Juventus return from the final international break of the 2025 calendar year this Saturday with a trip to Florence.
Both Juve and Fiorentina — a club that, rumor has it, doesn’t like the Old Lady from Turin
all that much! — have already made managerial changes as they’ve dealt with their own unique sets of struggles so far this season. One club, the one that wears purple, is in much worse shape through the first 11 games of the 2025-26 season than the one in bianconero when it comes to their respective positions in the table, and that has caused even more angst than usual from Viola supporters in Florence.
Even though he doesn’t live in one of Italy’s most beautiful cities, we decided to call in one of those Fiorentina supporters to get the temperature — and other things — of how things are going at Viola Park these days.
(Hint: they’re not great!)
That’s right, folks. Our old buddy Tito from Viola Nation is back for another one of his drop-ins where he fills us in on everything that is going on with Fiorentina these days. And by “what is going on” right now, it’s pretty much just “what has gone wrong” ever since the last time Juventus and Fiorentina played each other back in March.
And let’s face it, with the season Fiorentina have had so far, it’s pretty much just talking about what’s wrong and nothing close to positive when it comes to Tito’s favorite club. (One that he loves and sometimes wonders if it will ever love him back.)
Let’s not wait around any longer to get this going. It’s time to talk Fiorentina with Tito.
DP: Tito, as always, thank you for dropping by our corner of the SBN Italia family. I think it’s a pretty obvious place to start this out, so I ask: What the hell is going on at Fiorentina?
T: Well you may ask, Danny. Well you may ask. On the macro level, what’s going on is the chickens of years of minimal organizational oversight coming home to roost. Club owner Rocco Commisso has been minimally involved for the past few years, leaving team president Joe Barone and DS Daniele Pradè to run the show as they saw fit. They built a pretty good relationship and rode Vincenzo Italiano’s excellent coaching to some good results, but when Barone died unexpectedly last year, it all fell apart. To be clear, a lot of folks (including me) had been critical of some of Barone’s processes, but he’d done a decent enough job wrenching a moribund club onto an upward trajectory.
Commisso didn’t replace Barone — who was more than his right-hand man and was also a close friend — and handed the reins to Pradè and club CEO Alessandro Ferrari, who has no background in soccer (he was a supermarket executive before this). Barone’s tragic death thew a wrench into the Viola business since, but it’s hard not to see Pradè’s expanded role leading to the current collapse: he alienated Raffaele Palladino so much that the mister resigned a day after the entire organization expressed its confidence in him; he made a series of very poor transfer decisions (e.g. €30 million for Roberto Piccoli) that have left the squad very limited; and he hired Stefano Pioli.
More than that, though, this year was a huge opportunity for Fiorentina to take a step forward. With so much turmoil throughout the top half of Serie A, a smart and well-run organization could’ve capitalized and grabbed a Champions League spot. When it became very clear that Fiorentina is not smart, not well-run, and barely qualifies as an organization at this point, the combination of inflated expectations, as well as simmering resentment about Palladino and a host of recruitment mistakes, reached a boil, and even Commisso, squirreled away in New Jersey and clearly not interested in his club anymore, had to do something. Unfortunately, years of neglect (or absolute faith in the Barone/Pradè combo, if you prefer) have left the Viola with no institutional knowledge at the top of the org chart and unproven leadership in Ferrari and acting DS Roberto Goretti, who’s never worked at this level before.
Of course, what’s gone wrong on the pitch is an entirely different question and I’m sure that you won’t put me through the suffering of reliving this accursed season.
DP: Well, then let’s just get to the manager who was hired over the summer to replace Palladino and his handsomeness. Pioli’s return to Fiorentina was a disaster and didn’t even make it through November. What can Paolo Vanoli do, at least in the short term, to try and get things headed in some sort of positive direction?
T: Yeah, Pioli was awful. He walked into what was, in hindsight, an untenable position and got some organizational stink on him that wasn’t entirely his fault, but he was truly disastrous. I thought that his previous tenure in Florence, when he provided the club with a level of dignity, humanity, and emotional ballast that carried it through those horrible days and weeks after Davide Astori’s death, would buy him a little more time, but his inability to reach the players — there were stories over the summer about his guys not understanding their roles and wholly credible rumors of dressing room insurrections over the past month — demonstrated that he was out of his depth.
