Pisa have generated enough chances to be a 40-point team. They are an 18-point team. The gap between those two numbers, 22.2 points, is the largest xPoints deficit in Serie A this season, and it is not particularly close. By CURSD's Luck Index, Pisa sit at -86 on a scale that stretches to -100. They are the most cursed side in the Italian top flight, and by a significant margin.
But this is not a story about a good team in disguise. It is a story about a bad team that the numbers say should be merely poor, trapped in a season where almost nothing that could go wrong has failed to do so.
The xPoints Chasm
Pisa's expected points total of 40.2 would place them in the lower-mid table, around 15th. Instead, their 2 wins, 12 draws, and 23 losses have left them dead last on 18 points with one match remaining. That 22.2-point delta means that across 37 matches, Pisa have hemorrhaged roughly 0.6 points per game to variance alone. Their 12 draws hint at the pattern. They have been in enough matches to take something from them, only for the math to tip the wrong way over and over again.
Twelve draws and two wins from a 40-xPoint profile is a special kind of quiet devastation.
The Finishing Crisis
This is where the curse finds its sharpest edge. Pisa created chances worth 38.23 expected goals this season. They scored 25. That is a finishing delta of -13.23, meaning they left more than 13 goals on the pitch relative to the quality of their opportunities. In concrete terms, Pisa took 356 shots and converted them at a rate that would embarrass a side playing with a blindfold. Some finishing variance is normal. Thirteen goals of it is not. It is the kind of underperformance that turns draws into losses and narrow losses into comfortable ones, compounding across an entire campaign until the table looks nothing like the underlying process.
Defensive Misfires
Pisa's defense has not been spared. They conceded 69 goals against an expected goals against figure of 58.28, a defensive variance of +10.72. Their opponents have finished at an above-average clip, punishing mistakes and half-chances alike. Combined with the finishing deficit on the other end, Pisa have experienced a total swing of nearly 24 goals across both boxes. That is the profile of a team living in the wrong timeline.
To be clear, the baseline is not good. A net xG of -20.05 and being outshot 533 to 356 tells you Pisa are a bottom-table side on merit. No model is arguing otherwise. But the gap between bottom-table and historically awful is the gap the curse occupies.
Injuries and a Loaded Schedule
Pisa's injury burden this season sits at 186, well above the league average of approximately 120. That is over 50% more player-games lost to injury than the typical Serie A squad, a tax that strips depth from an already thin roster. Their schedule strength of 1.25 confirms they have faced a harder-than-average slate of opponents, which compounds every other disadvantage. When you cannot finish, cannot catch a break defensively, and are missing key personnel against difficult opposition, the math spirals.
What Regression Would Actually Buy Them
With 37 of 38 matches played, there is almost nothing left to regress toward. But the thought experiment matters for context. If Pisa had simply performed at league-average luck, converting their xG and conceding per their xGA, they would sit on roughly 40 points. That is survival. Not comfort, not safety with room to spare, but survival. The curse did not rob Pisa of a top-half finish. It robbed them of the fight to stay up, which is arguably crueler. A team that was always going to struggle was never given the chance to struggle on fair terms.
Pisa's underlying numbers say they deserved to be bad. Their actual numbers say they deserved to be historic. The 22.2-point gap between those realities is the single largest in Serie A, and it is the difference between a forgettable relegation and one that will be studied.