Bologna lost three key figures last summer, and yet, they don’t appear to have missed a beat. We look at how the Rossoblù overcame upheaval on the pitch and in the dugout.
It’s a tale as old as time, at least in football terms.
A modest club has an impressive manager and players, and as a result, must ultimately relinquish them to bigger clubs with more money and start again.
Bologna had a superb 2023-24 season under Thiago Motta, finishing fifth in Serie A and qualifying for the UEFA Champions League for the first time. They finished five points ahead of Roma, six ahead of Lazio and a whopping 15 ahead of Napoli, albeit in a poor season for the defending champions.
Their patient passing style under Motta won them, and him, plenty of admirers, so it was little surprise when Juventus came calling for the Brazil-born coach’s services in the summer of 2024.
He was followed out the door by star players Riccardo Calafiori and Joshua Zirkzee, so how would Bologna be able to fare in 2024-25 having been shorn of so much?
As it turns out, perfectly fine.
It wasn’t a great start to the season, winning just one of their first 11 games in all competitions, though seven draws in that time also suggested Bologna would still be difficult to beat. Their only three losses in those first 11 came away to Napoli, Liverpool and Aston Villa.
However, things have picked up since. After 29 games, the Rossoblù sit in fourth place, above Motta’s Juve in fifth.
Their improvement in recent months has been impressive. In 2025, only Roma have picked up more Serie A points (29) than Bologna (25).
They are also on a four-game winning streak in the league for only the second time in the last 55 years, after a run of six games in a row between February and March 2024. Their next league game is away to 19th-place Venezia, which they will be heavy favourites for, but then they host second-place Napoli.
Bologna’s latest success was a notable one, thrashing Lazio 5-0 at Stadio Renato Dall’Ara. It was the first time they had won a Serie A match by a margin of at least five goals since February 1997 (6-1 at home against Hellas Verona).
On top of everything, they’ve had to manage a Champions League campaign for the first time ever.
It didn’t go brilliantly, with Bologna winning just one point from their first five games. But as their form turned domestically, it began to show in Europe too as they ended the league phase with a 2-1 home win over Borussia Dortmund between respectable draws at Benfica (0-0) and Sporting CP (1-1).
So, how have they done it despite the losses of Motta, Calafiori and Zirkzee?
The club’s technical director Giovanni Sartori – who had history of building impressive teams with little money at Chievo and Atalanta prior to joining Bologna in 2022, working alongside former Rossoblù striker and current sporting director Marco Di Vaio – was expected to go for more of the same to replace Motta. He was a young coach with fresh ideas, and the decision to bet on him had paid off handsomely.
However, somewhat surprisingly, they brought in the more experienced Vincenzo Italiano, who had left Fiorentina after leading them to back-to-back UEFA Conference League finals, albeit La Viola were beaten in both. Italiano had been expected to land a job at one of Italy’s giants, but Bologna secured his services, and despite an early wobble, it appears to have been another inspired appointment.
Italiano has kept the same 4-2-3-1 formation that Motta utilised to great effect, and he’s almost exactly matched his predecessor to this point. Bologna have 53 points after 29 games, one fewer than at this stage last season (54), but it is only the second time in the three-points-for-a-win era (since 1994-95) the club has had this many points after 29 games.
Despite losing Zirkzee, who top-scored for Bologna in Serie A last season with 11 goals before moving to Manchester United, they have scored their most goals (49) through 29 Serie A games since 1965-66 (54). In fact, with nine games remaining, Bologna have already scored just five fewer goals than in the whole of last season. It seems to be largely down to better finishing, with Italiano’s side averaging 13.8 shots per game compared to 12.6 last season, with only a slight rise in expected goals (xG) per game from 1.28 to 1.39.
At the other end, Bologna have already conceded two more goals (34) than they did in the whole of last season (32), even though they’re averaging two fewer shots against per game (8.8) than in 2023-24 (10.8). In fact, Bologna (256) have faced the fewest shots in Serie A this season, though their xG against per game (0.97) is almost identical to last term (0.98).
The main issue is that they have given better quality chances to opponents this season than last. Shots conceded by Bologna from non-penalty situations in 2023-24 averaged 0.08 xG per attempt, which has increased to 0.10 in 2024-25. As a result, teams are finishing their chances more frequently this season, converting 11.9% of non-pen shots compared to just 7.0% in 2023-24.
Last season under Motta, Bologna averaged 58.3% possession in Serie A, with only Napoli (61.3%) averaging more. Under Italiano, their average possession in the league has dropped very slightly to 58.2%, with only Inter (59.7%) and Juventus (59.2%) averaging more. But the main change is where they are having possession on the pitch compared to last season with Motta in charge.
