For Empoli, the "Tuscan Derby" wasn't a match; it was a siege.
They had arrived at the Stadio Artemio Franchi with one goal: survival. Their manager had spent all week drilling a "low-block" defense, a literal wall of blue shirts designed to squeeze the life out of Fiorentina's creative sparks.
But six minutes in, the wall developed a crack.
Renzo Uzumaki received the ball 30 yards out. To the 40,000 fans in the stands, the pitch looked like a crowded parking lot. To the Empoli defenders, it was a solid barrier. But to Renzo, with his 99 Vision, the pitch was a grid of light.
He didn't even look at Mario Gomez. He saw the "Shadow Zone" behind the Empoli center-back—a blind spot created by the defender's own body positioning.
Zip.
The ball traveled through a gap no wider than a dinner plate. Gomez's shot was saved, but the Empoli backline looked at each other in terror. "How did he see that?" the captain hissed. "He was facing the other way!"
In the 11th minute, Renzo did it again.
Aquilani fizzed a horizontal ball toward him. Most players would have trapped it, scanned the field, and played a safe pass. Renzo didn't trap it. He didn't even scan.
With a delicate, one-touch flick, he sent a weighted lob into the stratosphere. The ball didn't just fly; it hunted. It dropped with mathematical precision onto the toe of a sprinting Mohamed Salah.
The Empoli players stared at Renzo with existential dread. They were "parking the bus," but Renzo was passing the ball under the bus, over the bus, and through the exhaust pipe.
On the touchline, Vincenzo Montella was frozen.
As a former top-tier striker, Montella knew the limitations of the human eye. In the heat of a match, your vision is narrowed by fatigue and the physical presence of 200-pound defenders. You don't see "lanes"; you see chaos.
But Renzo... Renzo was playing as if he were sitting in the VAR booth with a 4K bird's-eye view.
"Is he lucky?" Montella whispered to his assistant. "Or is he... something else?"
He watched Renzo thread another needle through three defenders. It wasn't just talent; it was a spatial awareness that bordered on the divine. Renzo was finding weaknesses that wouldn't even show up on a post-match analysis video.
Suddenly, the stadium let out a collective gasp that turned into a roar.
Milan Badelj, the "Bull," had just crunched an Empoli midfielder near the center circle. The ball spilled loose, and like a magnetic force, it found Renzo's feet.
The Empoli defense scrambled to close the gaps, four men converging on the 16-year-old. They thought they had him trapped. They thought the "Iron Curtain" would finally hold.
They were wrong.
Renzo took one touch, his head remained perfectly still, and then—without looking—he unleashed a pass that made the entire coaching staff of both teams jump to their feet.
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