progress.

Much of that progress runs through Manu Koné, and if you have not yet given yourself over fully to the cult of this Frenchman then Monday's Transfermarkt valuation — sixty million euros, ten million more than at the start of the season, ahead of Barella, Sucic and McTominay — should be the moment of conversion. Sabatini described him as a central barrier who stops counterattacks and immediately puts Roma back on the front foot, which is accurate as far as it goes, but the most exciting development is that Koné has started scoring. Two goals already this campaign, against a return of zero points four per 90 minutes last season, and Sabatini believes those goals will ignite something new in him, a hunger for the net that was previously absent. The passing precision — ninety point two per cent, second only to Gianluca Mancini in the Roma squad — tells you about the technical quality. The fouls per match creeping up from one point seven to nearly two tells you about the physical ferocity Gasperini demands. Koné stayed this summer when interest came from elsewhere, and every week that decision looks wiser.

Alongside him in defence, two men are making equally compelling cases. Mario Hermoso leads the entirety of Serie A with sixteen interceptions and has played ninety-four per cent of Roma's available minutes — Gasperini himself called him a statue in the position, and it is easy to see why. Three fouls conceded all season. Three. While N'Dicka has eight and Mancini seven, Hermoso glides through matches like a man who has memorised every passing lane and every run before the opposition have decided to make them. And then there is Leonardo Balerdi, who arrived on loan from Marseille and has already made the question of his permanent transfer feel entirely academic. Roma tried to sign him last season when Marseille's thirty-million asking price was prohibitive; this summer's structured loan — a million euros down, with a purchase clause of fourteen million if he hits the fifty-five per cent appearance threshold — looks like the sort of deal that will be talked about for years as one quietly brilliant piece of business. He has played against Atalanta, Torino and Inter. He has demonstrated the recovery pace that Gasperini's high defensive line absolutely requires. The coach said he is a captain, and you believe it watching him.

It would be remiss, on this particular week of all weeks, not to stop and think about Francesco Totti. He turned fifty on Sunday — fifty — and marked the occasion with a letter in Il Messaggero that was tender and funny and deeply, unmistakably Roman. He wrote about playing as a child with his brother Riccardo at the Terme di Caracalla. He wrote about wearing Roma's armband, about the 2001 Scudetto meaning more to him than the 2006 World Cup, about passing the mural of himself near his childhood neighbourhood on via Sibari and feeling something that cannot be put into words. He also wrote, with characteristic directness, about his decision not to return to the pitch when the temptation arose a couple of years ago — admitting he was tempted, then concluding that coming back would have made Francesco happy but disappointed millions of fans. That is the measure of the man: the choice to belong entirely to something larger than himself. There are reports of legal discussions with the club over image rights and shirt sales bearing his number ten, and the word from some radio voices is that the relationship remains cool. But Lorenzo Pes of Tele Radio Stereo left a small door open for the 2027 centenary, and I think that door matters. Whatever the commercial disagreements, this city and this man are not finished with each other.

The international break now takes players away — Balerdi and Matías Soulé will join Argentina, and Santiago Castro, who has hit two posts without yet scoring for Roma and who carries Francesco Totti's personal endorsement, will rejoin the squad that he last appeared for in March 2025 without taking the field. He returns only three days before Roma's next fixture, which offers minimal recovery time, but the boy chose Roma knowing the competition was fierce and the expectations enormous, and there is something in that deliberateness that suggests he is ready for the heat. For Roma scouts, meanwhile, a name worth filing away: Ruben Van Bommel at PSV, twenty-two years old, seven league matches this season with two goals and four assists, and a profile that reportedly interests Gasperini's staff as a possible solution to the left-wing question Sabatini acknowledged still exists. None of this is settled. But between the stadium authorization that changes the financial architecture of the club, a squad performing at the summit of Italian football, and a transfer horizon that is beginning to sharpen, Roma go into October with more genuine reasons for optimism than they have carried into an autumn in a very long time. The question is not whether this group can compete — they already are. The question is how long, and how far, they can sustain it.