Roma's Bench Is Winning Games, but the Back-Three Changes Are Costing Them

Roma's 3-0 win over Sassuolo sends them into the international break in good shape. The Champions League collapses against Real Madrid and Manchester United still stick in the mind, though, and they should. Those games exposed a pattern that's starting to look more like a habit than bad luck.

Gian Piero Gasperini has done plenty right. Roma are unbeaten in Serie A through 11 games, and getting back into the Champions League last season was a serious achievement. Their pre-match work looks sharp, and the side moves the ball with more fluidity and menace than at this point a year ago. The weak spot sits in the middle of matches, where a handful of substitutions have been hard to justify.

Changing the Back Three Is Costing Roma

Swapping two-thirds of the back line against United was asking for trouble. Leonardo Balerdi, the one starting centre-back who stayed on, was arguably the most culpable for handing the English side a way back into the game. Madrid followed a similar script. The second defensive change came only minutes before José Mourinho's side pulled a goal back to cut the deficit to one.

The September draw with Inter is the clearest warning. It was Roma's biggest throwaway in Serie A this season, and by the final whistle none of the starting back three were still on the pitch. Inter's equaliser arrived between the second and third centre-back changes. That's a lot of reshuffling for a team trying to protect something.

My read is that the rear-guard is the one area you leave alone when protecting a lead, barring injury. Defenders need full concentration, and they're far more reliable when they're already settled into the rhythm of the game. Roma have repeatedly asked players to come on cold and hold a lead. Twice in Europe, that gamble has backfired.

To be fair, you can't always tell why a substitution is made. Fatigue, a knock or a tactical reason can look identical from the stands, and a like-for-like swap may have been forced. But with five changes available, forced ones are the exception. When Gasperini makes defensive changes by choice, the results haven't backed him up.

What the Numbers Say

Roma's record after Gasperini has used all five substitutions is revealing, though not in the way you might expect. Across all competitions, they have scored eight goals in that phase, one each against Fiorentina, Torino, Napoli and Udinese, and two each against Atalanta and Cagliari. They have conceded five.

Split the competitions and the picture sharpens. In Serie A, the post-fifth-sub window is spotless: eight scored, none conceded. In the Champions League, the same window has produced five goals against and none for. Three came against Real Madrid and two against Manchester United. That split points to a possible lack of depth at the level European football demands. It could also be a timing problem, with the wrong changes made at the wrong moments.

Measure from the first substitution instead and the sample grows. Roma have scored 18 and conceded 11 in those games. In the league alone, it's 15 scored and four conceded. Some of those first changes weren't optional, such as when Manu Koné had to go off early against Madrid through injury. Still, the net picture is positive, as you'd expect from a team fighting near the top of the table. Maybe things aren't as bad as they look, but plenty of variables are tangled together here.

Then there's Gasperini's habit of leaving a substitute waiting on the touchline, sometimes even while the ball is out of play, before sending someone else on. That happened a few times last season too. Did he see something that changed his plan, or was he never fully convinced by the original choice? Adaptability is essential in a coach, but the pattern has become a recurring theme of his tenure.

A Tale of Two Benches

The attacking side of the bench is working well. Roma already have seven goals from substitutes this season: Niccolò Pisilli against Fiorentina, Rodrigo Mora against Lecce, Matías Soulé against Atalanta, Balerdi twice against Napoli, Mora again and Donyell Malen against Cagliari. Last season, they had one goal from a substitute at this stage, Artem Dovbyk's strike against Parma in October 2025. They're already halfway to last season's bench tally, and the campaign is barely a third old.

Part of that comes from the scoreline. Roma have often carried bigger leads into the final stretch than they did last year, when games were tighter. That gives Gasperini room to bring on attacking options who can play without pressure and get on the scoresheet.

Even so, some decisions with a comfortable lead have raised eyebrows. Against Slovan Bratislava, Roma were 4-0 up when Gasperini sent Gianluca Mancini on in midfield as his final change. That's the kind of move he should save for tighter games. With the match that comfortable, it was a missed chance to hand minutes to a young player. Alessandro Di Nunzio, a natural midfielder who had made his debut late against Genoa a few days earlier, was on the bench that evening.

Managing leads is a nice problem to have, and Roma didn't always have it last season. But if they want to go further in the big European nights, and there's been progress on that front without quite erasing the demons of recent seasons, Gasperini needs to refine his in-game management. Depth is the reason he keeps changing things. Six centre-backs are competing for three places, and four players can fill the right wing-back role, though one usually has to cover on the left. More bodies means more temptation to rotate, and more rotation means more chances for the defence to be caught cold.

The January window could help if it fills the remaining gaps. The attacking changes are already working, and another winger would only add to that. Defensively, though, the decision-making has to sharpen. That's as much on the players as on the bench, but Roma will only fulfil their potential this season if the calls made from the touchline stop handing leads back to the opposition.