In only a matter of days, the 2024/25 Serie A season will begin. Before the action gets going, let’s take a look at the five most pressing questions around the league, including a spotlight on defending champions Inter Milan, Champions League chasers Roma, and 2023/24’s most disappointing team Napoli.
Will Roma make it to the Champions League?
Roma have literally finished sixth in each of the past three seasons, so you could argue that they haven’t materially improved since firing Jose Mourinho, who was dealt a pretty bad hand by the club’s management going into the 2023/24 season despite having led the club within a penalty shootout of a Europa League triumph.
Mourinho put Roma back on the map and renewed the vigor within the capital club, and now it is up to club icon Daniele De Rossi to build on that. So far, the early returns are good, but whether it is De Rossi or Mourinho leading the charge, the Giallorossi clearly need a better squad in order to challenge even the likes of Atalanta for a top four position.
Roma have done just that this summer, making three of the most high-profile signings in Serie A in midfielder Enzo Le Fee, striker Artem Dovbyk, and right winger Matias Soule.
Dovbyk has probably gotten the most headlines since he scored over 20 goals last season for one-time title upstarts Girona, and Roma paid nearly 40 million euros in order to secure the signing over 2020/21 LaLiga champions Atletico Madrid.
Soule, formerly of Juventus, may be a bigger fish, though, because he is a playmaker and even goal-scorer in the Paulo Dybala mode. He was one of the best playmakers in Serie A last season with 2.8 dribbles completed and 2.3 key passes per game on a very poor Frosinone side.
Only 21, Soule can be a future building block for Roma, and, in the immediate future, he is a nailed-on starter and part of the best attacking trios in Serie A on paper alongside Dybala and Dovbyk.
Roma have a stellar attack, but the defense and midfield still lack depth, even with the underrated Le Fee signing. With the Giallorossi, it becomes hard to be a true believer because it feels like they are just one bad injury to someone like Leandro Paredes, Chris Smalling, or Lorenzo Pellegrini away from crumbling into rubble.
That said, Roma have pretty much as strong of a squad on paper as Atalanta or Juventus, so if luck is on their side, they can finish in the top four. And with a striker who can presumably finish his chances better than Lukaku in 2024/25, they will like their chances at making their own luck.
Can anyone challenge Inter Milan?
As unpredictable as Serie A has been in each of the past handful of seasons since Juventus lost their monopoly on the crown, the actual champion of the league has been pretty easy to decide in the final weeks; it’s been a while since we’ve seen a proper title race in Italy.
These past two seasons, Napoli and Inter Milan were the clear winners, and while it would be nice to say that Inter will get some real competition next season, truth be told, you could argue that they improved more than any of the other teams in the top four.
AC Milan didn’t actually upgrade their defense or midfield this summer, Juventus debatably got worse by gutting their attack without signing any valid help for Dusan Vlahovic, and while Atalanta have signed Mateo Retegui and Nicolo Zaniolo, those two high-upside signings aren’t enough to bridge the tap between fourth and first.
Meanwhile, Inter probably lengthened the gap between themselves and everyone else further by making arguably the two best free signings in Calcio, poaching creative midfielder Piotr Zielinski from Napoli to give what is already the league’s best midfield a new dimension, while 20-goal Porto striker Mehdi Taremi brings his athletic prowess and all-around quality to a ludicrously loaded front line.
Inter are the pick of the litter in Serie A. They have the best defense, midfield, goalkeeper, and striker duo, and it isn’t even close in any of those cases. Juventus and AC Milan had to do more on the transfer market to push Inter in any of those categories, and aside from Juve changing up their midfield, those teams didn’t make any ground there. Serie A is absolutely still Inter’s to lose.
How ugly will things get for Antonio Conte and Napoli?
Antonio Conte is a master at blowing things up. Whether it’s Juventus, Chelsea, Tottenham, or even Inter Milan, Conte is a specialist at making a scene on his way out, but, often, he does have a point buried in a mad rage, because most of these teams failed to meet his demands.
With Conte, it’s a respect thing, and no club better epitomized how an executive branch can disrespect a great manager than Tottenham, perennial purveyors of all that is mediocrity.
The extra slap in the face for Conte is watching how Tottenham and even Inter Milan have invested in new managers double to what they have Conte, who basically gave Romelu Lukaku a second lease on footballing life and developed a lot of the players who have become mainstays for 20-point Serie A champions Inter today.