Field tilt measures territorial dominance between teams, looking at the share of possession each side has in their attacking third compared to their opponents. A field tilt of over 50% means your team makes more passes in the opposition’s final third than they make in your defensive third. Last season in Serie A, Bologna’s field tilt was 55.8% (seventh highest in the league), but that has increased to 64.5% under Italiano (third highest).
Bologna’s passing accuracy in Serie A games has dipped this season, from 86.5% last term to 83.6% this, but there is one fairly obvious contributor to that: they are attempting a lot more long balls than they did under Motta. In fact, Bologna have attempted more long balls than any other team in Serie A this season (1,441), which is quite a change from 2023-24 when only Milan recorded fewer (1,767).
They are also attempting more progressive passes. Last season, Bologna were 14th in Serie A for progressive passes, but only the three teams above them in the table have attempted more than their 829 this season.
Despite this change in approach, Bologna are largely controlling games in the same way. As you can see from their zones of control maps from last season and this, they are practically identical, as is their points return.
Italiano’s team are balanced in their attack, almost equally utilising both flanks, with a difference of just 1.0 percentage points between ventures down the left (37.5%) and right (38.5%), making them an unpredictable prospect to defend against.
Riccardo Orsolini has already matched his goal output in the league from last season (10). With his excellent dinked finish against Lazio on Sunday, he became only the third Bologna player to reach double figures for goals in three different Serie A seasons since 1994-95, after Di Vaio (four in a row between 2008-09 and 2011-12) and Giuseppe Signori (four between 1998-99 and 2002-03).
Remo Freuler, who signed permanently last summer after a successful loan spell in 2023-24, has provided great balance in midfield for Italiano just as he did for Motta. The former Nottingham Forest man has created the second most chances (29) for Bologna in Serie A this season, as well as also winning possession the second most often (117).
The expectation was that new arrival Thijs Dallinga would replace Zirkzee’s presence up top, but the former Toulouse striker has been unable to displace young Argentinian Santiago Castro, who has eight goals and four assists in Serie A this season. Like Zirkzee, the 20-year-old is a well-rounded attacker for Bologna, leading the team in attacking sequence involvements in the league this term with 106.
Italiano has developed the team off the ball as well. Bologna have tallied the second most high turnovers in Serie A this season, with their per-game average up to 7.4 from 6.3 last season. With nine games remaining, they have already nearly matched last season’s totals for shot-ending and goal-ending high turnovers.
Bologna have the most pressed sequences in Italy’s top flight in 2024-25 (362) after only having the seventh most last season. These are defined as the number of sequences starting in the opposition’s defensive third where the opposition has three or fewer passes, and the sequence ends in their own half. Bologna’s total is at least 31 more than any other team.
In terms of comparing their playing styles over the last two campaigns, Bologna had the third most average passes per sequence in Serie A last season (4.4) but are now joint-eighth with Torino (3.6), while their direct speed upfield has only increased slightly.
Viz by Jonathan ManuelThey are busier defensively, though, which could help explain why they have faced so few shots. Their 903 defensive actions are at least 83 more than any other team in Serie A, while they have also allowed the fewest opposition passes (8,168). This therefore means Bologna have a PPDA (opposition passes per defensive action) of just 9.0, the lowest in Serie A by a distance, with Motta’s Juventus the next lowest at 10.7.
This means Bologna engage opponents with a high press more intensely than any other Serie A team. In fact, among all teams in Europe’s top five leagues, only Monaco (8.7), Barcelona (8.6) and PSG (8.5) have a lower PPDA than Bologna this term. They had the third lowest PPDA last season in Serie A at 11.6.
Fifth place in the league last season saw Bologna qualify for the Champions League, but they will likely have to go one better this time if they want to return to Europe’s top table, as Italy is unlikely to get an extra spot again.
While it is a tremendous achievement for Bologna to be sitting fourth after 29 games, especially considering they are ahead of the team who took their manager last summer, Italiano’s men still have a lot to do to finish there. According to the Opta supercomputer, Bologna have a 24.4% chance of a top-four finish, with their most frequent final position across 10,000 simulations being fifth (25.8%), which would at least match their achievement last season.
Bologna have a potentially season-defining run of five games that sees league fixtures at home to Napoli, away to Atalanta and home to Inter sandwiched by the two legs of their Coppa Italia semi-final against Empoli.
Should they end 2024-25 with a top-four finish and/or silverware in the Coppa Italia for the first time since 1973-74, the celebrations in Emilia-Romagna could even surpass last year, which ended in an estimated 40,000 fans lining Piazza Maggiore.
Enjoy this? Subscribe to our football newsletter to receive exclusive weekly content. You can also follow our social accounts over on X, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.
Bologna Proving Succession Planning is More Important than Stars Opta Analyst.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Bologna Proving Succession Planning is More Important than Stars )
Also on site :