Europe’s Most Exciting Team? All Eyes on Roma as Gasperini Makes Fans Dream Again

“Playing Atalanta is like going to the dentist,” Pep Guardiola famously said in 2019.

A sense of foreboding starts forming in your stomach and sweat permeates the forehead. It is a wholly unpleasant experience, frightening even, for some.

All of which is at odds with Gian Piero Gasperini’s football, which was largely exhilarating over nine hugely successful and transformational years.

And yet the comparison isn’t entirely without its merits. At their best, Atalanta were as relentless as a whirring drill, leaving their opponents as helpless as a patient in the dentist’s chair.

None of this was even remotely on the horizon when Gasperini took charge in the summer of 2016. Atalanta had just finished in 13th place after never coming higher than 11th in the previous four seasons following promotion from Serie B in 2011.

By the time Gasperini left for Roma, he had turned La Dea from a club fretting over its Serie A status to one that never finished lower than eighth in his nine seasons in charge, and qualified for the Champions League five times.

Atalanta lost three Coppa Italia finals under Gasperini – reaching the semis on two more occasions – but lifted the Europa League in 2024, thrashing Bayer Leverkusen in the final courtesy of an Ademola Lookman hat-trick.

It was La Dea’s first European silverware and their first trophy in 61 years, an astonishing achievement for a club that had for decades been known as the ‘queen of the provinces’ – Bergamo has a population of just 120,000, ranking outside the top 30 in Italy’s most-populated cities list and below places such as Foggia and Rimini.

Atalanta’s relentless pressing and devil-may-care approach had already accounted for Sporting, Liverpool and Marseille and in Dublin it caused Xabi Alonso’s finely tuned machine to short-circuit.

It was Gasperini’s football at its best and it captured the imagination of Europe, far more than results themselves.

Atalanta upended calcio’s status quo, but never quite managed to win the Scudetto, coming closest in 2024-25 as eventual champions Napoli’s toughest challenger until January.

Not that anybody in Bergamo, where Gasperini remains a hero, has any regrets.

“Winning the Europa League was a surprise to everyone,” Atalanta fan and New Balance Arena regular Danny Bird tells Destination Calcio.

“Especially beating Liverpool and an unbeaten Leverkusen. The Champions League never really felt like a missed opportunity, I don’t think anyone had hopes of us winning it.”

Gasperini’s reputation as one of the game’s great thinkers is in stark contrast to the credentials he carried when he first arrived in Bergamo, having just come off the back of a lukewarm return to Genoa, his three-year stint nowhere near as successful as his first between 2006 and 2010.

After a failed spell at Inter that lasted all of five games and one with Palermo that finished after little more than 20, his career appeared to be on the way down. Instead, he turned it all around.

So, can he work his magic again with Roma? The early signs are promising. Gasperini took six months to get his methods across last season, but eventually led the Giallorossi to Champions League qualification for the first time in seven years.

Perhaps more importantly, he won a bitter feud with Claudio Ranieri and Frederic Massara, then-Roma’s special adviser and technical director respectively, who have both since departed.

With the club firmly behind him, Gasperini has his team purring.

They beat Fiorentina 4-0 and Lecce by the same scoreline in their first two Serie A matches to kick off Gasperini’s second campaign in the Eternal City in style. And it was three in a row when they saw off none other than Atalanta.

As one of calcio’s oldest adages has it, August is unreliable at best and a liar at worst, but two summers into Gasperini’s reign, they finally look like Scudetto contenders.

“Compared to Gasperini’s first year, the squad already understands his footballing philosophy, which is why they’ve hit the ground running,” Fabio Capello told La Gazzetta dello Sport. “I even told Gasperini twice myself: it’s time for Roma to start winning again.”

Capello would know all about it as he was the man who led the Giallorossi to their last Scudetto 25 years ago, before finishing second a point behind Juventus the following term.

They certainly have been the most exciting team to watch in Serie A, perhaps in European football as a whole, so far this season. Not even Lazio’s unexpected revival under Gennaro Gattuso after a dismal summer – the Biancocelesti won their first two games – can wipe the smile off the Romanisti’s faces.

There has hardly been a better time to be a football tourist in Rome, a city that lives vicariously through its two clubs.

And then, of course, there is the Champions League. The competition that announced Gasperini to a wider audience, but the one he never quite mastered.

Two-time defending champions Paris Saint-Germain and English giants Manchester United are among Roma’s eight opponents in the league phase, but it’s the home fixture against Real Madrid on October 14 that has been circled in red on calendars across the Italian capital, as it marks Jose Mourinho’s return to the Stadio Olimpico.

The Portuguese won the Europa Conference League with the Giallorossi in 2022, lost the Europa League final the following season and reached another semi-final 12 months later before leaving halfway through his third campaign.

Mourinho left positive memories in Rome, but his football is at the opposite end of the scale to Gasperini’s, who in 2019 told Italian magazine SportWeek that “conceptually, I have close ties with Guardiola”.

Realistically, not even the most ardent of Romanisti expect their team to win the Champions League. Serie A – and to a lesser extent the Coppa Italia – are by far the priorites for a club that has won just three trophies in a quarter of a century since their last Scudetto.

But as Gasperini reflected after Atalanta thrashed Juventus 4-0 in Turin in February 2025: “Dreaming is a joy, not an obligation. Never deny people their dreams, sometimes the impossible becomes reality if you believe with all your heart.”

For now, Roma can at least dare to dream. And to join them on their journey, check out our playbook with all the information you need.