Top of the table. Five matches into the Serie A season, Roma have thirteen points from fifteen — four wins and a draw — with fourteen scored and three conceded. The goal difference is plus eleven and the goals come to nearly three a game. Read the concession column twice: three in five league matches is the kind of number that gets a defence written about.
Position one after five matches is not a trophy and nobody here is calling it one. But the arithmetic underneath is the kind that holds up: four wins and a draw, points dropped once, and both ends of the pitch keeping up its end. Three conceded is barely more than one every two, and the fourteen at the other end keep arriving.
The match records know this season from its sharp end. The fourteenth of September: two-nil away at Torino, in a match played at the Stadio Olimpico Grande Torino. The nineteenth: two-two at home with Inter at the Stadio Olimpico. Five days apart, and between them the two halves of this team's whole argument — a clean sheet on the road and a four-goal draw at home.
Every match row in this book is a league match, all the way back to the twentieth of October 2024. The competition list names the Coppa Italia as well; the rows here are all Serie A. Six rows, one league, two years and a bit of history: this book is short and very specific.
The Inter ledger, Roma's side of it: a one-nil home defeat on the twentieth of October 2024; a one-nil win away on the twenty-seventh of April 2025; another one-nil home defeat on the eighteenth of October 2025; two-five away at the Stadio Giuseppe Meazza on the fifth of April 2026; and the two-two on the nineteenth of September. Every one of those one-nils went to the away side. The same five fixtures sit in Inter's match records with the same scorelines — both books agree.
That five-two deserves its own sentence. Seven goals on the fifth of April, the only match in these records with that many in it, and the only one of the five Inter meetings that ended with any daylight in the score at all. Three of the five finished one-nil to whoever had travelled; one finished level; the fifth was chaos in numbers.
Six matches sit in the match records in total and they hold sixteen goals — seven of them on that April night alone. The other five average under two goals each. Before the two-two five days ago, none of the four previous Inter meetings in these records had finished level. One more oddity: the three home rows in this book hold no wins at all — two one-nil defeats and the two-two — while the three away trips brought two wins and the five-two. Three of the six rows are from 2026 and three from the two years before it.
What the table makes plain is the defence: three conceded in five, and a plus-eleven doing the rest. What it leaves out is everything before this season — the older Inter meetings live in the match rows and in no table, because tables only ever count the present tense.
Top of the table, three conceded, and the Inter meeting ending in a shrug. The table does the boasting; the match rows do the remembering. First with three conceded is a line worth reading twice.
By the numbers — Serie A: 1st · 5 played · 4-1-0 · 14-3 · 13 pts · form WWWWD (oldest → newest). All data from ScoreCrowd's match records, retrieved 24 September 2026.