Roma have started this season with a different posture. Not just winning games, but dictating them. At the centre of it all stands Gian Piero Gasperini, a coach who has wasted no time turning the Giallorossi into a side that looks, unmistakably, like his own.
From the touchline at the Stadio Marcantonio Bentegodi in Verona on May 24, 2026, his silhouette told the story: constant movement, sharp gestures, relentless instructions. This is not a man easing his way into a new job. This is a manager taking control.
A Coach With Unusual Clout
Inside Trigoria, Gasperini’s influence already feels heavier than that of many of his predecessors. That is no small statement at a club that has recently housed José Mourinho, a serial winner and a dominant personality in any dressing room.
Yet Gasperini appears to operate with a broader mandate. The tactical blueprint is clearly his. The training intensity is his. The selection calls, the positional tweaks, the demands on players with and without the ball – all unmistakably his handwriting.
The hierarchy seems to have granted him room to shape not only how Roma play, but what Roma want to be. That kind of power can tilt a season. It can also redefine a club’s ambitions.
The Malen Project
Into this environment steps Donyell Malen, a striker with pace, instinct, and a ceiling still to be reached. Under a different coach, he might simply be another forward expected to hit respectable numbers. Under Gasperini, he becomes a project.
The question is not just how many goals Malen can score. It’s how far Gasperini can push him.
The Dutchman has already shown flashes of a forward who thrives in space, who attacks the box with conviction, who can punish high defensive lines. Gasperini’s system, built on aggression, verticality, and wave after wave of runners, offers him exactly that: a constant supply line and a structure that drags defenders into places they don’t want to be.
The conversation has already turned to something bolder: can Malen, in this setup, mount a serious tilt at Gonzalo Higuaín’s extraordinary 36-goal Serie A record?
Chasing Higuaín’s Shadow
Higuaín’s mark remains one of the great modern benchmarks in Italian football – a number that usually belongs more to fantasy than to planning. To even mention it in the context of a Roma striker says plenty about the early impact of both player and coach.
The season is still young. Form can fade, injuries can intrude, defences can adjust. Yet the early signs invite the question rather than dismiss it.
Malen does not need to become a one-man finishing machine. Gasperini’s sides rarely rely on a single source of goals; they overwhelm from multiple angles. But if the patterns hold – wing-backs flying, midfielders crashing the area, constant overloads – Malen will keep finding the ball where strikers dream of receiving it: close to goal, with defenders scrambling.
That is where records start to look less like fantasy and more like a target on the horizon.
Roma’s Ceiling Under a Firm Hand
So what does all this mean for Roma’s season? At minimum, a team that looks sharper, more assertive, more convinced of its own plan than in recent years. At maximum, a genuine title challenge built around a coach in full command and a striker flirting with historic numbers.
Gasperini has stamped his authority on the squad with startling speed. The players have responded. The club, by all indications, has handed him the keys.
If this is only the beginning, the real question for the rest of Serie A is simple: how far can Roma go now that they finally look like a team built to attack the top, rather than just talk about it?
