Capitano Danilo (11 Viewers)
- Thread starter j0ker
- Start date
Filled in decently as DM last season too. Was a bit embarassing for our CM/DMs to fail, and fail, and fail there to watch the RB step up and do a better job. Fortunately for him, his services where needed elsewhere.
Regardless if we play five at the back or four next year, I'd like for him to step up as DM when we are in possession trying to build from the back. Allegri has adapted our build up more towards Pep-style where our LCB roams a bit to try and offer passing alternative and spread passes a bit higher up the pitch. It's improved us a lot. Sandro is OK here but Danilo does it really well. Helps us conceal Bremer's weakness too.
Regardless if we play five at the back or four next year, I'd like for him to step up as DM when we are in possession trying to build from the back. Allegri has adapted our build up more towards Pep-style where our LCB roams a bit to try and offer passing alternative and spread passes a bit higher up the pitch. It's improved us a lot. Sandro is OK here but Danilo does it really well. Helps us conceal Bremer's weakness too.
Still underrated. Idk about “world class” but no doubt in my mind he’s one of the better CBs in serie A. And if he isn’t he’s at least one of the most consistent, I don’t even remember any bad games off the top of my head.
here’s a genuine question: what made him such a highly rated fullback at one point and why wasn’t he moved to CB earlier? I didn’t watch him much before Juve but he brought almost nothing going forward as a fullback before the switch. Did he just forget how to attack?
here’s a genuine question: what made him such a highly rated fullback at one point and why wasn’t he moved to CB earlier? I didn’t watch him much before Juve but he brought almost nothing going forward as a fullback before the switch. Did he just forget how to attack?
Different phases of a player's career I guess. Danilo and Alex Sandro were traditional fullbacks. Good going both ways. And played together in a system that exploited fullbacks runs. That CL run they were legitimately scary together.
I don't think Danilo forgot to attack. At Madrid he was very attacking for a while, and left gaps because of it. But to be an attacking fullback at Madrid or at Juve there are different standards than at Porto.
Still Danilo is still a threat in attack imo. When he does pop forward he still good. He is just more valuable on defense where he is great. Brilliant player overall.
I don't think Danilo forgot to attack. At Madrid he was very attacking for a while, and left gaps because of it. But to be an attacking fullback at Madrid or at Juve there are different standards than at Porto.
Still Danilo is still a threat in attack imo. When he does pop forward he still good. He is just more valuable on defense where he is great. Brilliant player overall.
he does look like this type of a guy who cares for a team. Im not Danilo biggest admirer but just for this he should be kept here for a long time. Also Gatti looks like a guy who could be a future Capitano too. Really the form that Federico is displaying lately is something else, wall in defence, plus those runs in attack. We didnt have a newly come defender in the team who was having such a big impact on the team for a long long time.
https://theathletic.com/4396581/2023/04/13/danilo-interview-juventus-allegri/
Juventus’ leader Danilo: ‘Do you think any other team could have done what we’re doing?’
Juventus’ leader Danilo: ‘Do you think any other team could have done what we’re doing?’
Danilo’s Juventus team-mates have a nickname for him.
“Every now and then they call me ‘The Philosopher’,” he tells The Athletic. It is meant with respect, unlike when Zlatan Ibrahimovic applied the same sobriquet to Pep Guardiola during his brief spell at Barcelona, where the Swede at least followed the Socratic method in challenging the coach’s ideas.
Allusions to Kant and Descartes in the Juventus dressing room are, on the contrary, a nod to Danilo’s intelligence. He has emerged as quite the cerebral leader since joining from Manchester City in a swap deal that saw Joao Cancelo move in the opposite direction almost four years ago.
Danilo has played more minutes than anybody else for Juventus this season, captaining the side 22 times in the absence of Leonardo Bonucci due to injury — and is likely to make that 23 in their Europa League quarter-final first leg at home to Lisbon’s Sporting tonight (Thursday). Few would have tipped him for the armband when he came to Turin in the summer of 2019. Matthijs de Ligt, Manuel Locatelli and Paulo Dybala were all expected to skipper the team after Giorgio Chiellini, who departed to MLS at the end of last season, and Bonucci.
