Gattuso Keeps Aiming for 40 Points, but Lazio's Club-Record 29 Have Them Top of Serie A

Gennaro Gattuso has a line he repeats almost every week: Lazio's only target is 40 points, the traditional safety mark in Serie A. After Sunday's 1-1 draw at Napoli, his team is 11 points short of it with 27 games still to play, and it sits alone at the top of the table on 29 points, the most any Lazio side has ever collected after 11 rounds.

The draw at the Maradona ended a run of six straight league wins, but Lazio are still unbeaten, they have the best defense in the league, and Gazzetta dello Sport notes that only Barcelona and Arsenal have a better points-per-game average across Europe's top five leagues. Inter beat Como 2-0 later on Sunday to climb within a point, and Roma, 3-0 winners over Sassuolo, are two back. The race is tight. The coach still won't call it one.

Davide Frattesi put Lazio ahead in the 28th minute, running about 50 yards from midfield to finish Tijjani Noslin's pass at the near post. Napoli drew level three minutes after halftime when Alfonso Pedraza, who had just come on for the injured Nuno Tavares, turned the ball into his own net while trying to beat Rasmus Højlund and Scott McTominay to a cross. Christos Mandas then made the saves that kept a point, and Reda Belahyane cleared a Kevin De Bruyne rebound off the line.

What Gattuso described afterward did not sound like a team chasing 40 points.

"I went into the dressing room and it was like a funeral, but I congratulated the team," he told DAZN. "It's fine that they're disappointed, it's a good sign."

Gustav Isaksen, who wore the captain's armband in Naples, was more direct. "We're disappointed with the result, we wanted to win," he said, per Gazzetta.

Gattuso went the other way. "We shouldn't look at the table, because we don't really belong up there," he said. "We have to live day by day. We can have those conversations when there are seven or eight games left. Right now it means nothing."

Some of that is superstition, and some of it is history. Gattuso arrived on June 23, less than three months after Italy lost their World Cup playoff to Bosnia and Herzegovina with him on the bench. Lazio had finished ninth in 2025-26, missed Europe for a second straight year, and again fell outside the Italian federation's financial threshold, which left them almost no room to spend this summer. Organized supporters have boycotted the Stadio Olimpico in protest against president Claudio Lotito since early 2026; Il Fatto Quotidiano reported the club sold just over 4,000 season tickets, down from 30,000 the year before.

The season then opened with a 2-0 home loss to Serie B side Mantova in the Coppa Italia on Aug. 16. Twelve weeks later Lazio are top, after plenty of preseason skeptics said they would be thinking only about survival, which is partly why the 40-point mantra has started to sound like a jab at the doubters as much as caution.

There is a real arguement that Lazio's lead is running ahead of their underlying play. Gattuso has used the most settled lineup among the top four, with 14 total changes between league starting XIs according to Squawka, compared with 40 for Inter, 36 for Roma and 35 for Como, all of whom are also playing in Europe. Lazio are not.

They have also finished far better than their chances. After nine rounds, FootyStats had them at 1.54 expected goals per game while scoring 2.44, and conceding 0.78 goals per game from 1.32 expected goals against. Squawka ranked them 10th in shots taken but second in shot conversion. That kind of gap tends to close over a full season, and the last Lazio team to sit alone at the top, Simone Inzaghi's 2019-20 side, finished fourth.

The two-week pause might help Lazio more than most, because they left Naples with fresh problems. Josip Šutalo felt a hamstring pull in the first half and was replaced after 33 minutes. "He felt a tightness in his hamstring, he won't go to the national team and we'll see what grade the lesion is," Gattuso said, which takes him out of Croatia's camp. Fantacalcio reported that a medium-grade strain could mean three to four weeks out.

Tavares, who Gattuso said had barely trained and played through a hamstring contracture, lasted only until halftime; Corriere dello Sport reported the Portuguese full-back could still report to his national team to be examined there. Captain Mattia Zaccagni, who has started every league game and has five assists, watched from the stands in Naples and is due for an MRI on Tuesday or Wednesday to determine whether the swelling in his leg comes from the knock he took against Cagliari or from a muscle tear, which would sideline him for at least a month. Albert Gudmundsson, out 45 days with a shoulder injury, is targeting minutes in Saturday's friendly against Maltese side Mgarr United.

The schedule after the break is where the 40-point talk gets tested. Atalanta, the Rome derby against Roma and a trip to face Inter all arrive between Dec. 6 and Jan. 6. If Lazio are still first after that stretch, Gattuso will have run out of reasons not to look at the table, even if he keeps telling his players to look away.