★ Moneyball Original · Opinion
"Football is rubbish without fans": Lazio's best start in a generation, in front of empty seats
By Moneyball Editorial · published
"Football is rubbish without fans." Gennaro Gattuso said it, and he meant it as a plea. His Lazio side have made their best start to a Serie A season in a generation, 19 points from 7 matches, level with Inter, with a Juventus 0-3 Lazio in Turin (expected goals: Lazio 0.56, Juventus 1.25), and they have done it in front of the emptiest Olimpico anyone can remember. The fans are not staying away because the team is bad. They are staying away because of who owns it. This column asks two questions. Is the start real? And what is it costing Lazio not to have a crowd?
A civil war, not a slump
As Goal reported, the conflict between Claudio Lotito and Lazio's organised supporters goes back to 2004, when he took over the club. He set out to cut the ultras' grip on tickets and merchandise, and it has been war, cold and hot, ever since. Lotito, a businessman and a senator, is one of Serie A's most controversial figures. Under him Lazio have won six trophies; under him, too, the fans accuse the club of selling its best players and spending too little to replace them.
Last season it broke. Maurizio Sarri, the coach, publicly backed the fans' boycott. Against Genoa in January only 5,402 people watched Danilo Cataldi score a 100th-minute penalty. Valentín Castellanos and Matteo Guendouzi were sold and, the fans say, barely half the money was spent. Lazio finished ninth, lost the Coppa Italia final to Inter, and Lotito answered the anger with insults, a plan to list the club on Nasdaq at a value of €1.5 billion and a stadium at the Flaminio worth €3 billion. An open letter in Il Messaggero asking for peace was answered with four words: "It's too late now." Thousands did not renew their season tickets for 2026/27. The opening Coppa Italia match, against Mantova in August, drew just over 5,000, nearly half of them away fans. Lazio lost 2-0 to a Serie B side.
And then Gattuso's team started winning.
Is the start real? Ask the chances
Hot starts are the easiest thing in football to misread. Seven or eight matches are enough to put a team top and nowhere near enough to prove it belongs there. So we do what Moneyball does with every team: ignore the scorelines for a moment and look at the chances. Each league match's expected goals go through the Dixon-Coles score matrix, the model behind our Match Board, to give the points that performance usually earns.
The honest answer is: partly. Lazio have 19 points from chances worth 9.6 expected points. That gap of 9.4 is the kind that tends to close. They are 2nd on points but 10th on expected points. Their Pi-rating, which moves after every result by how far the margin beat what was expected, has them 3rd in Serie A.
| Measure | Lazio | Rank of 20 |
|---|---|---|
| League position (points) | 19 pts from 7 | 2nd |
| Expected points (from xG) | 9.6 from 7 | 10th |
| Pi-rating (goal margin vs average) | +0.18 | 3rd |
| Strength after shrinkage (xG margin per match) | −0.01 | 11th |
| Projected final points | 61 | 5th |
The warning sign is the finishing: 14 goals from 9.6 expected (+4.4). Very few teams keep that up. At the back they have conceded 5.7 fewer than the chances they allowed: good goalkeeping, good fortune, or both, and the kind of number that drifts back.
The top of Serie A, three ways
| # | Club | Pts | xPts | Pts − xPts | Pi | Projected |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Inter | 19 | 15.8 | +3.2 | +0.20 | 78 |
| 2 | Lazio | 19 | 9.6 | +9.4 | +0.18 | 61 |
| 3 | Roma | 17 | 14.0 | +3.0 | +0.19 | 70 |
| 4 | AC Milan | 15 | 11.8 | +3.2 | +0.12 | 63 |
| 5 | Como | 14 | 10.8 | +3.2 | +0.09 | 59 |
| 6 | Frosinone | 13 | 7.6 | +5.4 | +0.06 | 50 |
Pts − xPts: points won minus the points the chances usually earn. Positive means ahead of the performances (red), negative means behind them (green). Pi: goal margin against an average Serie A side. Projected: points so far plus the shrunk strength played out over the matches left.
Gattuso, the coach Italy wrote off
Gattuso was a surprise choice. Italy's failure to reach the 2026 World Cup under him had hardened the idea that he is all passion and little tactics. Gigi Buffon, who worked beside him with the national team, disagreed loudly: he compared Gattuso to Marcello Lippi, in the way he manages a group and in the commitment he draws out of players. "Every Serie A coach is competent," Buffon said; the difference is the bond with the squad and the feel for a game as it happens. The defender Oliver Provstgaard said the dressing room has a togetherness he had not felt before, and that Gattuso has a lot to do with it.
The numbers describe a team that works for each other: Pressure Index 51.6 (8th of 20), tackles 13.6 a match (18th of 20), expected goals against 1.38 a match (7th of 20), possession 48.4% (10th of 20). This is not a side that overwhelms opponents; it is one that refuses to be beaten.
| Player | Minutes | Rating | Goals | Assists | xG |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Christos Mandas | 630 | 7.41 | 0 | 0 | 0.00 |
| Mattia Zaccagni | 623 | 7.36 | 1 | 3 | 2.11 |
| Nuno Tavares | 504 | 7.29 | 1 | 3 | 0.41 |
| Matteo Cancellieri | 294 | 7.13 | 1 | 0 | 0.49 |
| Davide Frattesi | 536 | 6.98 | 3 | 0 | 1.50 |
| Danilho Doekhi | 323 | 6.97 | 0 | 1 | 0.49 |
The draw that tells you everything
As Goal reported, the only league match Lazio had failed to win was a 2-2 with AC Milan, after leading 2-0 at half-time. Mattia Zaccagni, the captain, said afterwards that a full Olimpico might have carried them over the line. It is the most revealing comment of the season. Teams that are 2-0 up at home and pinned back for 45 minutes need something the coach cannot give them: noise, the sense that the stadium is pushing the other way, a referee who feels it too. Lazio had a few thousand people and a lot of empty blue seats.
