The Serie A has always been a wildly unpredictable league. If the footballing spectacles within the league are nothing to write home about, the underlying stories and subplots which dominate it’s discourse, most certainly deserve attention.

Four-horse races at the head of the table; Italian manager merry-go-rounds; returning legends; revived fallen giants… There’s a plethora of fascinating things going on for the average European fan to stink their teeth into.

But the most intriguing of the lot? That’s Fiorentina. A team which finished 6th in the 2024/25 campaign, reaching the UEFA Conference League semi-finals in the process - sits rock bottom of the Serie A table with 1 win to their name after 16 games.

So, what on earth has happened in those 6 months from the end of last season to where we are now? How have Fiorentina become so dire so quickly?

There’s a lot of difficulty when it comes to answering that question. You would think that such an unprecedented fall-off would be the result of a large exodus of key players, horrible luck with injuries or uninspiring transfer business in the summer. None of these situations arose. La Viola kept most of the important players who helped them overachieve massively last year. Moise Kean, Dodo, Yacine Adli, Robin Gosens, David De Gea - all of them stayed put. In fact, Fiorentina’s squad got significantly better over the off-season.

Tariq Lamptey was bought in from Brighton to bolster the right-back position. Roberto Piccoli and evergreen Edin Dzeko were signed to provide adequate back-up to star player Moise Kean. Several other shrewd pieces of business were made as Fiorentina looked to recruit predominantly from Italy in order to deepen their squad in preparation for a season filled with European football. In total they spent over €90 million - a fairly substantial amount for a Serie A side.

Fiorentina’s downfall can be pinpointed to have started at an exact moment. That was, when head coach Raffaele Palladino mysteriously left the club after guiding them to their most impressive points tally in over 10 years. Mysteriously because we still have no idea why he actually left. In an interview with La Gazzetto della Sport, the Italian cryptically revealed “I view football as a puzzle, all the pieces need to fit together for things to function… the conditions weren’t right to continue. Our ideas and vision were too far apart.”

What this really means? Nobody knows. We can speculate all we want, with whispers circling that he had a horrible relationship with Sporting Director Daniele Prade. The truth will inevitably come out in all its might when the time is right.

The result of Palladino’s shock exit was seismic. The players were left completely in the dark, the fans were puzzled. The man that had nearly led Fiorentina to the promise land of the Champions League was no longer there and as too was the coach who had turned around the careers of Moise Kean and Robin Gosens, Fiorentina’s best 2 players of last year’s campaign.

*Moise Kean has 5 goals and 1 assist in 20 games this season. Image via @Italy_focus on X*

But nobody knew that Palladino’s resignation would result in this catastrophic season. In fact, it’s hard to believe it all falls on his departure. The truth is, whilst Fiorentina spent heavily in the summer window, they brought in 12 new first-team players. This is a level of turnover likely to cause more problems that it solves. Bloated squads and an unhappy dressing room filled with players who all think they should be playing more, especially when results aren’t going as planned. Palladino’s successor in the Fiorentina dugout, Stefano Pioli, stated how problematic the transfer window may prove to be when he first joined the club.

Pioli, a Scudetto winning head-coach with AC Milan, was received with cautious optimism by fans. He had a good track record in Italy and understood the club as well as anyone really could, having both managed and played for them. But his tenure was more disastrous than anyone could’ve anticipated. Pioli drew four and lost six on his way to anchoring Fiorentina to the relegation spots. Not a single new signing was flourishing. The heroes of last campaign were all shadows of the players they once were. Pioli constantly rotated lineups in hopes he would stumble on something that worked, but nothing did. 0 wins in 10 is the epitaph for which his second stint in charge of Fiorentina will be remembered.

So is there any hope for Fiorentina fans, or should they begin to solemnly prepare for life in the Italian second division?

They’ll be glad to know that it isn’t all over just yet. Although no club has ever escaped relegation after winning 0 games from their first 13, by expected points, Fiorentina should be much higher in the table. It’s an accumulation of dramatically underperforming in front of goal and letting far too many shots in which means that instead of 11th in the league, which xP suggests they should be, they currently sit in 20th. Most data analysts suggest that this sort of stuff tends to even out over the course of a season and teams’ bad/good luck runs out. But over the past few seasons we’ve seen clubs stick their middle finger up to ‘xG’ over a whole league campaign. Most notably Nottingham Forest last season and Man United the one before who both dramatically overperformed on the attacking side of things. Luck isn’t an exact science at all but Fiorentina being a mid-table team as far as the stats suggest paints a slightly more positive picture of their season so far.

*The last time Fiorentina were relegated was in the 1992/93 season. Gabriel Batistuta & Brian Laudrup were both key fixtures of the side. Image via @80s90sfootball on X*

The other glint of hope for La Viola is that both Pioli and wretched Sporting Director Daniele Prade have now been relieved of their duties, both leaving the club in early November - much to the relief of the fans. In have stepped Paolo Vanoli, former Torino coach who’s more than used to a fierce relegation battle - and former Spurs Director Fabio Paratici who looks destined to head back to Italy at the time of writing.

As of yesterday, Fiorentina finally won their first league game of the season, thrashing Udinese 5-1 at home. They currently sit 5 points off 17th with two extremely important games against Parma and Cremonese coming up. It’s not impossible for them to stay up, far from it. The start of the season has been a mess caused by lack of cohesion long-term thinking upstairs. These issues may finally have been rectified, the poison has been relieved from its chalice and now the pressure is on to make sure one of the nation’s most historic clubs doesn’t find themselves in the ghastly depths of Serie B.

They have a squad far too good to go down and the stats suggest they should be alright. Let’s see if they are able to use last game against Udinese as a platform for a positive change in results, or if it was just a blip in what has been an historically dark season at the Artemio Franchi stadium.

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