Roma still dare to dream after remarkable 2025 despite Napoli setback | Nicky Bandini

Gian Piero Gasperini was a victim of mistaken identity last week, after an Italian news story about a man who allegedly impersonated his dead mother to collect her pension was picked up by media outlets around the world. Roma’s manager has no connection to any of this, yet one Argentinian broadcaster included an old photo of him in their coverage.

The segment for Telefe Noticias showed Gasperini’s face between those of the accused and the deceased. A silly meme, circulated by football fans on social media to imply some (dubious) resemblance, confused as being authentic. The online version of the video was quickly taken down from YouTube, but not before it created a fresh set of headlines back in Italy.

Was Gasperini even aware? He had plenty to keep him busy in a week that took Roma from a Thursday game against Midtjylland through to a top-of-the-table clash at home to Napoli on Sunday. One of the biggest opportunities yet for his Giallorossi to prove themselves as serious challengers for the Scudetto.

Where rivals have tended to shy away from that discourse, Gasperini leaned in. “When you’re in this position it’s right to dream,” he said after the 3-1 win at Cremonese that gave his team sole possession of first place in the previous round. “We know those don’t often come true, but it’s beautiful to experience them … Let’s pretend to wake up but instead go back to sleep and keep it going a little while longer.”

Why shouldn’t Roma believe, at the end of this extraordinary year? They had collected the most points of any Serie A team so far in 2025, and the margins weren’t close – their 76 points putting them 10 ahead of the next-best side, Napoli. The managerial transition from Claudio Ranieri, who began their revival, to Gasperini, who replaced him in the summer, has gone more smoothly than fans ever dared to hope for.

Yet still there were suggestions that Roma’s face did not fit in the lineup of title contenders. How could a team win the league without a reliable scorer? Their two centre-forwards, Evan Ferguson and Artem Dovbyk, had found the net just three times between them. The latter was now out with a hamstring injury. Tommaso Baldanzi, a 5ft 7in trequartista with two goals in 65 previous appearances for the club, started up top against Cremonese.

The easy counterpoint is that a team need not score so often if it rarely concedes. Roma owned the tightest defence in Serie A, with six goals allowed in 12 games. Centre-back Gianluca Mancini, who made his top-flight debut under Gasperini eight years ago at Atalanta, has played some of the best football of his career since being reunited. Mile Svilar has continued to perform at the level that won him Serie A’s best goalkeeper award last season.

But that toothlessness up front has seemed to have a disproportionate impact in games against potential title rivals. Roma lost 1-0 to both Milan and Inter this season despite taking a combined 35 shots. Matias Soulé, their starting No 10 and most consistent threat, acknowledged in the run-up to Sunday’s showdown with Napoli that “these are the matches that tell us who we are and where we can get to”.

Roma hoped to make a fast start against opponents in the grip of a midfield injury crisis. Kevin De Bruyne, Frank Anguissa and Billy Gilmour have all been sidelined, forcing Antonio Conte to reconsider the 4-1-4-1 formation he favoured at the start of this season. Only in their last two matches, against Atalanta and Qarabag, he dabbled with a 3-4-2-1 – similar to the one Gasperini employs.

Napoli won both, with eye-catching performances from David Neres on the right of attack. The Brazilian had struggled to find his place in the original system, but this one made space for him to do the things he does best – pushing high, engaging defenders, blowing past them on the counter. And providing for teammates as well.

He served a warning in the ninth minute on Sunday, with a first-time ball over Roma’s defence for Noa Lang to chase on the far side. Svilar got out sharply to shut down that opportunity, but Neres switched flanks to serve Giovanni Di Lorenzo with a further chance moments later. The full-back fired into the side-netting.

Finally, in the 35th minute, Neres took matters into his own hands. Carrying the ball out from the edge of his own box, he pushed it forward to Rasmus Højlund then kept running beyond Bryan Cristante, receiving a return pass and beating Svilar coolly to give Napoli a well-deserved lead.

David Neres with Rasmus Højlund after scoring the decisive goal in Rome. Photograph: Antonio Balasco/IPA Sport/ipa-agency.net/Shutterstock

Gasperini was serving a touchline suspension, but TV cameras found him in the sparsely furnished “quiet room” behind the press section. An animal trapped in a cage: pacing, growling, bellowing until he could take it no more and disappeared completely – presumably to send down some half-time instructions.

Neither he nor assistant Tullio Gritti, filling in for dugout duties, could influence the course of this game. Roma had started with Ferguson up front, supported by Soulé and Lorenzo Pellegrini. By full-time they swapped out all three, sending in Baldanzi, Paulo Dybala and Leon Bailey. Stephan El Shaarawy replaced the wing-back Wesley. None could break their own team’s inertia.

The shape of the game did shift somewhat. Where Napoli held a greater share of possession in the first half, Roma dominated it throughout the second. But they had few ideas for how to use it, and came close to scoring only once, in the 90th minute, when Dybala’s no-look flick gave Baldanzi a step on his marker. His shot from the edge of the box demanded a good save from Vanja Milinkovic-Savic.

But that was about it. The game ended with a passage to sum up the evening: Roma gearing up for one final assault after they won a free-kick in the sixth minute of injury time, only to somehow finish up taking the ball backwards from the corner of the Napoli area to the halfway line without taking a shot.

In post-game interviews, Gasperini was offered opportunities to make excuses. Asked about a possible foul on Manu Koné in the buildup to Neres’s goal, he said such decisions could go either way and that the fault was with his team for failing to cover properly in any case.

Gian Piero Gasperini stuck in the stands during the game. Photograph: Fabio Rossi/AS Roma/Getty Images

He more readily accepted the suggestion Roma may have suffered from the short turnaround, observing that his players looked “slow”. At times it had felt as though they took his joke about staying in bed a little too literally.

But he also dismissed suggestions that Roma lack the means to fight their title rivals – pointing out the very different nature of this performance to the ones against the two Milan clubs, even if all three ended ultimately in 1-0 defeats.

He had no appetite this time for Scudetto talk, but a glance at the table shows Roma remain in the thick of a fascinating race. Napoli did move ahead of them, level with Milan in joint-first, but Roma and Inter are just one point behind. Bologna could pull alongside those two if they beat Cremonese on Monday night.

On a disappointing night, Gasperini still saw a silver lining. “It’s lucky for us actually, because we can’t do any worse in these head-to-heads now,” he quipped. “When the return games come around, we can only get more points than we did so far.”