Leave it to a 20-year-old, with three Serie A starts under his belt, to provide a most perceptive analysis of the Italian top flight as we head into a new year. “The most difficult thing to do in this game,” said Francesco Pio Esposito on Sunday night, “is to stick the ball in the net.”

He was speaking in praise of his Inter teammate, Lautaro Martínez, whom he set up for the decisive goal in a 1-0 win away to Atalanta. Pio Esposito had barely entered as a second-half substitute when he was gifted possession by an opponent, Berat Djimsiti. Instead of taking the chance on himself, he froze the last defender and released Lautaro to score with a side-footed through-ball.

This has been an up-and-down season so far for Inter, still working out who they want to be six months into Cristian Chivu’s tenure as manager. They have lost four league games – including matches against title rivals Juventus, Milan and Napoli – and were knocked out of the SuperCoppa before the final by Bologna.

Yet Sunday’s win still means they end 2025 on top of Serie A, despite having played one fewer game than half of the division. Milan are only a point behind, and Napoli two, with Juventus (four) and Roma (six) still also very much in the hunt. But if this might – as Suzy Campanale predicted last week – be a season in which the champions wind up crawling across the finish line, then Inter are for now the ones wiggling fastest.

And perhaps Pio Esposito has told us why. At a time when goals are especially hard to come by in Serie A, Inter own the player most adept at getting them. Lautaro’s winner against Atalanta was nothing spectacular, but the Argentinian still took his chance efficiently: teeing himself up with his right boot then finishing calmly with his left beyond one of the league’s better goalkeepers.

If anybody needed reminding that such finishes are never as straightforward as the best make them look, then Lazar Samardzic offered a demonstration soon afterward. Presented with a golden opportunity to equalise for Atalanta in the 87th minute, the Serbian jabbed wide from an unmarked position in the middle of Inter’s six-yard box.

Lautaro has been on a roll lately, finding the net in four consecutive league games. He is Serie A’s top scorer so far this season, and Sunday’s strike put him level with Riccardo Orsolini in first place for this calendar year, too, on 15 goals apiece. Though the Bologna player’s tally is more impressive – he plays as a winger, not a centre-forward – it does include four penalties, where Lautaro has not taken any.

We should also acknowledge that 15 is a low bar for first place. For comparison, Kylian Mbappé leads La Liga on 39, Harry Kane the Bundesliga on 31, and Erling Haaland the Premier League on 27.

Before anyone gets carried away suggesting that it might be twice as hard to score in Serie A as elsewhere, let’s also take in some mitigating factors. The figure would likely be much higher if Mateo Retegui – last season’s capocannoniere – had not left Atalanta to join Al Qadsiah FC in the Saudi Pro League this summer. He was on 13 goals already from January to May.

Other plausible contenders have missed time due to injury. Gianluca Scamacca, Atalanta’s replacement at No 9, is only recently starting to show his best again after the cruciate ligament tear he suffered in August last year. Ademola Lookman missed preseason in a stand-off with the club over a desired transfer. Romelu Lukaku, first-choice striker for the defending Serie A champions Napoli, has been out injured since August.

Still, it is true that this has been one of the lowest-scoring Serie A seasons in recent memory, with an average of just 2.327 goals per game. That is down from 2.561 in 2024-25 and 2.611 the year before that. Not since 1991-92 (2.271 per game) has the figure been lower, according to data compiled by numericalcio.it.

When such trends occur, there is rarely a single cause. Besides absences and departures of prolific players we might look to managerial changes. Atalanta – whose 78 goals last season were second only to Inter’s 79 – were forced to start afresh when Gian Piero Gasperini left to take charge of Roma after nine years in Bergamo. His first successor, Ivan Juric, lasted for 11 Serie A games, only two of which were wins.

There have been signs of improvement since under Raffaele Palladino, though he was unable to break a long sequence of poor results against Inter specifically. Sunday’s defeat was Atalanta’s ninth in a row to these opponents. The Nerazzurri from Bergamo have not beaten those from Milan in any competition since 2018.

Palladino did try something different, bringing Mario Pasalic into Atalanta’s forward line with the task of screening attempts by Inter to play through Hakan Calhanoglu. One thread in a greater scheme to ‘cage’ Inter’s playmaker, and a break from Gasperini’s old man-to-man approach. A plan that failed in part because of a strong performance from the renascent Piotr Zielinski alongside Calhanoglu.

In the end, though, the difference was Lautaro. And Pio Esposito as well. He might be right that scoring is the hardest part, but the Inter academy graduate’s presence of mind to look for the pass was impressive. At 6ft 3in, he has the build of a natural target man and the best of those have always known when to be selfless and look for the runners either side of them.

Lautaro has been one of Pio Esposito’s most vocal cheerleaders for some time now, praising his talent and work ethic while also beseeching journalists and fans to be patient. “We have to give him room for calm, the space to make mistakes,” said Lautaro again on Sunday. “I think he’s going to bring some great satisfaction to us but also for your Italian national team as well.”

For now, the burden of scoring the goals that keep Inter ahead in the title chase is one Lautaro is happy to shoulder. He remains, at 28, a player who divides opinion – ranking 20th in both The Guardian’s top 100 poll and the Ballon d’Or voting for 2025 yet drawing mockery from some critics for stating his belief earlier this year that he is one of the top five forwards in the world.

Inter, certainly, are delighted to have kept hold of a player who, besides being Serie A’s joint-top scorer for this calendar year, also bagged 12 goals in 13 Champions League games in 2025. Losing the final of that competition for the second time in three years is also a part of the story, but there are many who never reach that stage in the first place.

Lautaro, Inter’s captain, has spoken more than once about how devastated he was by the PSG mauling, of being unable to speak for the first five days. He had fought through injury late in the season to be involved at all, and the summer began on a sour note with reports of a falling out between him and Calhanoglu as the Inter exited the Club World Cup in the last-16.

Only Inter’s players and coaches can know if the psychological scars of chasing four trophies last season, and winning none, have fully healed, but physically at least Lautaro appears back to his best. Asked on Sunday if some credit belonged to Inter’s fitness coach, Stefano Rapetti, Lautaro replied: “the whole staff. The years pass for all of us. I worked hard to get back into shape, but with lads like this behind you they raise your level. You have to want to keep growing. I have that desire every day.”