Tactically, I don’t expect Vanoli to a whole lot differently. The biggest difference I noticed against Genoa (the mister’s first game in charge) was that the Viola wingbacks started deeper, which had some interesting effects higher up, but I don’t want to read too much into a single game after Vanoli’s had 1.5 training sessions to implement his ideas. He’ll probably stick to a 3-5-2 and sit deep, looking to hit on the break, which is what Pioli was trying to do too. Given that this team doesn’t have any wingers — Pradè spent the past two years getting rid of them (and Nico González sends his best) — there aren’t that many other options. I don’t foresee a return to a 4-man defense because Dodô and Robin Gosens have huge responsibilities in attack and thus need extra cover, necessitating a back 3. Vanoli’s locked into the same setup.
The difference is vibes. I won’t pretend to be an expert on Vanoli as a coach, but he’s said all the right things so far, including that Fiorentina has to play like it is where it is in the table. That means we’re going to see some ugly, scrappy stuff, but hopefully with some hunger and accountability on the part of the players. Vanoli spent years working with Antonio Conte and has adopted his mentor’s attitude. I’m skeptical that such a confrontational, disciplinarian approach can work for more than a couple of years, but it often seems to fix listless teams like this, forcing them to build good habits and stop being idiots. That last part is probably impossible for Fiorentina, but if Vanoli can get these guys playing like professionals, he’ll be fine.
Part of the problem is the players (Fiorentina’s xG is hilariously fifth-best in Serie A), so you could argue that some of the problem is less structural and more down to guys not kicking the ball correctly, but this team as a whole is such a mess.
DP: Without there being a truly overwhelming choice to take over for Pioli, do you think Vanoli has the ability to get things improved enough so that Fiorentina isn’t a relegation battler in a few months?
T: Vanoli’s as good a choice as any available. The Fiorentina fan base clamored for local boy Luciano Spalletti, of course, but il mago di Certaldo was never going to take on this sort of job. The only candidates were either unproven young coaches or guys who’ve built their careers in the bottom half of the table. As much as my fellow fans don’t want to hear it, that’s what the Viola are now, and they need, as Vanoli says, to act like it. Pretending like some sort of glorious past gives them license to behave differently is exactly what’s gotten the team into this mess.
Sorry, I’m ranting.
Anyways, on paper, yeah, Fiorentina should be fine. To get to 36 points (the minimum non-relegation total since 2018-2019) will require 1.33 points per game, which would be good for right around 10th over the course of a full season. That’s achievable. The next bottom-six teams — Lecce, Pisa, Parma, Genoa, Verona — are all pretty bad and I don’t seen any of them really improving all that much. There’s also the thing where the newly-promoted teams tend to fall off over the back half of the season as opponents figure them out. My expectation is a finish around 15th with relegation a specter looming over Fiorentina’s shoulder but not really threatening by March or so.
Of course, it could be that such supernatural imagery is all too appropriate and this cursed team is heading straight for Serie B, which would be a very funny way to start its centennial next year. Yep, Fiorentina turns 100 next year and Commisso’s talked a big game about having the Stadio Artemio Franchi ready to go. The construction’s already dropped way behind schedule and getting relegated would be a very Viola birthday present. That extra pressure could also prod Commisso to spend big in January, as the ignominy of a centennial in Serie B is considerable.
DP: Why hasn’t Moise Kean been able to replicate his first season in Florence?
T: The funniest (I use the word loosely) part of Fiorentina’s season is the attack. Despite boasting Serie A’s fifth-best xG, this team’s nine goals are just 14th in the league, and that’s squarely on Kean’s shoulders. He’s racked up the highest xG of any player, both total and from open play, and has scored two (2) goals, including a penalty. He’s still a nuclear athlete and despite the team’s overall dysfunction he’s still getting chances. The Viola signed him to a massive contract this summer and brought him reinforcements to ensure he wouldn’t have to do too much besides make his devastating runs in behind. There’s no reason he shouldn’t have scored a bunch more goals. If he had, Pioli might still have a job.
