Claudio Ranieri will be on the bench tomorrow night, for the 1,400th match of his nearly forty-year coaching career.

He was halfway there, just over 700 games into his career, when he last managed to get past (excluding the preliminaries) a knockout round in Europe: Arsenal-Chelsea 1-2 in the Champions League quarter-finals, April 6, 2004, 21 years have passed, writes Corriere della Sera.

A negative streak that matches that of Roma against Porto: 3 precedents, 3 eliminations.

But the last 16 home games of the Giallorossi in the EL allow fans to be optimistic: 13 victories, 2 draws and only one defeat, the 0-2 against Bayer Leverkusen in the semi-final of last season.

Roma have played at the Olimpico 8 times after a 1-1 away draw and have advanced on 6 occasions: against NK Zagreb (1964-65 Fairs), Valencia (Uefa ’90-91), Ilves Tampere (91-92 Cups), Neuchâtel (Uefa 1995-96), Leicester (2021-22 Conference) and Feyenoord (EL ’23-24). Two eliminations: against Fiorentina in the EL in 2014-15 and Porto in the 2016-17 Champions League play-offs, losing 3-0 in both cases.