Gattuso has tried to wave it away (his line is one match at a time), but he has also been honest about the squad. The transfer window was again thin. Davide Frattesi looks like a very clever signing, but the depth behind the first eleven is not that of a team built to win the league. The start has come from a group playing above itself, and the one thing that sustains a group like that over a long season is a crowd that carries it on the bad nights.
What a crowd is worth
Gattuso is right in a way that can be measured. In 2020, when European football was played behind closed doors, home advantage fell across the major leagues, in some almost to nothing. Referees, it turned out, gave fewer decisions to the home side without 50,000 people reacting to every tackle, and players lost a little of the lift that a full stadium gives. A crowd is worth points.
Lazio this season: 2.33 points a match at the near-empty Olimpico (3 matches) and 3.00 away (4 matches). They are doing better on the road than at home, which is exactly what a team without its crowd looks like. The Olimpico has become a neutral ground. Across Europe's top leagues a home side usually takes around four-tenths of a point a match more than it does away. Over 19 home matches, that is a handful of points: the margin between a title race and a top-four finish.
The boycott is the fans' only real weapon against an owner who does not want to sell, and they have every right to use it. But it is also hurting the players, the coach and the season the fans waited a quarter of a century for. Sporting director Angelo Fabiani called for the supporters to "lay down arms" before the home match with Parma. They refused.
Lotito's case, fairly put
It would be easy to write this column as a morality play: the greedy owner, the loyal fans, the brave coach. It would also be lazy. Lotito took over a club with crushing debts in 2004 and kept it alive. He has won six trophies in 22 years, more than most Lazio presidents managed in their lifetimes. His answer to the boycott, delivered in fury at the end of last season, was that he is building something bigger than any one transfer window: an academy, a stadium of Lazio's own at the Flaminio, a listing in New York that he says would value the club at €1.5 billion and at €3 billion with the stadium. "I have to protect Lazio's history," he said. "I cannot let it go bankrupt."
The trouble is that a football club is not only a balance sheet, and Lotito has spent two decades talking to his own supporters as if they were a nuisance. Calling the boycotters names did not win anyone back. Writing an open letter to "Lazio Clubs" that the supporters' groups said showed how little he knew about them did not either. Their reply was that the letter was an attempt to split the fans into good and bad, and that it would fail. So far, it has.
What should happen next
- Talk, with a referee. Twenty-two years of shouting have proved that neither side can win by force. A mediator the fans trust, with a written agenda, is the minimum.
- Open the books on transfers. The core accusation is that sales are not reinvested. If that is wrong, the numbers can show it. If it is right, they will show that too.
- Give the supporters a seat. A formal role in the club's decisions, even a small one, costs an owner almost nothing and changes the tone of everything.
- Do not punish the team for the president. Gattuso and his players have done everything asked of them. A season like this one does not come round often.
The Moneyball view
Some of the start is real, some of it is a hot streak. Our projection, which shrinks the early numbers toward the league average, puts them on about 61 points (5th): very likely a European place, a title only if the chances catch up with the points. Either way, Gattuso has the right line: football is rubbish without fans. The tragedy for Lazio is that the best team they have had in years is playing to a stadium that has every reason to stay empty. The ones who can end the civil war are not on the pitch.
- Expected goals (xG): the quality of every chance, so a team is judged on what it created and allowed, not only on what went in.
- Expected points: each match's xG run through a Dixon-Coles score matrix (the Poisson model with the low-score correction the Match Board uses) to give the points a performance usually earns.
- Pi-ratings: a rating for every club at home and away, moved after each result by how far the goal margin beat or missed what the ratings expected.
- Bayesian shrinkage: a club's xG margin is pulled toward the league average as if it had 8 average matches more, so a hot month is not mistaken for a new level.
- Projection: the shrunk strength played out against an average opponent for every match left, added to the points already won.
- Finishing and goalkeeping regression: goals against xG at both ends. A big gap either way rarely lasts a season.
- Home and away split: points per match on each side of the fixture list.
- League ranks on Sportmonks' team figures: possession, passing, pressure, chances, duels.
- Player ratings per 90, from the same Sportmonks data that runs Moneyball Scout.
This is an opinion column by Moneyball Editorial. Background and quotations from Goal's reporting on Lazio's season. The figures update themselves after every round, and the sentences around them change with the figures.
Questions
- Why are Lazio fans boycotting the Olimpico?
- In protest at president Claudio Lotito, in charge since 2004, over the club's direction and its spending on the squad. Thousands did not renew their season tickets for 2026/27.
- Is Lazio's start real?
- This column tests it with expected points: each match's expected goals run through a Dixon-Coles score model. A start built on chances lasts; one built on finishing above the chances usually fades.
- Does a crowd really matter?
- Yes. When matches were played behind closed doors in 2020, home advantage fell across Europe's leagues. A team without its crowd gives up part of its edge at home.
- Where do the numbers come from?
- Sportmonks match data for Serie A, read by the Moneyball engine and updated every time the site updates.