AS Roma 2025-26: New manager, new striker and Italy’s best goalkeeper give hope to hungry franchise

I arrived at Olympic Stadium Saturday about four hours before AS Roma’s season opener. The early arrival was due to eagerness and Rome’s Byzantine era public transportation system. The taxi that rescued me from a bus stop with no buses dropped me off across the street from the stadium at Bar della Musica, the no-frills shack where red-and-yellow draped Romanisti gather for pre-game panini, Peroni beer and prayers.

They pray every game that this will be their season. Roma has won only three Italian Serie A titles in its 98-year history. The last came in 2001. It hasn’t played in the Champions League, the top club tournament in the world, since 2018-19. 

Yet Roma sold a record 44,000 season tickets and that night would have an 18th straight sellout of at least 60,000 fans.

“The Roma fan is like a man in love with a beautiful woman,” said Fabrizio Grassetti, president of the Unione Tifosi Romanisti,  Roma’s top fan club which boasts 100,000 members, many of whom attend every home and away game. “Very beautiful. And so we always see her through yellow and red eyes. And there’s always optimism.”

This season, the apple of their eye isn’t a beautiful woman off an Intimissimi ad or a catwalk. It’s a white-haired, 67-year-old man whose mug won’t land on any male fan’s bedroom wall, let alone the side of a Rome building.

Roma fans have fallen for white-haired men before. But Gian Piero Gasperini is different from Jose Mourinho. When “The Chosen One” came to Rome before the 2021-22 season, his face did appear on the side of buildings and T-shirts. But his Champions League titles with two clubs and national titles in four countries were ancient history in light of his sackings from his last three jobs.

Gasperini arrives fresh off leading Atalanta to five Champions Leagues in his last seven seasons and the 2024 Europa League trophy, its only European cup trophy in its 118-year history. Atalanta is from the small city of Bergamo, overshadowed by powerhouses Milan and Inter Milan to the south and Juventus to the west. It’s the equivalent of a curvy Umbria farmgirl making the cover of Vogue Italia.

Gasperini background

The man Roma fans are genuflecting for this season comes from Grugliasco, which was a small country town in Piedmont when Gasperini grew up but is now absorbed in Turin’s urban sprawl. His mother ran a fishmongers shop, and his dad worked in a factory affiliated with Fiat.

As a child, Gian Piero was a massive Juventus fan and became such a prodigy the club signed him to their academy at the age of 9. He’d take the bus 40 minutes and a tram to the training ground by himself.

He never became more than a Serie B journeyman. His playing highlight was bloodying Diego Maradona’s lip when he ran into Gasperini’s wedding ring during Napoli’s game with Pescara, which Gasperini captained in one of his few seasons in Serie A.

But Pescara’s peskiness rubbed off on Gasperini and became his trademark as Atalanta consistently punched above its weight. But before that monumental run that began in 2016-17, he had a long, trying haul up the coaching ladder.

He began in 2003-04 with Serie C Crotone and led it to Serie B in his first season. He moved to Serie B Genoa in 2006-07 and in his first season moved it up to Serie A after a 12-year absence. After five seasons impressing others, Inter Milan gave him his shot at the big time in July 2011.

He lasted five games. Yes, Italian soccer owners have the patience of executioners with full bladders, especially when a European power starts the season 0-1-4.

He landed at Palermo, one of his favorite playing stops, but his mom and dad died within days of each other and the season went in the toilet. Owner Maurizio Zamparini, Italian soccer’s top executioner, fired him, brought him back and fired him again.

He returned to Genoa in 2013 but he tired of its flimsy financial situation, especially when it cost him a bid to the 2014-15 Europa League.

At Atalanta

His move to Atalanta in 2016 seemed like a sideways move with a club fighting off relegation every season. But he found stable management, strong financial backing and an excellent youth academy which, remembering his childhood, he dipped into regularly.

Soon Atalanta became the new scourge of Serie A. High pressing defense, quick, attacking offense. That became Gasperini’s model. It would give up a goal to score two and while critics felt it would never be sustainable with a snooty powerhouse, it suited Atalanta’s starving fans just fine.

He consistently outcoached the household names in Europe.

“Playing Atalanta is like going to the dentist,” Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola said.

