Not only is Donyell Malen on course to be Roma’s top scorer this season despite only joining midway through, but the Dutch striker has now set a new club record.
With his hat-trick against Pisa on 10th April, Malen arrived at double figures of goals for Roma. Only Gabriel Batistuta has hit the landmark of 10 for the Giallorossi in fewer games than the Aston Villa loanee.
Malen’s first goal of the hat-trick – the best of the three – was enough to set him apart from any other winter signing in terms of the amount of goals scored in their first half-season at Roma.
The record was previously held by Stephan El Shaarawy thanks to his eight goals over the second half of the 2015-16 season. Malen matched that benchmark when he scored in the second leg of Roma’s Europa League clash with Bologna in March, before his first goal against Pisa pulled him away.
Along with Malen and El Shaarawy, the podium for most goals scored by a mid-season arrival in their first six months with Roma is completed by Luca Toni, who fired in five goals while on loan from Bayern Munich in 2010.
A handful of other players have scored three goals between their winter arrival and the conclusion of the season they joined in: Fábio Júnior in 1998, Hidetoshi Nakata in 2000, Marquinho in 2012, Diego Perotti in 2016 and Sérgio Oliveira in 2022.
Anyone else to have joined Roma in a winter transfer window has only ever scored once, twice or not at all in their debut season with the club.
Historically, the mid-season transfer window used to be autumnal in Italy, which reduces the number of players to consider for this specific record. An honourable mention ought to go to Marco Delvecchio, for example, who scored 10 goals in 1995-96 for Roma having joined from Inter in the November of that season.
But players who joined in that kind of timeframe obviously had a couple more months to achieve such figures than those who were part of the now more familiar concept of joining in January like Malen.
Leave a Reply