So Conte is going to do great things for Napoli. It would be foolish to claim that a manager with Conte’s track record for both top Serie A clubs and the Italian national teams can’t turn his players into killers both tactically and mentally.
But the problem is that Conte can never be a part of a sustainable project, and, on top of that, Napoli’s Aurelio De Laurentiis is not the easiest man to work with. I mean, the guy even ran Carlo Ancelotti out of Naples in an act of pure lunacy that had Calcio pundits flabbergasted as to how De Laurentiis could villanize the beloved Ancelotti, who has since proven that he is the best manager in the world right now.
Napoli basically did the same thing to Luciano Spalletti, who led the Partenopei to their greatest season since the day of Diego Armando Maradona. So if those two couldn’t get along with De Laurentiis, then the clash of egos between Conte and Napoli’s boss is about to be the stuff of legends that will have even the Italian footballing media saying, “Whoa, this is too ridiculous, guys.”
Conte is going to help Napoli; he’s too good of a coach not to. But, man, from the moment their season kicks off, the countdown clock will be playing for the inevitable implosion.
Who will be this season’s Bologna?
Honestly, nobody really fits the bill as a mid-table team that’s going to suddenly bust up the rankings and threaten for Champions League qualification, but if there are two true mid-table sides (Napoli’s one-off in 10th doesn’t count, and Fiorentina are too good to be a true surprise) worth considering, then they would be Udinese and Torino.
Udinese were 15th last year and probably aren’t good enough as an all-around squad, but the return of Alexis Sanchez to the city where he actually became a European footballing star (before heading off to Barcelona) is a compelling story.
Sanchez is 35 but was brilliant for Marseille with 14 goals in his last season as a regular starter in 2022/23, and he’s had a couple of nifty seasons as a rotational striker for Inter Milan sandwiched around a throwback year in the French top flight.
Obviously, Sanchez is a fraction of the player he once was, but he and captain Florian Thauvin, another former Marseille star, are a real two-headed monster to watch alongside new signing Iker Bravo from Real Madrid, the MVP of the U19 European Championships.
Torino finished higher in the table last season and have a more balanced squad, holding onto key starters like Rauol Bellanova and Nikola Vlasic. Having Che Adams, Antonio Sanabria, and long-time Serie A star Duvan Zapata as strikers to choose from is quite a boost.
It’s that selection of attacking talent and finishing that could set Torino apart from the rest of the mid-table, which includes a Genoa side that just lost one of the best strikers in Italian football, Albert Gudmundsson, to Fiorentina.
Torino and Udinese are both unlikely to qualify for European football, but they are both interesting sides with a few quality pieces who could make some of the traditional Serie A powers sweat a little.
How high can Como go?
Como are the new Monza, a promoted side from Serie B with heavy investment and arguably an even more ambitious project than their predecessors with the likes of Raphael Varane, Cesc Fabregas, and Andrea Belotti on board.
Even one of the top center backs of the 2023/24 Serie A season, former Cagliari man Alberto Dossena, has joined the Como train, and expectations for the club’s first season are high.
It’s unrealistic to expect Como to finish in the top half of the Serie A table, but it’s not impossible. The biggest issue is going to be based around breakout stars and if Belotti can recover the quality he showed at Torino as compared to his poor spell with Roma.
Finding goals and difference-making attacking quality is generally the most difficult thing for a Serie A newcomer, which is why Monza went after established veterans at striker and benefited so much from Andrea Colpani as a playmaker – Colpani has now moved to Fiorentina.
Como are going to be relying a lot on Belotti to be a creator and scorer, but they also have a player familiar with shining on mid-table or lower-table Serie A sides in playmaker Simone Verdi.
And if Patrick Cutrone can find the talent at 26 that made him a top prospect at AC Milan, then perhaps Como have an enviable striker duo in Cutrone and Belotti that is necessary to truly compete in Calcio.
The managing editor of The Trivela Effect, Kevin has 15 years of experience in digital media. He covered Real Madrid from 2019-2022 for The Real Champs as a site manager. You can contact him at the site’s official Twitter handle @TrivelaEffect or via the site’s official email thetrivelaeffect@gmail.com.