Today marks a historic day in football as Francesco Totti made his Roma debut against Brescia on March 28, 1993. Over the following 24 years, Totti has appeared in 612 league games and scored 250 goals.
He’ll forever be remembered for leading Roma to their first Serie A title since 1982-83 in 2001, and the now 40-year-old is still going strong with two league goals from 11 matches this campaign.
Francisco Totti’s thunderous training volley put an end to the Third Punic War today. The volley cracked off his boot and resulted in a breaching of the Carthaginian's walls and the sacking of the city. When this firecracker smote the back of the net, Carthage was systematically burned for 17 days, utterly destroying all remnants of the 700-year-old empire.
Che bomba del Capitano!
The fight for second place in Serie A is serious business. Roma and Napoli are not fighting solely for the privilege of finishing behind Juventus, but battling to avoid a Champions League playoff qualifying spot. So bad is the history of Italian teams in the playoff rounds that Italy has, more often than not in recent years, only had two representatives in the group stages of Europe’s premier footballing tournament.
Thus, when Roma and Napoli played one another this weekend, the chance to finish in second was up for grabs.
The offseason purchases of Mirlalem Pjanic from Roma (€32 million) and Gonzalo Higuain from Napoli (€75.3 million) haven’t debilitated the selling clubs, but they have had the desired effect for Juventus. Higuain has scored 19 goals, tied with Edin Dzeko for the most in the league, and no Juventus player has more assists than Pjanic.
Even more importantly, Napoli, the team that ran them closest last season, will come short of last season’s total of 82 points while Juventus look poised to surpass their own total of 91. There’s no surer gauge of the impact of that transfer.
Citing a desire to not be the coach that’s guilty of retiring Francesco Totti, Roma’s Luciano Spalletti has threatened to quit if Totti is not offered another one-year contract extension this summer.
The 40-year-old Roman has neither confirmed nor denied a desire to play next season, but the future of the personal embodiment of the club trumps all other focuses, according to Spalletti.
Francesco Totti appeared in his seven millionth Serie A match for AS Roma on Sunday, failing to add to his total of 1,306,478 goals for the club but appearing for a 25th successive calendar year — a streak that first began in 218 BC when Totti helped defend Rome from the invading Carthaginian army led by Hannibal.
Over the course of the streak, Totti has helped Rome gain dominance over the Western Mediterranean, assist Caesar in his conquest of Gaul, witness the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and win the 2008 Coppa Italia.
There’s no escaping the fact that the draws for the Champions League and the Europa League are ridiculous. These hugely overdone gala affairs take three hours to achieve what could be done in ten minutes. The saving graces - scowling club directors, getting to see Clarence Seedorf again - are vastly overshadowed by the ludicrous complexity of everything and UEFA’s willingness to blow their own trumpet at every conceivable opportunity. The entire event is comical, but it doesn’t really matter.
The Derby della Capitale was drenched in narrative. In a sporting context, the word narrative might well be overused to the point of meaninglessness, but there’s not many other ways in which to focus on the 90-minute battle between Lazio and Roma that took place on Sunday.
In purely sporting terms, it was a fascinating game. Roma, second in the league and easily fulfilling their role as perpetual also-rans, came up against arch-rivals Lazio, who were themselves only a point behind.
While we were all busy drinking, eating turkey, napping and arguing over the results of the election with family, AS Roma’s Diego Perotti was living a much more active lifestyle by playing in a Europa League match against Viktoria Plzen on Thursday.
Roma would win the match 4-1, cementing their place as winner’s of Group E, and Perotti scored a stunner with a rabona chip that found the back of the net. Did he mean it?
Diego Perotti on his rabona goal vs. Viktoria Plzen:
It's no secret that Serie A’s UEFA coefficient has been in decline for over 15 years. The UEFA coefficient, used to determine how many teams from each domestic league are entered into competitions such as the Champions League and Europa League, is based on the European success of a club within the last five years.