“Leo is a person and a player I can lean on,” Danilo explains. “I put myself out there and see if I can help our less experienced players.”
After all, Danilo has won everything there is to win in the club game. He scored the winner in the 2011 Copa Libertadores final as a team-mate of Neymar at Santos before heading to Europe the following January to join Porto. He has Champions League winners’ medals from both his seasons at Real Madrid, enjoyed back-to-back Premier League triumphs with City, as well as both domestic cups, and has won everything domestically in Italy.
(Photo: Chris Brunskill Ltd/Getty Images)
The wisdom he has to pass onto the kids from Juventus’ Next Gen programme, the likes of Samuel Iling-Junior, Nicolo Fagioli, Fabio Miretti, Matias Soule and Enzo Barrenechea, is considerable.
The Philosopher nickname in part derives from football’s enduring surprise at anyone having an interest in books. When Danilo steps off the bus and walks down the slope to the locker rooms at the Allianz Stadium, he is as likely to be carrying a paperback as a washbag.
“I like to read and to study new things,” he says. Usually, it’s psychology over philosophy. Martin Seligman, the author of Learned Optimism, is someone he turns to and, boy, have Juventus needed to learn to be optimistic this season. “Do you think any other team could have done what we’re doing if, along with all the injuries (to Paul Pogba, Federico Chiesa and Angel Di Maria), the same things had happened to them?”
The setbacks Juventus have experienced, a series of injustices in Danilo’s and the club’s view, could have overwhelmed the team and crushed morale. In September, a stoppage-time winner at home against Salernitana was ruled out because the VAR did not have the camera angle that showed Antonio Candreva was playing goalscorer Arkadiusz Milik onside. That decision cost Juventus two points and, to add insult to injury, Milik received a second yellow card for celebrating a goal that ultimately didn’t stand.
Danilo still looks gobsmacked six months later. “For me, it was unbelievable,” he says. Internally, the incident set the tone for the rest of their season.
Massimiliano Allegri and his players were already under pressure. Early results weren’t good enough. Defeats to newly promoted Monza and then Maccabi Haifa were embarrassing as Juventus experienced elimination from the Champions League after the group stage for the first time in almost a decade and #AllegriOut started trending online again.
No sooner had Juventus turned things around with an impressive run of six straight wins and as many clean sheets leading up to the World Cup break than Andrea Agnelli and the board suddenly resigned while all eyes were on Qatar 2022.
Upon the resumption of Serie A in January, a 5-1 defeat away to Napoli was followed by a 15-point penalty, all in the same week. Juventus went from the prospect of fighting for the title to pondering relegation in a matter of days. None of this was under the players’ control. It could have floored them. Instead, they came out swinging.
“Where there’s a crisis, I see opportunity,” Danilo says. “We needed it to bring us closer together, to become even more of a family, to have an even greater sense of belonging to Juventus. You can see that on the pitch. There are times out there when we’re unable to play our best football but you can see the determination, the sacrifice and the attachment. That’s the best thing about Juve.”
Whatever your opinion of the club’s off-the-pitch turmoil, the ability of Allegri and his players to quieten the noise around them and grind out results has been quite remarkable.
One of the books Danilo is reading at the moment is by a priest, Fabio De Melo (no relation, it seems, to Felipe Melo or Arthur Melo). “It talks about finding your essence, about putting all the things that don’t represent you to one side, about not letting things that perhaps through the influence of others and the environments in which we live feel like a reflection of ourselves but really aren’t a reflection of ourselves.”
To watch Juventus of late is to get the impression Danilo has gone out and bought everyone in the squad a copy.
