Italian Serie A
2025-08-25 - Udinese vs Hellas Verona
A Sports Betting Pick by Cafa
Italy Serie A - Round 1
Stadio Friuli, Udine, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy (25,144)
Monday, 25 August 2025, 18:30 CET
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Udinese Team News
Udinese had a good season in 24/25. Like, really good by their standards. The left field choice of a coach Kosta Runjaic - he’s still here - opened this team up and made it play very offensively. It worked to a certain extent, as much as the player quality or lack thereof allowed.
Now, all these players who were the difference-makers are gone. Jaka Bijol, the superb centre-back, went to Leeds for €18m, Lazar Samardzic the main playmaker went to Atalanta for €15m, and the most usual forward pair of Lorenzo Lucca and Florian Thauvin are also gone. Lucca, valued at €22m, went to Napoli on loan for a €9m fee, while the 32-year-old Thauvin went home to play in his home league, for Lens.
These transfers don’t look very good. Bijol should have attracted a much larger fee, especially as €19m is peanuts for Premier League clubs, while Samardzic and Lucca are young talents that didn’t even fulfill their potential yet. It’s as if they were let go so some other team can make them thrive.
Udinese will live and die by the quality of the new signings. It’s always impossible to tell how the new guys will play, but what’s obvious is that the recruitment policy was to bring in young players that were deemed to have potential. A lot will be expected of French central midfielder Arthur Atta and of Danish centre forward Luca Kjerrumgaard, both 22. At least the fans don’t have to change their chants, their star forward used to be Lucca and now it’s Luca…
Budget recruitment rarely succeeds, and this is a whole new team in a rebuild mode, too. That’s a lot of ifs. Coach Runjaic will be tasked to create a new offensive force out of the young budget players that he’s been given, but the last season’s experience is that it doesn’t quite work like that. You get a win here and there, you get a standout player for a few rounds, but then it fizzles out.
Udinese is in for a difficult season, with a lot of tinkering and a lot of rotation. This could potentially change only if one of the new signings indeed becomes a key player who carries the team.
Hellas Verona Team News
Verona is doing wonders with the most limited roster in the league. Every season, they sell the players that can attract a double digit transfer fee - this time it was Jackson Tchatchoua and Diego Coppola who left for €12.5m and €11m respectively - and the new signings, if they even happen, are absolute bargains. Verona is trying to pluck good players from lesser known leagues. Most of their signings this season are coming from Switzerland, Belgium, Serie B, Serie C, with some rare signings from France such as centre forward Armin Sarr who came in from Lyon but he originally played in Allsvenskan and Eredivisie. That’s Verona’s transfer policy for you.
In the end, you get a team that actually looks good on the pitch, as all these players have a certain football quality. They all play nicely. What you don’t get are match winners, key players, men with character who can carry the team. More often than not, a Verona match looks like this: they look good and make their fine passes, but eventually the game runs away from them and they lose.
Ironically, Tomas Suslov, the last season’s budget signing from Groningen, is now the most valuable player in the team. He scored 3 times and made 5 assists last season. Suslov is currently injured and won’t be back before the new year.
Paolo Zanetti is still the head coach, so we can expect Verona to look largely the same as they did in the previous 40 matches. And that means 3-5-2 or 3-4-1-2, fluent passing, and more away victories than you’d expect from such a poor team. With Verona, if it rains, it pours. If the game goes their way they can beat Roma, Fiorentina, Napoli, even on the road. They did the same to Udinese last year with a 0-1 win here.
Probable Lineups
(to be updated 24h prior to kick off)
The Betting Market
Udinese is a 1.95 favourite, which is not a very good price, as Udinese is far from a confident favourite and now they’ve lost all their match-winning weapons. 2.10 or 2.20 would be more like it. At the same time, Verona can be a menace on a good day.
Over 2.5 Goals is priced at 2.20 as the bookmakers rightfully expect a bore fest, which leaves 1.66 for the Under. BTTS-Yes is priced at 1.95 and that’s actually a tempting bet if you think this game will open up at some point. It's possible. Verona scores first, Udinese equalizes.
The Betting Verdict
We could try to find some value here in the Under, or in BTTS-Yes where we’d hope for both of these poor teams to somehow find the net. But the bet is something else entirely. We’ll go for the continuity of Hellas Verona and their visiting bravado that we’ve seen time and time again, and will fade the rebuilding Udinese. Udinese is known as a very unstable team, they can lose at home, they did so nine times last season and it wasn’t always a top side that took the points. Genoa, Verona and Monza won in Udine too, and Torino was close.
As with all bets priced this high, 4.50, this is no more than an educated punt. We simply rate Verona’s chances higher than the implied 22%. They’re at least 23%.
The Statistics :
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The Pick :
Udinese 0-1 Verona
