Roma 4-0 Fiorentina: for once the scoreline did not inflate a thing

The verdict, before the numbers

Usually our job is to spoil the party. The rout arrives, everyone talks about dominance, we open the data and discover the match was even and the scoreline lied.

With Roma-Fiorentina that does not happen. The 4-0 is the most honest result of the entire Serie A matchday, and one of the very few, anywhere in Europe, in which the pitch and the scoresheet say the same thing.

The number that settles it

Roma 3.78 expected goals. Fiorentina 0.29.

Thirteen times as much. That is not a figure of speech: it is the ratio between what the two sides built in ninety minutes.

To grasp how extreme Fiorentina's 0.29 is: it is the lowest figure of the whole Serie A matchday. In practice, an entire team produced across ninety minutes less than a single big chance is worth. Nine efforts, four on target, and a total threat that sits below a third of a goal.

At the other end: 17 shots, 8 on target. Roma hit the target twice as often as Fiorentina managed a meaningful shot.

And that is the difference with Inter, who on the same weekend beat Monza 4-1 while creating just 1.54 against 1.22. There the scoresheet inflated the performance by almost two and a half goals. Here scoresheet and performance coincide: Roma created 3.78 and scored 4. Gap: +0.22. Practically zero.

Malen: three goals, but it was not luck

Donyell Malen finished with 1.66 personal expected goals from five shots. It is the highest figure of any player in Serie A this weekend.

The number says two things at once, and it matters to separate them.

The first: the chances he had were real. He did not score three impossible goals, he repeatedly found himself in high-probability positions. A player who gets into those areas five times in a match gets there because his team puts him there, not by accident.

The second: he still did better than expected. Three goals from 1.66 expected means almost a goal and a half above average. An evening out of the ordinary, the kind no forward repeats every week. It is his second Serie A hat-trick.

The goals come on 28, 53 and 62 minutes. All three from assists by Paulo Dybala, who ends with three of them and a hand in almost everything Roma built. On 86 minutes Pisilli adds the fourth after another Viola defensive lapse.

The match was decided without the ball

The least eye-catching number is the one that best explains the 4-0: PPDA, that is, how many passes you let the opposition make before going to win the ball back. The lower it is, the more you press.

Roma 8.2. Fiorentina 19.1.

Roma went to disturb after eight passes. Fiorentina allowed more than twice as many. This is not a tactical detail for insiders: it is the reason one team had seventeen shots and the other nine. Roma won the ball high and close to goal, Fiorentina watched.

Possession, for the record, reads 61% Roma. But possession is the most overrated number in football: what counts is where you win the ball back, and Roma won it back where it hurts.

The honest bit

A word of warning, because it is August.

For Roma: the performance is real, the scoreline is not inflated. But 3.78 expected goals a match is a rate nobody sustains over thirty-eight matchdays. This is the best possible version, not the average.

For Fiorentina: 0.29 xG is a serious number, and bad luck does not explain it, there is nothing to fix in front of goal, quite simply nothing was created. It is the one figure from this weekend worth looking at with concern, because unlike missed chances, chances never created do not come back on their own.

And there is one final reason this match deserves the attention it is getting: on a weekend when three teams in ten won despite creating less than their opponents, this is one of the few in which the pitch and the scoresheet tell the same story.

Want to check for yourself? The Meritometro delivers the verdict on every match of the weekend based on the chances, not the result. And in the Nerd Zone you can see shot by shot where Roma built those 3.78 goals.