Mourinho once said of Gasperini, “I made a change. He countered. I changed. He countered again.”

AS Roma and its sad recent past

Speaking of changes, Roma fans are tired of theirs. Italian soccer coaches have life expectancies of some of the more advanced moths. Roma is no different. Since the American father-son team of Dan and Ryan Friedkin bought the club in 2020, Roma has had six managers.

Paulo Fonseca couldn’t survive a seventh place in his second season. Mourinho’s shine wore off in the locker room by Year 3, Daniele De Rossi’s local hero status couldn’t buy him more than two years and Ivan Juric wasn’t up for the job. Then interim manager Claudio Ranieri retired after leading Roma to the second most points in the second half of last season behind Barcelona among Europe’s top five leagues.

Gasperini, seeking a new challenge, walked into a club that has always been on Serie A’s financial second tier. With an aging stadium it shares with Lazio and few revenue streams, it has lost a string of players who became household names elsewhere: striker Mohamed Salah and goalkeeper Alisson Becker to Liverpool and center back Antonio Rudiger to Real Madrid to name a few.

But his hellbent offensive style has the support base of Italy’s best goalkeeper in Mile Svilar. New sporting director Frederic Massara has signed a bevy of young talent, two of which were the absolute stars of a glittering opening night.

Roma 1, Bologna 0

I’ve covered sports events all over the world and heard crowds so loud I couldn’t talk to the person next to me: The Denver Broncos’ old Mile High Stadium. University of Kansas’ Allen Fieldhouse. Germany’s Allianz Arena on the opening night of the 2006 World Cup.

But few match the steady 90-minute jet engine of Stadio Olimpico for a Roma game. Saturday night, with new hopes and a new manager, the place was a wave of red and yellow banners and more rowdy songs than a Metallica concert.

Against Bologna, a Champions League participant last season, Gasperini picked up at Roma where he left off at Atalanta. Roma dominated from the very beginning. Massara had lured 20-year Irish wunderkind Evan Ferguson away from Brighton on loan. Ferguson hoped he would resurrect his young career after last year’s injury plagued season. 

After all, under Gasperini last season, little-known Argentine Mateo Retegui led Serie A with 25 goals and parlayed that into a €20 million a year, four-year contract with Al-Qadsiah of the Saudi Pro League. Truth be told, I was at the stadium chronicling Ferguson’s debut for the Irish Times.

One of the Premiership’s best young players three years ago when he scored 10 goals in 25 games, Ferguson had three shots in his first 16 minutes, barely missing a driving header from the top of the 18-meter box. 

Later in the second half he placed a cross worthy of an instructional video across the box to Manu Konè who somehow went wide left on a half empty net he could’ve driven a Fiat into.

The other young hopeful, 21-year-old Wesley Franca from Brazil, was the hero, intercepting a bad back pass and nudging in a goal in the 53rd minute for a 1-0 win.

It was Gasperini’s 600th game in Serie A, the first of many the city hopes he has here. 

Gasperini comments

“We were bold today,” he said in the post-game press conference. “It’s not easy against Bologna with their dangerous forwards and the quality they have on the bench. We worked tirelessly when out of possession. I’m happy. 

“The first game is never easy for anyone, not even the well-established teams. To have played with this spirit in this stadium against this team is a big injection of confidence for us.”

We’ll see how long it lasts. In his first season, Mourinho led Roma to its first European trophy when it won the inaugural Conference League title in 2022. (Sorry, Romanisti. I don’t count the pay-for-play Inter-Cities Fairs Cup in 1961) Two years later, he got “the big haircut.”

Gasperini still wants another forward. Leon Bailey, a reliable scorer on loan from Aston Villa, injured his leg in his first practice Wednesday and is out at least a month. Paulo Dybala, Roma’s marquee player off Argentina’s World Cup title team, is coming off a leg injury and can’t go 90 minutes yet. They’re negotiating with Chelsea winger Jadon Sancho who scored 38 goals for Borussia Dortmund five seasons ago and is Bailey’s good friend.

But as fall approaches and the red and yellow flags fly as high as Roma’s hopes, this white-haired man from rural Piedmont is slowly becoming one of the brightest lights in a city famous for them.