Miracle-working Lazio and the league where it doesn’t take much
Serie A today is a league in which a ninth-placed team can become unbeaten league leaders in the space of a summer.
Gattuso's Lazio deserve credit for their remarkable start, but what it reveals about the league warrants a closer look.
A few months ago, Lazio were a ninth-place team with a tired squad, a new manager coming off the national team's World Cup debacle and a sporting director who had faced a whole summer of suspicion. The transfer window amounted to no business at all. Lazio then opened their season with a home defeat to Serie B side Mantova in the Coppa Italia. Now, with the Olimpico emptied by the fans' protest, Lazio have 25 points from nine matches: eight wins, one draw and no defeats. Nobody is ahead of them, though Inter have yet to play. Only two teams have done better at this stage of the competition in the three-points-for-a-win era: Capello's Juventus of 2005/06 and Roma's ten consecutive wins in 2013/14. Both had 27 points. Those teams were built to win, not to rise again. That statistic is not an insult to Lazio. It is a question for the league.
Before asking it, though, Lazio deserve full credit for a clear, courageous approach. Gattuso's side press high and man-to-man from the start of their opponents' build-up, combining that ferocity with patient, considered possession: a little Gasperini without the ball, something of Sarri in how they manage it. Above all, Gattuso has insisted they always play this way, risking heavy defeats rather than giving in to the timidity that grips teams when they are ahead. They showed it again yesterday in Reggio Emilia, beating Sassuolo 6-2 with two missed penalties along the way. The gritty former midfielder has proved to be a thoroughly modern coach. Especially after what more or less everyone said following Zenica, he deserves every honour.
How can so little be enough? Back then, not a chance.
From the mid-1990s to the mid-to-late 2000s, those of us my age grew up with a Bundesliga that Bayern Munich had yet to make a family affair. Every so often, the title seemed to come out of a hat. One year Stuttgart won it, another year Werder Bremen did. For one season, Hamburg thought they were a big club. In 1998, even Kaiserslautern won it, fresh from promotion from the second division. The recipe was much the same each time: find the right manager, one or two players set for a magical season and a couple of talented youngsters from the academy, and suddenly you were challenging for the title. It was a wonderful, unpredictable league, but there was no real gap in quality. When the overall standard falls and the elite ranks thin out, surprises become the norm.
Today's Serie A looks more like that league than we care to admit. In two years, Como have gone from Serie B to the Champions League: promoted in 2024, they finished fourth with 71 points in 2025/26. Some will say Como have done everything right. They're right, but that is precisely the point: a clear idea and a few good decisions can close the gap to the top in a way this country had never seen before. No extraordinary feats are required. Above all, the established hierarchy is decidedly weaker than it once was. Juventus and AC Milan in recent years are perhaps the clearest examples.
Entertaining and unpredictable as Serie A is, a team who finished ninth becoming unbeaten league leaders over a summer with almost no reinforcements and no crowd says more than just that Lazio are exceptional. It says something about the league around them. Their manager had been written off, yet Lazio are dominating with almost the same squad. The big clubs of the past would have punished them, and the smaller clubs would have found ways to counter them. Now it seems you can win by avoiding mistakes and having the courage to commit to one idea.
In the Serie A of those Bundesliga years, Lazio probably couldn't have put together this run. Gattuso is undoubtedly the architect of Lazio's half-miracle, and it's a wonderful story. But it is also, perhaps above all, a clinical report on the health of Italian football.
For Lazio, congratulations. For the league, a diagnosis.
