With 1o games left in the Serie A season, Fiorentina’s fate is still dangling. While the Viola are fully out of the relegation places on points rather than head-to-head for the first time since match day 7, the Viola lead Cremonese by a single point in the race for safety, setting up what will probably be more of a flaccid than furious finale.
After looking over Fiorentina’s closing schedule, I found myself getting very nervous because it’s about as brutal a run-in as I could’ve imagined, full of
clashes with both fellow relegation candidates and European hopefuls. My next thought was naturally to wonder how difficult the direct relegation rivals’ schedules were. For this exercise, I decided that any side within 6 points of 17th place with 10 games left is a direct rival. That means Cremonese, Lecce, Genoa, Torino, and Cagliari.
I wanted to create an all-in-one metric to determine strength of schedule but almost immediately bogged down in the math. That stuff is pretty involved and I’m not sure I’ve got it in me to assemble the correct formula. If I’m bored this summer, I might give it a shot, but it would require going back over at least 10 years of results and fine-tuning a lot of algebra. Instead, I figured I’d just put down the remaining schedules of all the relevant teams, then set them side by side to ease the comparisons.
That’s a lot of information so I simplified it a little bit, taking the average point total of the remaining opponents. I figured I could do a single level deeper and split that into home and away point totals, which I felt was important. Serie A teams this season average 1.45 points per game at home and 1.28 per game away, which means that home games are worth, on average, 11.72% more points than away games. For such a small sample, it doesn’t matter too much, especially when you factor in specific opponents, but here’s how it looks. Assume all the regular caveats and maybe some irregular ones too.
To be clear, these numbers aren’t predictive. They reflect the past, not the future. Still, they indicate that Fiorentina has the toughest remaining schedule after Cagliari, which isn’t great. What particularly worries me is the quality of opposition at home. Fiorentina’s home/away splits (1 point per game at home, 0.79 away) shows that the team’s been considerably more effective at the Franchi this year.
Of course a glance back at these tables shows you just what you didn’t want to see: those home games, the ones in which the Viola might have hoped to take the most points, are pretty difficult. In fact, I’d say that Genoa’s the only opponent against whom I’d clearly favor the Viola. If you wanted to throw Sassuolo or even Lazio in there, you sure could. I consider both those fixtures a coin flip at best and would probably lean towards the visitors but you’re an adult and can make your own decisions.
Similarly, Fiorentina’s the 3rd-puniest road team in Serie A this year so I’m not expecting it to take many points away from home. Cremonese is sandwiched between Conference League games and the Viola are already carrying several key injuries. Hellas Verona’s beatable in theory but recent history demonstrates the contrary. Similarly, a trip to Lecce should be a rare away win but there’s no way in hell that Riccardo Sottil doesn’t post something passive-aggressive on Instagram and then curl one past David de Gea, and I’d put good money on another Corvinata doing the same so Pantaleo can grin his Cheshire grin from the shadows. The rest of the away fixtures are even less promising.
And hey, speaking of those guys in the red and gray shirts, Cremonese’s pillowy remaining home schedule should also worry you. Wins against Torino and Pisa, as well as another couple of random draws, could be enough to see the Grigiorossi surge back past Fiorentina, especially since they’re on the road less than any of these sides. Their recent form is abysmal but a lot can change in 10 games and Davide Nicola is better than anyone in recent Serie A history at avoiding the drop, having done so with 4 straight teams in miraculous fashion.
Genoa, on the other hand, could be in more trouble than you think. The Grifoni are significantly better in Liguria and only get 4 more games in the friendly confines of the Ferraris. The table may show them at 13th and they’ve been pretty good recently but it’s not hard to imagine them sinking like an anchor over these final months. Torino’s in a similar situation, albeit not quite as dangerous, but has also been worse over the past few games.
I’ll wrap up by reiterating that these are abstract numbers and that the games are played in painfully tangible reality. Our brains, desperate to find patterns and establish control over an inherently chaotic universe, ignore the gulf between the abstract and the real. In more practical terms, 2 or 3 of these teams will stack up some points over the next couple months and leave the relegation conversation altogether. Strength of schedule won’t tell you which ones. This article is meant to be a reference, allowing you to observe the lay of the land without telling you how the actual battles themselves will go.
