Roma hit the post three times as Empoli won via goals from Emmanuel Gyasi and Lorenzo Colombo's penalty. Eldor Shomurodov headed home for Roma.
De Rossi said afterwards, “I need to analyse the game carefully when I watch it again, but my first impression is that we lacked energy and intensity.
“Especially in the first half, the ball was moving around too slowly. When we made the vertical passes, the way we had prepared it, we were also dangerous.
“When you play against teams that clam up well in defence, if you pass it around slowly and don’t do the preventative marking, you lose sight of the spaces and concede on the counter-attack. Then you lose confidence and even luck isn’t on your side.
“It’s true, their wingbacks caused us problems. I asked them to change after 20 minutes, but they kept doing it. Artem needs service in the penalty area, with a high ball. He also needs some support, because if he’s alone, it becomes impossible for him to fight the right spaces.
“We need better service, we need a better choice of formation, there are many things that we can improve. In the second half, it wasn’t a tactical change, it was just that we were desperate and ramped everything up.”
De Rossi added, “It is possible to balance all these players, but you need to be focused on the preventative marking and be more aggressive. We worked on it last season, but this time we fell back into old habits.”