The club have stayed true to themselves regardless of external perception. They have found their essence over the course of 12 wins in 15 games since the start of February, a run which has taken them to the last eight of the Europa League and Coppa Italia semi-finals.
Deep down, Juventus have always been a blue-collar team. Their games at Turin’s old Comunale stadium were recreation at the end of a hard week for workers in the FIAT factories in Lingotto and Mirafiori. The corporate identity has, at its core, always been about making something solid and reliable that everyone wants, something that goes the distance. Fino alla Fine.
The style, or perceived lack of one, has once again been a matter of debate this season, even though it echoes the club motto: “Winning isn’t important, it’s the only thing that counts.” How doesn’t matter, whether it’s by a few furlongs or, as Allegri the horse-racing enthusiast says, by ‘corto muso’ — a nose.
This has been misconstrued to mean Allegri wants his team to take the lead, then sit back and see the game out rather than go looking for another goal. “I’m fed up with the BS you come out with,” he vented after Juventus got their noses in front only to draw 1-1 at home to Nantes in February in the first leg of a play-off to reach the Europa League’s round of 16. “I don’t want to always win 1-0. I’ve never wanted that.” Juventus then went and won the decider 5-1 in France.
Angel Di Maria celebrates scoring in the rout against Nantes (Photo: Daniele Badolato – Juventus FC/Juventus FC via Getty Images)
Danilo echoes his coach.
“We look to score two or three goals in every game. It would be better to win (by a bigger margin) with more peace of mind. But if we can’t find another goal and things aren’t going as we’d like, we have this ability to not concede. We defend like a family and leave everything out on the pitch. Our new signings don’t get it at first, but then they learn. There’s always someone who is prepared to put in that extra sliding tackle, to speak up, to double up to help his team-mate out. That’s the beauty of Juve.”
The dirty work. The ugly side of the game.
“If people analyse the 1-0 win against Inter (at San Siro on March 19), they can talk about the (Adrien Rabiot) handball. But we had lots of chances. What I mean by that includes the decision up to the final ball — the decision up to taking a shot. We could have scored two or three more goals and the game would have been different. In the end, we only won 1-0 and the perception is different.
“We always try to do the things you need to do in order to see a game out, and we try to help ourselves by managing our energy, making subs with the upcoming games in mind. Unfortunately, it’s not always possible (to find that extra goal). But I prefer to win 10 games in a row 1-0 (than not win).”
This way of looking at things, the Juventus state of mind, clashes on a cultural level with the Brazilian approach to football. Dani Alves left them only a season after joining. He even claimed the club made a mistake by signing him. “If you put an extremely defensive player in a team like Barcelona, it makes no sense,” he said. “By the same token, if you put an attacking full-back in a team set up to defend, it isn’t the right place for him. Structurally Juventus were built to defend whereas I want to get forward and this conflicted with the idea they had for the team and meant I didn’t play as much as I would have liked.”
Historically, when you think about the South Americans who have played for Juventus, the players who come to mind tend to be gritty Uruguayans such as the enforcer Paolo Montero, honest pros in the Rodrigo Bentancur mould, and the steely, streetwise flair of Argentinians including Omar Sivori and Carlos Tevez rather than the silk of Dybala.
Other than Jose Altafini, stylistically Juventus and Brazil tend not to go together (anyone remember Diego Ribas flopping in Turin?), at least not in the way Milan and Brazil did in the past. “Over the last decade, things have changed,” Danilo counters. The game’s elite no longer look to Brazil only for strikers such as Ronaldo or the flicks and tricks of a Ronaldinho.
“Look at the top sides and they all have Brazilians who are either captains or hard workers. There’s Marquinhos at PSG, Thiago Silva at Chelsea, Casemiro at Madrid and then Man United. Alisson at Liverpool. Ederson at City, and Fernandinho before him. The perception of Brazilian footballers has changed and so where there was once a clash with Juve, all of these players could come here and be in the team for years.
“I’d love to have Casemiro. He’d be at home here.”
