They crushed Fiorentina, Malen and Dybala achieved a feat that had only been seen once in the history of Serie A.

Donyell Malen's hat-trick against Fiorentina was not only one of the greatest individual performances of the first week of Serie A 2026-2027: the Roma striker, together with Paulo Dybala, achieved a feat that had only been seen once in the history of the Italian championship, as all three goals came from the Argentine's assists.

One player scored three goals, while the other provided three assists. A perfect symbiosis in the attacking phase that, given the recent history of Serie A, is an extremely rare event. According to Opta, before Malen and Dybala, such a situation had not happened since May 2, 2021, when Emanuel Vignato and Rodrigo Palacio achieved this with the Bologna jersey.

Palacio and Vignato, the precedent that has stood since 2021

The curious precedent came against Fiorentina. In Bologna-Fiorentina 3-3, Rodrigo Palacio scored all three goals for the red and blue team, while Emanuel Vignato provided the assist for each of them. The result was therefore identical to that of the Roma duo: a hat-trick by one player and three assists by the same teammate for all three goals.

The statistic is even more significant when you consider that Opta has been systematically collecting this data since the 2004/05 season. Precisely for this reason, when it comes to precedents in the modern era of statistics, Palacio-Vignato represented until yesterday the reference to be surpassed. Opta has in fact certified that the case of the Argentine Dybala is the first since 2021 of a player managing to provide three assists for the same teammate, author of a hat-trick.

There is also an almost unbelievable coincidence: in both cases the victim was Fiorentina. In 2021 it was Palacio's Bologna that punished the purple team three times; in 2026 it was Malen and Dybala's Roma. A curiosity that makes the data even more special.

It's never happened before? Beware of the difference

However, there is an important caveat. If we expand the search to cases where a player has provided three assists for the same teammate, without requiring the latter to have achieved a hat trick, there is a precedent.

We are talking about Gastón Ramírez and Fabio Quagliarella, in the 3-1 Sampdoria-Fiorentina match in January 2018: in that case the Sampdoria striker scored all three goals and the Uruguayan provided all the assists. So, in that match too, the same distribution of goals and assists was achieved: three goals by the same player and three decisive passes by the same teammate.

And that's where the statistics get interesting: Ramírez-Quagliarella and Palacio-Vignato are the only precedents identified in the Opta era where a player provides three assists for the same teammate in the same match. The 2021 match made Vignato the second player, after Ramírez, to achieve this feat.

The difference is that Palacio and Quagliarella both scored a hat-trick, so in all three cases the perfect combination of 3 goals + 3 assists was achieved by the same teammate. For this reason, to the question of whether Malen and Dybala have achieved something that has never been seen in Serie A, the most accurate answer is: it is not an absolute novelty, but it is an extremely rare achievement.

Roma have thus restored one of the rarest statistical combinations in Italian football. And, in a curious coincidence, they have done so against the same team that had suffered the last episode of this kind in 2021.