Roma's Serie A position, broken down

Third place, 73 points, and what that actually costs you in Serie A

Roma finished the Serie A season on 73 points, third in a twenty-team division, and if that sounds comfortable you have not looked at the top of the table recently. Third place in Serie A this season is a Champions League spot, which matters enormously, but 73 points in third also tells you something about how compressed the title race was and how far Roma still sit from genuine title contention, not just in points but in the type of football a title-winning side has to sustain across 38 games.

Twenty teams. Seventy-three points. Third. The gap between Roma and the teams below them in the top four race is presumably tight, and the gap to the sides above them presumably wider. I am not going to pretend I have the exact figures for every club in the table, but what 73 points across 38 games gives you is an average of just under two points per game. and in Italian football, that is the floor for Champions League football, not a platform for a title push. Roma met that floor. They cleared it. That is not the same as dominating it. See the Roma club hub for the full season breakdown across all competitions if you want the wider picture.

Third place also means Roma were not the best team in Rome this season. Whether that sits awkwardly inside the club depends on who you ask. It should sit awkwardly. Third is fine. Fine is not what Roma are built to aspire to.

The goals scored and what the balance tells you

Fifty-nine goals scored across a 38-game season works out to fewer than one and a half per game. For a side finishing third, that is a number that stops me. Not because it is catastrophically low, plenty of Serie A seasons have been won on less attacking output. but because it puts Roma in that bracket of sides who win games by keeping them tight rather than by blowing teams away.

A goal difference of plus-28 is healthy. It says the side is genuinely better than most of what they faced. But the 59 goals scored figure also says Roma were not the most adventurous attacking side in the division, and if you are going to win a Serie A title rather than finish third, you probably need to be doing something more threatening going forward. The defence held things together, 31 conceded is a good number, and I will come back to that. but Roma's attacking output this season feels like the ceiling of a side that has not quite found the goal-scorer who changes the character of the team.

Plus-28 is the kind of goal difference that wins you league titles in other seasons. This was not one of those seasons, apparently. Make of that what you will about the standard at the top.

Thirty-one goals against

This is where Roma genuinely impressed me this season. Thirty-one goals conceded in 38 league games is a very good number, fewer than one per game. and it is the foundation everything else was built on. Without named defenders or a named goalkeeper in the data I have available, I cannot point at an individual and say he was the reason, but 31 against across a full Serie A season means the backline was organised, consistent, and rarely catastrophic. That matters in Italy more than almost anywhere else in European football, where a leaky defence will punish you quickly.

What the 31 conceded also implies is that Roma did not have one of those seasons where everything holds until April and then falls apart. A side that concedes that few goals over 38 games is a side that kept shape even when results were going against them. The 11 defeats, which I will pick apart properly below. did not come with the defence shipping four or five at a time. They came in a season where the backline was largely the most dependable part of the squad. For odds and previews on Roma's European campaign next season, our predictions section will have coverage once the draw is confirmed.

The draws are the problem

Twenty-three wins, eleven defeats, four draws. That draw column is tiny. Four draws from 38 games is an unusually low figure, and on the face of it that sounds like a positive, this is a side that plays to win rather than settling. Except the eleven defeats tell a more complicated story.

Four draws means Roma converted very few stalemates into points. When they did not win, they usually lost. A side that draws more games and loses fewer can accumulate points steadily; Roma's pattern was more volatile. Win or lose, not much in between. Over a long season, that tends to cost you when you face the better sides at the top of the table. sides who might grind out a draw where Roma instead lost narrowly and dropped three points rather than one.

Eleven defeats is not a disaster for a third-placed side, but combined with only four draws it means Roma dropped a lot of points in chunks. Every defeat is three points gone; a draw surrenders only one. If even three or four of those losses had been salvaged as draws, which, with 31 conceded all season, is not an outrageous idea. Roma could have pushed much closer to 80 points. That is title-race territory in most Serie A seasons. You can dig into the betting market reaction to Roma's home form next season over at the LiveScore Bet review when prices are released.

The volatility of that win-loss split is the one thing that lingered with me most from Roma's season. A defence that concedes 31, an attack that scores 59, and yet eleven defeats. The goals-against figure says the side was hard to beat. The defeat count says they were beaten anyway, regularly enough to matter. Those two facts sit in tension, and whoever manages Roma next season has to resolve it, probably by finding the kind of striker who turns a 1-0 lead into a 2-0 before the opposition can equalise, because this squad right now cannot always hold what it builds.

The squad needs one genuinely clinical centre-forward. That is the whole story of next season before it has even started.