Genoa 1-0 Venezia at the Stadio Comunale Luigi Ferraris, and the entire match was decided by a single moment of quality in the 25th minute — Mikael Ellertsson, Genoa's Icelandic midfielder, converting after a lay-off from Stephan El Shaarawy to give Daniele De Rossi's side a lead they would not relinquish.
The goal arrived at the precise moment when Venezia had not yet found their footing. El Shaarawy, who would be withdrawn at 62', combined with Ellertsson to break the deadlock, and from that point the match became a question of whether Davide Nicola's visitors could manufacture an equaliser. They could not. Genoa's defensive shape held, and the single yellow card — shown to Sebastian Otoa at 55' — prompted De Rossi to act promptly: Otoa was substituted off at 70', limiting any further disciplinary risk. The five substitutions Genoa made across the second half were managed in two waves, with Frendrup and Colombo arriving at 62' and Marcandalli, Amorim, and Puczka following later, each change tightening rather than disrupting the structure.
Ellertsson is the natural focus here. The goal was the opener and the winner — the only goal of the match — and it came with an assist from El Shaarawy that showed a combination Genoa had been building toward. What gives the moment additional weight is the context in which it arrived: Genoa had taken just one win from their previous three Serie A fixtures before Sunday, and had conceded five goals across those three games. A clean sheet alongside the three points represents a meaningful shift in defensive solidity, even if one match is too small a sample to declare a trend.
Venezia's afternoon illustrated the difficulty of their position. Nicola's side came into the fixture having won just one of their last five matches, conceding twelve goals across that run. Against Genoa they managed to keep the deficit to a single goal, but their attacking output — zero goals, no yellow cards, four substitutions made without altering the scoreline — suggests a team struggling to generate the kind of pressure that forces results. Their most recent win, a 1-0 home result against Napoli on October 17th, now looks increasingly isolated rather than the start of a recovery. The substitutions Nicola made — Mazzocchi and Dagasso at 71', Rrahmani at 79', Lauberbach at 87' — came progressively later and could not manufacture a response.
The impact on form is concrete. Genoa now move to two wins from their last three across all competitions, having come in on one win and two defeats in that same window. Their Serie A form over the last four matches, including this result, reads two wins and two defeats — a more balanced picture than the one-win-from-four they carried into Sunday. Venezia's trajectory is unchanged: one win from their last five remains the summary, and the goals-against column continues to grow.
A bottom-of-the-table fixture settled by a single first-half goal and defended for sixty-five minutes: Genoa took what was available, and Venezia could not find a way to take anything at all.