Lazio's unbeaten start invites a Leicester City comparison, with caveats
Dario Marcolin says Gennaro Gattuso's Lazio echo Claudio Ranieri's title winners, but the mechanisms behind the table-topping run are rooted in squad cohesion and a kind run of fixtures, not a miracle.
Lazio sit level with Inter at the top of Serie A on 25 points after nine rounds, having won eight and drawn one, a record Dario Marcolin says bears comparison to Leicester City's title-winning campaign under Claudio Ranieri.
The former Lazio, Napoli and Blackburn midfielder, who made 110 appearances for the Biancocelesti, told Gazzetta, via TMW, that Gennaro Gattuso's side has become "like an open book" and that their start to the season is "unprecedented".
Marcolin's reasoning rests on more than form. He pointed to the fact that Lazio play the same way home and away, a marker of tactical identity he says "adds certainty", and to the advantage of a side competing in only one competition this season, meaning a single fixture per week rather than the rotation and fatigue management that midweek continental football imposes.
Consistency without a continental distraction
The one-competition factor is not a minor detail. Clubs juggling European football must rotate personnel, manage minutes and sometimes sacrifice results in one competition to protect another. Lazio have no such calculation to make, and Marcolin's point is that this single-mindedness lets Gattuso repeat the same approach, with largely the same players, week after week.
That repetition is precisely what Marcolin says Leicester demonstrated a decade ago: that a settled, coherent plan applied consistently can outlast more resourced sides across a long campaign. His comparison to Manchester City in the same breath is less about scale and more about the idea that Lazio have shown they "can get all the way" if the current level holds.
He is careful to frame this as early-stage evidence rather than a finished story, noting Lazio have played only nine of 38 league matches, with 29 fixtures still to come. His claim is narrower than the headline comparison suggests: that Lazio have already shown enough to finish in the top four, not that they will necessarily win the title.
Taylor's tempo and Frattesi's second-ball menace
Marcolin singled out three individuals shaping the run. He likened Taylor, a Dutch former Ajax player, to Lazio great Winter, praising his habit of dictating tempo, the pace at which a team moves the ball and advances, rather than simply retaining possession.
Controlling tempo matters because it determines how quickly a side can shift from settled build-up into attacking transition, and how much time opponents are given to reorganise defensively. A player who regulates that rhythm effectively, as Marcolin credits Taylor with doing, gives a team control over games without needing territorial dominance.
Frattesi's contribution, in Marcolin's reading, is different: a constant goal threat and a disruptive presence that opponents must account for even when he is not the one finishing moves. Marcolin attributes part of that sharpness to a personal motivation, describing him as driven by "a spirit of revenge", though he does not elaborate on its source.
Zaccagni, meanwhile, is described as more confident and secure within the squad than before, a psychological read rather than a tactical one, but one that Marcolin links directly to Lazio's attacking cohesion this season.
Why the Leicester comparison only goes so far
The result that prompted this discussion was Lazio's 6-2 away win at Sassuolo on Tuesday, continuing their unbeaten Serie A run into the midweek round. The Guardian's Nicky Bandini noted that around 10,000 Lazio supporters made the 300km trip to Reggio nell'Emilia for that match, notable given home attendances have fallen sharply amid Lazio's separate dispute with their owner.
That detail sits outside the tactical picture but says something about the moment Lazio are in: a club drawing unusually large away support while its on-pitch results outstrip recent expectation, even as its off-pitch relationship with supporters at home remains strained.
Marcolin's comparison to Leicester is instructive as a model of what sustained consistency can produce, but the structural conditions are not identical. Leicester's run is cited here only as a historical reference point for overperformance relative to resources, not as a tactical blueprint Lazio are following; Marcolin draws the parallel in outcome, not method.
Lazio's test of that consistency comes quickly. They host Cagliari on Sunday 1 November before travelling to face Massimiliano Allegri's Napoli on Sunday 8 November, the final Serie A fixture before the November international break and a meaningful marker of whether Gattuso's side can carry their identity into a tougher away assignment.