I really can’t tell you what’s going on beyond Moose not kicking the ball good. Just as a Fiat 300 runs on gas the same as a Ferrari Murcielago, Kean runs on confidence the way that, say, Federico Bonazzoli does. The difference is the Sassuolo man has four goals and is brimming with confidence, while Kean’s dial is in the red. A few bad misses (including the worst in Serie A this year) have compounded and now he’s snatching at his shots His first touch has also been way off, not just his shooting, so it’s not just the one thing. My take is that he spent all of last year on an outrageous hot streak and has regressed back beyond the mean now and should bounce back. That means ensuring that he’s confident, which means generating can’t-miss chances for him, which requires the rest of the team to improve. If that doesn’t fix it by January, it’s less a matter for a coach and more one for a psychologist. Or an exorcist.
DP: I remember talking to you about some of the transfer moves Fiorentina made over the summer and you seemed relatively happy with the business they were doing at the time. What has changed? Why haven’t a lot of these worked out so far?
T: These players are who they were when Fiorentina brought them in this summer. The only difference is that now I remember I’m a goddamn idiot and you probably shouldn’t listen to me about anything ever. Which does undermine this entire article, which, hey, Danny? That’s my bad.
Anyways, I don’t think that every addition this summer is dead weight. I remain high on ya boy Nicky Beans, for example, although his attitude’s been pretty bad, and Simon Sohm should be useful as well, although he’ll never be a star. I overrated Hans Nicolussi Caviglia a little bit. He doesn’t have the technical or tactical ability to operate as the single pivot but I can see him doing fine in a double pivot. I also don’t hate Roberto Piccoli, who’s the best forward in the world as long as he doesn’t have to touch the ball; his athleticism, off-ball movement, and work rate are impressive but his feet are made out of iron and he probably shouldn’t have cost €30 million. Jacopo Fazzini also has a lot of tools but needs some coaching to figure out how to use them.
I wasn’t sold on Albert Guðmundsson last year and feel like I’ve been proven correct there; Pradè got him at a discount but also still got scammed. Edin Džeko’s got character and ability but he might be the only guy in Serie A I could beat in a foot race, and I’m not in peak condition. Tariq Lamptey looked fun but, in a shocking turn of events for a guy who’s missed nearly 20 games on average over the past three years, is out for the season with a knee injury. Mattia Viti and Luca Lezzerini are fine depth pieces but nothing more.
In short, any of these guys could’ve been a good and useful addition in better circumstances. Unfortunately, they all arrived into bad circumstances. The purpose of a team is to emphasize everyone’s strengths and hide their weaknesses; under Pioli, Fiorentina’s done the exact opposite for every player who’s seen the pitch. I don’t think that Vanoli’s going to turn any of the new arrivals (or the returning squad members, for that matter) into world beaters, because none of them are world beaters. They’re all competent, though, and just need to be set into a context that allows them to prove it. You could take any player on earth and drop them into this Fiorentina and they’d look this bad. It takes everyone working together to create a team this bad and that’s exactly what the Viola have done.
DP: How about a prediction for Saturday’s proceedings?
T: Do I have to?
OK, fine. I’m not a gambler but I pay attention to the odds because the people setting them are making a ton of money from them, and most of the odds I see have the Juvenuts as something like 1:2 favorites. That makes sense for all the obvious reasons, most of which begin and end with Fiorentina being cheeks. Juve’s got its own problems, as you’re well aware, but they diminish as to nothing when compared to the scale and volume of Fiorentina’s.
I’m hanging onto hope, though, that this is the first Viola win of the year because that is the funniest possible outcome and the universe delights in stupid humor like a classroom full of 12-year-old boys. Like a hippopotamus dangling above a bottomless ravine, suspended by a rope spun from cotton candy, I’m clinging to this last shred of hope that I know isn’t real.
1-0 to Fiorentina. Fagioli sets up Kean. Mayhem all across the pitch for 90 minutes followed by the sweetest relief any of us have ever experienced. I know it’s not going to happen. You know it’s not going to happen. The angels in heaven and the demons and hell and every conscious being between them know it’s not going to happen. But man, I need this. I hate Fiorentina and I hate myself for loving Fiorentina and I need this right now, Danny. I need this bad.
