Talking about Totti and De Rossi in 2026 feels different than it did even three or four years ago. The immediate aftermath of their retirements is past. The younger Roma supporters watching the team now have only highlight-reel memories of either player. And yet, walking around the Olimpico on a matchday, the names are still there, in the chants, on the shirts, in the conversations between strangers in the queue for the bar.

That persistence isn’t sentimentality, exactly, though sentiment is part of it. It’s a recognition that Roma’s identity over the past three decades was substantially built around two players who chose, repeatedly, to stay. The choice to stay is what the legend is built on, and in modern football the choice to stay is increasingly rare.

Totti’s status remains the harder one to write about because the depth of attachment is so total. To call him the symbol of Roma is to understate the case. He is the part of the club that no manager, no owner, no transfer cycle can erase. The famous moments are well-rehearsed. What’s less written about is the daily texture of belonging that he created — the sense that one person could embody a city’s relationship with a football club through forty years of changing circumstances.

De Rossi sits in a slightly different relationship to the supporters. The career was less individually transcendent and more about combat, leadership, and the kind of relentless professionalism that the dressing room valued. His more recent return as manager added another chapter to the relationship, and the way that chapter ended was complicated for everyone involved.

The current Roma squad has good players, talented players, players the supporters have warmed to. None of them, by 2026, looks like they will be at Roma in fifteen years. The football economy has changed. Loan structures, agent dynamics, club ownership patterns, even player career-length patterns — all of these now make sustained one-club careers improbable in a way they weren’t when Totti was a teenager signing his first contract.

This isn’t unique to Roma. The pattern is league-wide and continent-wide. The career of a Maldini, a Buffon at Juventus, a Totti at Roma is now a historical pattern more than a contemporary possibility. That’s worth marking honestly rather than wishing the change away.

The question for Roma in 2026 is what kind of identity the club builds when one-club legends are no longer the available vehicle. The answer, slowly, is being negotiated. Squad-level identity rather than individual-led identity. Tactical identity that the supporters can recognise as theirs. Connection to the city through the squad as a whole rather than the marquee player.

Whether this works depends on the club. The supporters are willing. The history is rich enough to support a different kind of relationship between team and city if the club commits to it. The drift toward generic global football identity is the real risk, and Roma is probably as well-protected against it as any major Serie A club because of the depth of the supporter culture.

Totti and De Rossi will remain the reference points for as long as the people who saw them play are alive. What’s being built in front of the chants is the next chapter, and how it’s written is the conversation worth paying attention to in 2026.