Leadership is not being afraid to prostrate yourself at the altar of whatever god has cursed you in hopes of propitiating their ire. | Davide Casentini/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesTitoMon, December 1, 2025 at 10:46 PM UTC·10 min readPlayer grades
David de Gea—7.5: Not at fault for either goal and I counted 4 very good stops he made among his 7 total. The first was a freak that looped into the top corner by mistake and the second was the rebound from a strong save he’d already made. Was even better on the ball than usual.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementMarin Pongračić—4.5: Kept Ademola Lookman fairly quiet (except for the goal), but his sulkiness is really wearing thin. I just don’t get him as a player; he bodied Kamaldeen Suleimana, nearly giving up a PK, but also managed to lose a header to the diminutive Lookman. He plays like a bully, aggressive when he thinks he can get away with it and timid otherwise.
Pablo Marí—4.5: Battled away with Gianluca Scamacca and fully deserved his yellow card. He’s too slow and too grabby for the man-marking job he’s been assigned. To his credit, he’s doing his very best at it. On the other hand, he’s full of mistakes and a liability on the ball. Felt fitting that he had to get subbed off against a team employing Raffaele Palladino, who pounded the table in order to bring him to Florence.
Luca Ranieri—6: Look, Luca’s got technical and physical limitations and won’t ever be a star; watching him try to keep up with Charles de Ketelaere isn’t fun. But he’s one of very few guys on this team who’s trying, constantly charging forward in desperation to make something happen, and he created a couple good chances. His petulance with the referees is more about being captain than anything else, I think. He’s baffled by his teammates’ listlessness and is button-mashing to see if he can get them going.
Fabiano Parisi—6.5: Fiorentina’s best player in the first half, constantly driving at Raoul Bellanova and giving the Italy international a tough time; I’d say that he won the battle on his wing, all things considered. I still don’t trust him but he’s earned a promotion over the past few weeks.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementSimon Sohm—5: The stats on fbref look decent but anyone who watched knows this was a stinky performance from the Swiss army man. Skewed a volley so badly I wasn’t sure it counted as a shot, borked a couple decent moments, and continues to struggle on aerial challenges despite his physical advantages. Only his teammates’ incompetence has kept him from the top of the fans’ shit list.
Nicolò Fagioli—5: The enigmatic midfielder showed a little fire, yelling at his teammates to get in position, occasionally trying to get the ball forward instead of pointlessly maintaining possession, and quarterbacking most of Fiorentina’s decent moves. He also missed some passes he had to make and offered Ranieri no help on de Ketelaere, who was the game’s obvious best player.
Rolando Mandragora—6: Like Ranieri, he’s giving it his all in a way that demands respect. He’s redlining himself without the ball, including one minor miracle where he ran down Lookman from behind on the break in an open field and took the ball from him. He won’t ever be the player we all want him to be but he is, at worst, a useful guy who’s grown into a leadership role. Even when he doesn’t have a huge impact going forward, you can tell he’s trying.
Dodô—3: Something bad has happened to our guy and it makes me sad. He used to be a smiling, selfless engine and one of the 3 best right wingbacks in Serie A. Now, he isn’t interested in getting the ball, loses it when he does, and makes the wrong decision every time. The passage in which he spent about 6 seconds dribbling around the Atalanta box before shooting instead of passing it to Kean summed it up. Between his diminutive size and his plumage, he’s clearly the canary in the coal mine and he’s in dire straights.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementMoise Kean—6: Had a very unlucky day, seeing one shot cleared off the line and another clang off the upright. He’s still more than a handful for most defenders but his frustration is always on the verge of boiling over. His sarcastic bow in thanks to referee Matteo Marcenaro for calling a foul on Isaac Hien got him booked, of course, but reminded me of Nico González’ sending off against Inter Milan in 2021 for clapping.
Roberto Piccoli—2: His athleticism and hard work mean I’m willing to forgive him the occasional flubs, but missing an open goal (plus a couple other good chances), dribbling out of bounds under no pressure, failing on every touch in the final third, losing the ball 7 times on 28 total touches, and spending more time flat on the turf complaining than actually playing was unforgivable. It’s embarrassing that Paolo Vanoli removed him in favor of midfielder Cher Ndour when his team was trailing by 2, and even more embarrassing that Fiorentina improved. I’m worried Bobby Smalls is on a Mario Gómez trajectory in Florence, which means pointed straight at the ground and preparing to leave a smoking crater.
Niccolò Fortini—4.5: He was clunky, struggling against Nicola Zalewski and looking clumsy on the ball. He generated little going forward and was rickety going back. And yet he was still an order of magnitude better than Dodô.
