We’re officially past the point in the U-23 rankings where potential alone will get you a spot. When you make your way closer and closer to #1, you have to show ability in a top-flight league, preferably Serie A, to show that you’re a serious hope for the future and for the present. There’s no doubt that Santiago Castro has the Serie A experience necessary to view him as a player that Roma can rely on now and for the next five seasons. The biggest question circling the new Giallorossi #9 is whether
he will be able to seize the opportunity handed to him confidently, with Donyell Malen ahead of him in the pecking order.
Number Four: Santiago Tomás Castro
Age: 21
Position: Striker
Shades of: Lautaro Martinez, Julián Álvarez, Carlos Tevez with less wide play
Who Is He?
Santiago Castro (who likes to go by Santi) was born in San Martín, Buenos Aires, Argentina, nearly 22 years ago. He first came to the attention of the Argentine football system while playing for the youth team at Vélez Sarsfield, the club he joined at age seven. After a decade in that youth system, Castro was given the chance to debut for their senior side in August 2021 at the age of sixteen. Since then, it’s been a generally quick rise to the top for the young striker, as he racked up 65 appearances across all competitions for Vélez Sarsfield before transferring to Bologna in January 2024 for around €13.2 million.
While that second half of the 2023-2024 season was a quiet one for Castro, the departure of Joshua Zirkzee to Manchester United following Bologna’s Champions League qualification gave the compact forward an opportunity to establish himself as a key piece of a side in transition.
Castro took the chance. He made 46 appearances in all competitions in 2024-2025, scoring ten, and ended the campaign holding a Coppa Italia medal. That win provided Bologna with its first major trophy in 51 years, sealed by a 1-0 win over Milan in the final.
The 2025-2026 season asked even more of Castro. Bologna spent it splitting their attention between a Europa League run and a league campaign that ended three points short of European qualification. Castro finished the season with 11 goals and three assists in all competitions, making him the second-most impactful offensive player for I Rossoblu behind Riccardo Orsolini. That performance was strong enough for Roma to want to buy into the Santi Castro experience. The Giallorossi paid Bologna a reported €35 million for Castro, signing him to a five-year deal and handing him the number 9 kit right before Roma’s return to the Champions League after eight seasons in the wilderness.
What Can He Do?
With all the usual provisos that Castro was doing these things for Bologna, a much smaller side than the Giallorossi, the highlight reel makes it clear that he can already provide exactly what a modern center forward is expected to provide for a side fighting for European qualification.
Castro’s most valuable trait is that he can attack the space behind the defense with ease; he runs the channels, acting as a target man when necessary and as an outlet when called upon. Vincenzo Italiano used all of these skills during his time with Bologna, helping mold Castro into a striker who was ever-present on the ball in a way that’s belied by his (somewhat) lower goal tally.
A lot of this comes down to Castro’s physical profile. The Argentine striker isn’t short, but he isn’t tall either; the real physical attribute that helps him boss an attack is his physical strength. In a league where weaker attackers are often pushed off the ball by a defender willing to play dirtier to avoid a goal, Castro is resilient. Paired with his strong close control, he could be an excellent complement to some of Roma’s more lithe attackers (particularly Rodrigo Mora, when that transfer is finalized).
What Can He Become?
Lautaro Martinez is the best-case scenario, for a lot of reasons. When Inter paid Racing €25 million for a 20-year-old Lautaro in July 2018, his first season with the Nerazzurri didn’t blow the roof off of Serie A. He scored a respectable nine goals, only for him to become a regular capocannoniere threat the next four seasons. Castro is at effectively the same point in his career as Lautaro Martinez was after that first season with Inter; he’s shown he can handle a top-flight European league, but he’s not a world-beater just yet. Let’s be honest, if he had had a 20+ goal season with Bologna, Roma couldn’t even sniff his socks in this current market.
With that in mind, a reasonable hope for the Gian Piero Gasperini is that Castro is a 12-to-15-goal striker across all competitions immediately. Now that he has a stronger attacking corps, Gasperini’s tactics should create more attacking volume than Italiano’s Bologna did. With the Champions League adding a lot more fixtures for Roma to handle throughout the season, Castro should get enough minutes to make that projected goal tally a reality.
That’s not to say that this kind of season is guaranteed, of course. Gasp’s system is physically punishing and demands defensive work from each player on the pitch; that’s a hole that Castro needs to fill in his game to become an out-and-out starter for GPG in the long term. A silver lining is, of course, that Gasperini’s physical demands seem to be messing with just about every player this training camp, so Castro certainly isn’t alone in needing to adjust to the demands of this tactical system. Still, Roma isn’t Bologna; Italiano could afford to let a 21-year-old striker learn on the job last season, while a club that’s finally back in the Champions League can’t afford it’s number nine the same leniency.
At least for now, the most likely outcome is that Castro becomes a very good Serie A center forward, one who regularly cracks 15-20 goals per season across all competitions. He’ll make the players around him better both for club and country, but may not reach the heights necessary to displace the world-class strikers already at the center of La Selección.
Yet there’s still just enough of a chance he becomes a true world beater in the mold of Lautaro Martinez to make Tony D’Amico’s gamble more than worth it. €35 million for Santiago Castro now is a bet that, at 24, he’ll be much closer to Martinez than not.
We’ll start seeing if that bet pays out very, very soon.
