I've been watching a lot of football even outside of Lazio lately, and one game I caught a little of was Roma's win over Fiorentina today. The announcers were doing indecent things to themselves during half-time: "Oh, going to be unbeaten in eighteen games, oh wow Claudio Ranieri, oh wow oh boy!", and on and on and on they want.

Eighteen games is almost half a season. It is a very good stretch, to be sure. But let's also provide a little context to balance the conversation, which none of them were doing. I'm going to compare Roma with Lazio, since that's the team I follow of course-- but the comparisons could be made in any number of other ways too:

• It doesn't matter what you do over eighteen games; what matters is what you do over thirty-eight. Roma have a whopping 82.9 million EUR payroll, fourth highest in the entire league. They should be finishing in the Champions League spots-- that's not impressive-- it's expected, given their wage bill. For reference, Lazio spends twenty million less on wages, and have the same number of wins this year, at eighteen. If anyone is impressive, it's Lazio not Roma-- or even moreso, look at Atalanta!


• In four of the past five seasons, Lazio have finished above Roma in the table. In many seasons teams like Atalanta and Bologna also finished higher than Roma, despite having way less of a wage bill.


• This past fiscal year, Roma ran an eye-popping 81 million EUR loss. That's in one season! Lazio? 38.5 million EUR profit.


• In terms of overall debt, Roma are the third most in-debt team in the entire league! They have 636.3 million EUR in debt! This versus Lazio's 282.7. In terms of net debt, the numbers are -139.4 and -38.1, respectively.


• To clubs like Lazio, Bologna, or Atalanta to name a few, making the Champions League is just icing, and a massive overachievement. To Roma, they need to make it just to have any even remote possibility of even halving all of the red on their balance sheet next year!

The fact is, this streak Roma are on brings them to the bare minimum of what they should be achieving, if you just take two steps back and add in some context.

With the amount of money they've over-spent, requiring almost a billion EUR of cash dumped into the club by their owner just to keep them solvent, they should be Scudetto contenders. But looking at the league tables over the past several years, what has this money gotten them exactly?