Roma arrive in Udine with the table tightening in the way it always does at this point of the season: everyone in the hunt, nobody comfortable. On Monday night at Bluenergy Stadium, the job against Udinese is simple to describe and harder to deliver: show up, impose order, and leave with the points that keep Roma where they want to be. Coming off a draining 1–1 away draw at Panathinaikos in the UEFA Europa League that was played almost entirely with ten men, there’s no appetite for romance here. This is about bankable football, the kind you can stack without needing your best version of yourself every week.

The problem is that Roma’s “best version” is currently scattered across the treatment room. Gian Piero Gasperini is again asked to build a coherent attacking plan without Paulo Dybala, Artem Dovbyk, Evan Ferguson, Stephan El Shaarawy, and Manu Koné. Gasperini will almost certainly use a 3-4-2-1 formation built for control, with Bryan Cristante anchoring the middle, Lorenzo Pellegrini and Matías Soulé tasked with supplying ideas, and Donyell Malen asked to turn half-chances into goals like he did against Torino.

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Even given Roma’s status as a definitively superior side to Udinese, the club from Friuli won’t just hand the Giallorossi the win. Udinese is mid-table, and they’re comfortable living in the messy middle of games. That’s exactly why this fixture matters. Roma will need to keep their nerve when the match tries to become something smaller and uglier than their ambitions. They don’t need fireworks. They need a clean tempo, a serious first hour, and the maturity to treat a single goal as a perfectly acceptable way to leave Udine with three.

What to Watch For

El Aynaoui’s Serie A Return

Neil El Aynaoui is back in the league picture, and Roma need him now more than ever. After returning from the Africa Cup of Nations (with a star certainly on the rise for the Moroccan National Team) and being eased back into training, he’s now in AS Roma’s matchday squad for Serie A for the first time in months. Thankfully, this is exactly the kind of fixture where a midfield body can raise the technical floor.

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In Gian Piero Gasperini’s likely 3-4-2-1, El Aynaoui is penciled in alongside Bryan Cristante as the second midfielder who can turn a reset touch into forward momentum and keep Roma from playing the whole match in front of a settled block. If the front line is thin, and it certainly is, the midfield has to create advantages by playing through pressure rather than around it, and by arriving late into the spaces the forward vacate.

The third layer is psychological, and it’s where Roma might quietly benefit. El Aynaoui didn’t just come back from AFCON; he came back with a new status as a hero of his national team and a target for some of the biggest clubs in the world. AFCON-watchers have framed him as one of the true revelations of the tournament, and the broader European noise inevitably followed, with Spanish-market chatter linking his name to Real Madrid and Barcelona on the back of his AFCON performances.

Players who return from an international run in the spotlight often re-enter league play with sharper decision-making and a calmer sense of authority. Players who prove themselves at the international level often make fewer panic touches, have more insistence on receiving under pressure, and show more willingness to dictate where the game is played. If Roma are going to win ugly in Udine, El Aynaoui’s composure might be the most valuable new tool in the squad.

Will Vaz Make a Difference?

Roma’s new-look attacking hierarchy is coming into focus, and it starts with Donyell Malen. Then it gets interesting. With Roma short on bodies and long on minutes, Robinio Vaz is being asked to live in the most thankless role in football (behind backup goalie, at least): the bench-forward who has to enter cold, read the temperature instantly, and make the game feel different in ten touches or fewer in the dying minutes of the match. That’s just the reality of arriving midseason at 18, when you need to get a new league’s rhythm still in your legs and you’re working with a manager who demands tacticaly know-how from every position, and especially the striker.

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What Vaz can change in his cameo minutes is the texture of Roma’s final third. The scouting pitch for Vaz when Frederic Massara decided to take a swing on him was energy. Vaz is a forward who presses like he’s offended you, one who runs channels to drag center-backs into uncomfortable decisions, and who turns a stale possession into something that resembles momentum. That profile matters behind a starter like Malen because it gives Roma a different lever late in matches. It affords them more verticality, more chaos, more “defend facing your own goal” stress for tired legs.

The honest wrinkle is the one every young forward eventually meets: he can provide strong performances in every single match this season as a sub, but that strength will not always be rewarded with a goal (or at least a meaningful one). As of right now, Vaz is still looking for his first goal in a Roma shirt, and the early story is almost comically familiar from the Ongoing Evan Ferguson Experiment. He’s providing promising movement, good intent, and one debut moment against Torino where he nearly opened his account, only for the goalkeeper to deny him from close range. Still, nearly is good for such a young striker; it shows that he’s already getting himself into the right positions to score and win. Given what Roma emphasized when they announced the signing (his age, his rapid rise, and a track record of contributing at Olympique de Marseille), the club is betting on Vaz as a player who can grow and lift the Giallorossi alongside him.

If Vaz gets another appearance against Udinese, don’t be counting his goals and treat “zero” as a referendum. Instead, watch whether Vaz can compress the match in Roma’s favor. Does his first sprint go forward instead of sideways? Does he make Udinese’s center-backs turn and run? Does he gives Roma that one extra sequence where a tired defense starts clearing with its eyes closed. The best late subs add direction to everyone else’s effort. For a team that can sometimes get a little too polite around the box, Vaz’s value is that he’s not especially interested in being polite.

If that first goal comes tomorrow for Vaz, it will almost certainly come through persistence. It’ll be off an ugly rebound, a deflection, a near-post touch that looks obvious only after it’s happened. Roma doesn’t need Vaz to be a finished product just yet. They need him to be a problem in the right areas: inside the width of the posts, on the last line, arriving like he believes the ball is going to fall for him. If he does that in Udine, then he’s making a difference, even if it takes a bit for the scoreboard to catch up.