Albert Guðmundsson—4: A couple of tidy moments but his failure to do anything positive in the final third (0 touches in the penalty area) means it was another flat performance. His lack of physical talent makes him look like nothing more than Icelandic Andrea Colpani.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementPietro Comuzzo—5: Was he perfect? No. Was he Pablo Marí? Also no. Clearly an improvement.
Cher Ndour—5: Still prone to weird touches and his brain is still a tick slower than his body at times but you can see the makings of a useful and versatile player in there.
Amir Richardson—5: Very rusty having just returned from mourning his father’s death a couple weeks ago, and of course this was his first appearance this year as Stefano Pioli banished him to the shadow realm. There was a bad foul and a couple of dumb passes, but there were also hints of ambition on the ball and positive forward distribution. I don’t think he’s the solution to Fiorentina’s midfield woes but I’d like to see more of him.
Three things we learned
1. I need to fix myself. Woooooooooaaaaaah.Fiorentina came out flat, missed a couple of chances, had some bad luck, conceded from a dead ball, and ended up with a well-deserved loss. The team played a 3-5-2 featuring some frail defending, an anonymous midfield, and strikers who look like perfect strangers. No, this wasn’t another Pioli special. That’s in the past. This was Vanoli’s Viola, and that’s the problem.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementTo be clear, the mister can’t change everything. He can’t just make the players better and he can’t scrap the entire tactical setup to install something new on the fly. He’s still getting to grips with the problems, which are complex and multitudinous. I can tell you one thing, though, and that’s that he won’t get anywhere by following the tracks that Pioli laid.
The whole point of bringing in a new coach was to get something else out of the players. Having them play the same way negates that. Again, it’s not FIFA. Vanoli can’t just move the slider from Dire to Adequate and have that reflected in the product on the pitch. It takes time. My opinion, though, is that he needs to shake stuff up because continuing in the same tactical direction means Pioli might as well be here. The players need something else to focus on, to wake them up, and that means making changes just for the sake of making changes. What’s the worst that could happen? 13 games without a win?
2. We’re going down, down in an earlier roundFiorentina is, as you may have heard, winless through its first 13 games. That’s happened to 9 other teams since 2000. Every one of them got relegated. Some of them battled back and went down swinging but most had, by this point, accepted their fate and sleepwalked through the rest of the year, grabbing the odd cathartic win for the supporters but never looking like breaking out of the drop zone.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementNone of those teams ever had aspirations like Fiorentina did this year, of course. 5 of those 8 were newly promoted, and nobody thought Chievo Verona, Hellas Verona, or Ancona was a European threat. To that end, this might well end up being the most disappointing season of any Serie A team of the millennium, which is a substantial accomplishment.
It’s wild to talk about escaping relegation in December, but if Fiorentina does, it will be a historic accomplishment and deserving of, well, not celebration, but at least a grudging respect. Pioli spoke this summer about the chance to qualify for the Champions League and make some noise in the cup competitions, to do something historic. His successor, ironically enough, may wind up making history as he cleans up Pioli’s mess, albeit history of an entirely different type.
3. Love is the coal that makes this train rollIt’s very easy to be negative about Fiorentina right now because everything about the club is very, very bad. From top (Rocco Commisso, doing a bad job) to bottom (Gino Infantino/Abdelhamid Sabiri, doing bad jobs), everything is bad. The Viola have created a three-dimension desert, an empty wasteland that stretches as far as the eye can see in both horizontal and vertical axes. It’s a philosophically significant achievement, if nothing else.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThat’s how we need to look at this season, I think. We’re beyond the point of frustration or grimly prophesying doom. That’s boring now. Any dope can look at Fiorentina and say, “Yeah, this team’s awful and deserves everything bad that happens to it.” That’s the lowest common denominator, Twitter banter point of view, the type that I’ve spent years trying to transcend on this website.
After all, if you’re here, you’re a weirdo of some kind. Unless you have a direct familial connection to Florence, you actively chose Fiorentina at some point. You could’ve picked a better team, one that regularly won trophies, but in your wacky brain, you decided that a bunch of goofballs wearing purple and always falling agonizingly short was a better recipient of your love. The fact that you’ve stuck with that terrible decision shows character and a certain level of creative thinking, qualities I admire in anyone.
Just because we’re now faced with adversity of biblical proportions, there’s no reason to change now. Gallows humor and graveyard whistling are all we’ve got. Raging at past decisions that brought Fiorentina to this point doesn’t make any difference (in fact, it never did). We might as well accept our fate with a wry smile rather than the helpless tears of fury, if for no other reason that it’ll make the whole experience a little less unpleasant for our fellow sufferers.
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