Right. Serie A. Let’s have a word.

Forget the tidy football you see here. Italy is a beautiful shambles. Juve are still knocking about. The Old Lady. A face like a slapped arse after last season, but they’ll throw euros at the problem. They always do.

The Milan gobshites, Inter and AC, they’ll be there or thereabouts. Inter’s new away kit, have you seen it Looks like a spilled slushie. Awful. Tells you all you need to know. All style, no bottle when it counts.

But the madness. The real religion. It’s down in Naples. The whole city runs on espresso and memories of that little Argentinian fella. Their stadium is built right on an old volcano, you know. They say it makes the ground shake when the crowd gets going. Proper stuff. It is completely different from the football here. More… shithousery. A pure pantomime. Forget your accumulators, just watch the beautiful chaos.

▶ And The Other Lot…

Look, forget the organised stuff for a second. Let’s talk about Rome. That derby between Lazio and Roma, it’s not sport. It’s a form of collective, municipal madness. A city-wide argument where the only punctuation is a flare. The noise they make in that stadium, the Stadio Olimpico, it’s not cheering. It’s a primal roar, a visceral thing that gets in your bones. The banners are the size of houses and the insults are pure poetry. They’d rather lose their house than lose that game. It’s beautiful.

And then, for a complete change of pace, you have the lunatics from Atalanta. They’re the opposite of Roman grandeur. Their whole team play with a manic, furious energy like they’ve all been stung by wasps. Their manager looks like a man who’s just been told his pint was knocked over. They never score any goals, it’s all hard running and tackles. Except for the weeks where they suddenly remember how to play and bang in four just for the craic. It makes absolutely no sense. That’s the entire point of the Italian Serie A. It’s not meant to be understood. It’s a glorious, passionate shambles.

▶ So, What’s the Final Punt?

So what’s the big idea here. Why should you, with a perfectly good pub down the road showing the English games, bother your head with this continental carry-on Because it’s real. The Premier League, for all its gloss, can feel like a business meeting with goalposts. A bit prosaic. Here, you get proper, unvarnished bedlam. You’ll see a fella who looks like a Roman senator in a Gucci coat absolutely lose the plot, screaming bloody murder at a linesman over a throw-in. It’s high art.

This whole beautiful mess, this Italian Serie A, it’s not for the faint of heart or the serious accumulator. There’s no logic to it. You couldn’t pick a winner with a crystal ball. A team will look like world-beaters one week and a bag of spanners the next. My tenner, for what it’s worth, is on Fiorentina. Their new third kit is a lovely shade of purple. That has to count for something, right. So don’t watch it to be clever. Watch it to feel something. Watch it for the magnificent, operatic, and utterly bonkers spectacle. Its a beautiful thing, really. Grand stuff.