Fiorentina put Benevento to the sword at the Franchi on Friday evening, winning 4-1 in the Coppa Italia first round with a performance shaped almost entirely by a devastating four-goal burst across the first fifty minutes. Paolo Vanoli's side needed less than two minutes to establish control and never relinquished it.
Albert Guðmundsson, Fiorentina's Icelandic midfielder, opened the scoring in the second minute — a signal of intent from a team that had carried genuine momentum into the summer break, having won at Juventus and drawn with Atalanta in their final two Serie A fixtures of the previous campaign. That early lead set the tone for a first half in which Benevento, managed by Antonio Floro Flores, struggled to impose any coherent structure. Fiorentina midfielder Moise Kean doubled the advantage on 35 minutes, converting an assist from João Mário to make it 2-0 at the interval.
The match was effectively ended in a four-minute passage immediately after the restart. Fiorentina defender Luca Ranieri, assisted by Radu Drăguşin, made it 3-0 on 48 minutes, and two minutes later Cher Ndour — Fiorentina's midfielder — added a fourth from Marco Brescianini's assist. Four goals in 48 minutes of match time, two of them arriving before Benevento could reorganise after the break: this was the passage that rendered the contest academic. Vanoli made a substitution at the interval, a rotation that did nothing to interrupt the rhythm — if anything, the tempo accelerated.
The key individual in this context is Ndour, whose goal on 50 minutes was the decisive one in the sense that it extended the lead to a margin Benevento had no realistic path to overturning. Brescianini's assist was the connector, but Ndour's finish confirmed that Fiorentina's depth across midfield — Guðmundsson, Fagioli, Brescianini, Ndour all starting — gave Vanoli options that a Coppa Italia first-round opponent simply could not match. Guðmundsson himself was withdrawn on 58 minutes, having already done his work in the opening two minutes and across the first half.
Benevento's response came on 54 minutes — a goal from an unnamed player that briefly made it 4-1 — but it arrived a minute too late to carry any psychological weight and prompted Floro Flores to make three substitutions simultaneously on 55 minutes, bringing on Simone Verdi and David Okereke among others. The triple change read less as tactical adjustment and more as an acknowledgement that the match was gone. Benevento's XI, built around a midfield-heavy shape with Prisco, Maita, Lamesta, Giugliano, and Talia, lacked the forward presence to threaten a Fiorentina backline. Pietro Beruatto's yellow card in stoppage time was a fitting coda to a difficult evening.
Fiorentina's form across their last three matches — two wins and a draw, seven goals scored and two conceded — reflects a team that has found consistency at both ends. The last-five window is more textured: a heavy defeat away at Roma sits alongside the Juventus win and the Atalanta draw, suggesting that Vanoli's side can be exposed by elite opposition but are capable of imposing themselves on comparable or weaker opponents. Against Benevento, the quality gap was simply too wide for the result to be in doubt once Guðmundsson struck in the second minute.
A month from now, what will matter about this match is not the scoreline but the signal: Fiorentina entered their Coppa Italia campaign with the same attacking fluency that closed their league season, and Vanoli's rotation policy — five substitutions deployed, several starters rested in the second half — suggests a squad with sufficient depth to treat a cup opener as a genuine audition rather than a chore.