David de Gea is reborn and central to Fiorentina’s Serie A renaissance | Nicky Bandini

David de Gea said on day one that he wanted to “make history” with Fiorentina. Three months later, you could make a case he has already succeeded. The Viola won their seventh consecutive Serie A game on Sunday, 2-0 away to Como. Only once before – back in 1960 – have they achieved such a run in the Italian top-flight.

The Spaniard has been essential. De Gea collected his fifth clean sheet against Como, more than any other goalkeeper has managed since he made his league debut on 15 September. He is having to work for them, too.

Fiorentina were defending a 1-0 lead at the Stadio Giuseppe Sinigaglia when Edoardo Goldaniga tamed a long ball and jabbed goalwards from six yards out. De Gea blocked that attempt with his knee and a follow up from Federico Barba with his shin before springing up to punch the ball away before the first player could force home the second rebound.

Como’s manager, and De Gea’s former international teammate, Cesc Fàbregas, said he “had not seen a save like it in years”. Fiorentina’s supporters debated whether it was even the best they had seen him make in their shirt. De Gea kept out a pair of penalties and plenty more shots besides during the 2-1 win over Milan last month that marked the start of this seven-game run.

Who could have imagined this level of performance from a man who had been out of football for more than a year after he was released by Manchester United in 2023? De Gea was presumed to be easing into retirement, though he has said: “I never thought about that. It was just difficult to find motivation for a new chapter after 12 years at a top club.”

He kept up his own personal training, doing one-on-one work with a goalkeeping coach as well as playing padel, but there is a big jump to competitive action. Before playing in Serie A, De Gea conceded three times in his actual Fiorentina debut – a Europa Conference League qualifier at home to Puskás Akadémia, which ended 3-3.

The omens for this season did not look good back then. Fiorentina barely scraped past the Hungarian side, requiring a penalty shootout after drawing both legs. They collected only one other win in their first nine competitive matches under the new manager Raffaele Palladino.

Yet Florence, birthplace of the Renaissance, has since become a city where footballing careers are reborn. If De Gea’s form has been remarkable, then so too has that of Moise Kean – who failed to score once in 20 games at Juventus last season but managed his 12th goal in 15 for Fiorentina on Sunday, wrongfooting the keeper as he met a cross from the left with a first-time shot into the near top corner.

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Throughout the team, there are stories like this. The left-back Robin Gosens, who joined Fiorentina on deadline day, loaned from Union Berlin, has played so well that he won back his place for Germany after a full year without being selected. Another loanee, Edoardo Bove – a graduate of the Roma academy who earned the nickname “sick dog” from José Mourinho while struggling to establish himself with the first team – scored a brilliant goal in last month’s 5-1 demolition of his parent club.

Their collective improvement – together with the emergence of new players, such as the 19-year-old centre-back Pietro Comuzzo – owes much to the flexibility of Palladino, who started the season with a back three and a high press but adapted after initial poor results to a compact 4-2-3-1. The emphasis is no longer on winning the ball back in the opponent’s half but on keeping a shape that is hard to push through and allows for rapid transitions.

Even then, nothing is rigid. Fiorentina returned to a back three during the second half against Como, seeking to counter opponents who were making good use of width. Above all, Palladino gives a sense of being well attuned to the strengths and weaknesses of his players and building structures that get the best of them.

Certainly, he is not one for mollycoddling. Invited after Sunday’s game to explain which strings he had pulled to get such strong performances from Kean, Palladino replied: “Moise did not play his best game today, from a technical standpoint, and I’ve already spoken to him about it. Obviously from the outside, everybody just sees his goal.”

You could not blame him for wanting to keep feet on the ground. When Palladino was appointed to replace Vincenzo Italiano this summer, the question was whether he could fill the shoes of a man who took the team to consecutive Europa Conference League finals, not whether he could lead a Serie A title challenge.

Fiorentina are not minnows, nor are they set up to compete at the very top of the table. Their wage bill is all at once the seventh-largest in the division, and less than half the size of those belonging to Internazionale or Juventus.

Yet, with more than a third of the season gone, the table shows Fiorentina as one of four teams sitting one point behind the league leaders Napoli. Their plus-17 goal difference is joint-second best in the division.

As Alex Frosio wrote in Monday’s edition of La Gazzetta dello Sport, “It’s like that theory about bumblebees. Fiorentina are not structurally built for flying, but they don’t care and do it anyway.”

Perhaps the next league game, at home to Inter, will serve as a reality check. “The lads are very ambitious,” said Palladino. “We need to be ambitious, and we also need to understand that it’s a particular league this season, a strange league, with lots of teams in difficulty, lots of changes of manager, and so a lot of teams that haven’t found those automatisms yet.

“We know this. And the thing we need to take from that is not to feel stronger than we are. We are a team that needs to work, that needs to stay switched on, work hard in training with a spirit of sacrifice and team … Then maybe down the line we’ll look at the table and we can set objectives.”

Source: theguardian.com