Lazio Playing Sarriball, But Not As We Know It. Now It’s Clinical.

The clips were impossible to miss. Every Sunday, as Napoli dismantled another ill-prepared foe, highlights of their incredible ball movement circulated on social media faster than Jorginho could find Marek Hamšík with his latest through ball.

Over his three-year tenure in Campania, Maurizio Sarri slowly and methodically built Napoli into a finely tuned machine, playing a brand of football that simply took away the breath of fans across the globe.

It was impossible not to relish the sheer beauty of their play, of the Sarrismo they came to embody. This wasn’t the empty, possession obsessed tiki-taka we had seen before, this was intuitive passing with a purpose as the Partenopei led Serie A in not just number of passes but also in goals scored.

There is something almost crude about distilling that team down to raw statistics, but numbers taken from WhoScored.com really do serve to underline just what Napoli became under Sarri’s guidance.

In 2015/16 – his first season at the club – they averaged 655.6 passes per game, 73 more than any other team in the division. A year later that number had climbed to 680.9 (a whopping 135 passes per game more than second-ranked Juventus) and in 2017/18 they were averaging 725.9, a ridiculous 145.9 passes more than any of their opponents in Serie A.

On an individual basis, Jorginho led the league in passes in all three of those seasons, and in 2017/18 the five players who made the most passes (Jorginho, Kalidou Koulibaly, Raúl Albiol, Hamšík and Lorenzo Insigne) were all part of the Napoli side.

But, as mentioned earlier, this wasn’t just ball retention for the sake of it. Gonzalo Higuain equalled the Serie A record for most goals in a single season (36) and won the Capocannoniere as the league’s top scorer in 15/16 and 12 months later and Dries Mertens finished with 28, just one goal behind eventual winner Edin Džeko.

It was almost enough to deliver the Scudetto to Naples, and while there were only glimpses of that beautiful football at Chelsea and Juventus, Sarri finally got his hands on major trophies as he won the UEFAEFA
Europa League and the Serie A title.

When he was appointed by Lazio last summer, it immediately felt like the right fit. Away from the pressure and scrutiny of a big European club, Sarri could thrive like he had at Napoli, with players and supporters who would give him time to implement his ideas properly and fully.

There was certainly some self-awareness from the Coach that his personality was ill-suited to life at the elite level, but that he could succeed just below that while causing plenty of upsets along the way.

Last season saw him guide Lazio to fifth place, one spot above city rivals AS Roma who of course were led by Jose Mourinho, with Sarri overseeing a 3-2 victory in his first Rome derby.

He also notched a victory over Inter (3-1), whose total tally of 84 goals made them the only side in Serie A to score more than Sarri’s Lazio (77). Once again, Sarri’s team were dominant statistically too, WhoScored.com figures showing they led the league in terms of pass accuracy (87%) and passes per game (568.3).

One slight change was the fact there was no Jorginho-esque midfielder dominating proceedings, but that didn’t stop Lazio from having three players in the top 10 – and six of the top 13 – in terms of passes per game.

This past weekend saw Sarri and his men go to Bergamo and beat Atalanta 2-0, handing their opponents their first defeat of the season. The win pushed Lazio into third place, and it would be easy to assume that the Coach once again had his side purring, that Sarrismo was once again in full effect.

But in many ways it appears that is not the case, with four teams – Napoli, Fiorentina, Inter and Monza – averaging more passes per game than Lazio’s current mark of 470.9, and they also sit a surprising ninth in terms of possession, averaging just 50.3% so far this term.

It is even more stunning to see the Biancocelesti as low as 16th in the shots per game chart, their average of 10.9 seeing them trail Napoli and their league-high mark of 19.5. Milan sit second in that same table with 17.1, and those two clubs have unsurprisingly scored the most goals in Serie A this season.

But while that duo have netted 26 and 24 times respectively, it is here where the difference between this Lazio side and Sarri’s previous team is truly revealed. Their tally of 23 goals is the third-most in the league, a figure which highlights the clinical nature of their finishing while simultaneously explaining why they haven’t needed to dominate possession in the same manner as their predecessors.

Sergej Milinković-Savić has been at the heart of it, following up on a superb 2021/22 campaign that saw him register an incredible 11 goals and 11 assists. He has scored three goals and created another seven already this term, while Luis Alberto has netted three and winger Mattia Zaccagni has weighed in with four goals and three assists.

Ciro Immobile has once again led the way, netting six goals before going off with an injury during last weekend’s draw with Udinese. With his lethal striker ruled out for around 45 days, Sarri revisited the move that saw Mertens rise to stardom in Naples, moving winger Felipe Anderson into the no.9 role just as he had done with the Dutchman.

It was no surprise to see Anderson net against Atalanta in his first game in the new role, Sarri’s system once again delivering chances for the man in the middle of his attacking trident.

The Brazilian has been lauded in the Italian press, but he is merely following in the footsteps of Higuain, Arkadiusz Milik, Mertens and Paulo Dybala, the latter winning Serie A MVP playing as a true no.9 under Sarri’s guidance.

With Inter and Juventus currently struggling, there is a very real chance that Lazio can earn a Champions League berth and, having seen them up close, Atalanta boss Gian Piero Gasperini couldn’t speak highly enough of Sarri’s side.

“For long periods, Lazio absolutely dominated,” the Coach told DAZN shortly after his Atalanta saw their unbeaten run come to an end. “We had not yet met a team that was so good on a technical level and with a high press, they always got to the ball first, and perhaps we had not yet faced a team of this level.”

Sarri too was pleased with the progress his team is making as, just as he did at Napoli but was not given time to do at Juve or Chelsea, he has seen a rapid improvement from year one to year two.

“You could see the determination even in the tiny things, how much nobody wanted to concede a goal, from the strikers to the defenders,” he said in his own post-match interview with DAZN. “We are seeing that what we prepare in training is coming a lot easier to us during the match scenario than it did last season.”

The next week sees them play three games in which they will be able to further hone their playing style as they take on FC Midtjylland, Salernitana and Feyenoord, before the latest instalment of the Derby della Capitale on November 6.

AS Roma and Jose Mourinho will be ready, but so too will Lazio. This is Sarrismo with an even more clinical edge.