(Photo: Angel Martinez/Real Madrid via Getty Images)
Renowned for their defending, Juventus’ back line has been all-Brazilian for much of this season with Danilo and Alex Sandro reinventing themselves as centre-backs on either side of Gleison Bremer. “A Brazilian defence in Italy is a source of pride,” Danilo says. “There’s a school of defending here and we’ve learned well because we play with guys like Bonucci, who come through the university of defending with Giorgio (Chiellini) and Andrea (Barzagli).”
One cap away from his half-century, Danilo hopes to get there under a new coach whether they are Brazilian or from elsewhere, amid reports of the FA talking to Madrid’s Italian boss Carlo Ancelotti. “If the decision is taken to go for a good, experienced foreign coach, I’d have no problem with it,” Danilo says. “If he gets good results, the people will learn to trust him even if he’s a foreigner. It wouldn’t be a problem.” Brazil have to be open-minded, in his opinion.
Danilo was a fan of previous national-team coach Tite and played the same hybrid role for him as he did at City under Guardiola and Juventus under Andrea Pirlo, stepping into midfield beside the anchorman to allow the No 8 to get forward and form a five-man front line. It’s why Manchester United expressed an interest in signing him before he committed his future to Juventus last month.
“Working with Pep changed how I see football almost 100 per cent,” Danilo says. “What he’s best at is teaching players. He manages to get his ideas across to everyone and that makes things easier. The way I look at football is based on space: ‘Where’s the opponent and the ball?’. I go where the spaces are.
“When Juventus appointed Pirlo, he had the same idea (as Pep). We just got each other from day one. I really enjoy myself in that hybrid role. To me it’s not only the game’s present, it’s the future as well. It’s getting harder to find space and to surprise your opponent, so in my opinion we’re at the stage where roles don’t matter anymore.” It’s the end of the position game as we know it.
After winning the title under Maurizio Sarri, and the Coppa Italia and Supercoppa with Pirlo, Danilo hopes to add more trophies, such as this season’s Europa League, under Allegri. If it happens, they will come in a different guise to his successes at the club.
“Sarri and Pirlo were different but thought about football in the same way. They wanted short passes and for everyone to play close together and build up through the thirds. Allegri sees football in a more direct way, with long balls, with aggression, which is another way of winning. I’ve learned from all of them but I think the Mister (Allegri) is the right guy for Juventus right now. He’s an unbelievable ‘gestore’.”
Danilo could have said “allenatore” – trainer — there. Instead he went with the Italian word for manager. It does not underplay Allegri’s instincts, his reading of the game and his coaching acumen. On the contrary, it emphasises his ability to handle people, groups and situations.
“Of everyone I’ve worked with he’s the best man-manager,” Danilo says, “and that shouldn’t be taken for granted because managing relationships with human beings isn’t easy. I don’t know if other coaches would have been capable of what he is doing, motivating the players in such a way as to stay focused on the pitch. It hasn’t been an easy season and he’s handled the situation in the right way.”
(Photo: Valerio Pennicino/Getty Images)
Generally unflappable in demeanour and blessed with the sort of humour to make light of things in the most dramatic and tense of times, Allegri’s steady and calm hand at the tiller has navigated Juventus through a storm.
Keeping his aplomb has been more of a challenge this season, and understandably so.
The players also lost their cool in last week’s Coppa Italia semi-final first leg at home to Inter, reacting badly to Romelu Lukaku’s stoppage-time equaliser. His usual goal celebration was misinterpreted as a lack of respect for the Juventus fans and led to a bust-up that saw Juan Cuadrado sent off. Lukaku went too for a second booking, a decision that seemed harsh and insensitive amid the horrible racist abuse he suffered although Inter, curiously, have not appealed it, not even as a symbolic gesture.
Danilo drew some criticism afterwards for standing by team-mate Cuadrado and calling the decision to show Lukaku a second yellow card “normal” — a view shared by Italy’s industry of refereeing experts. He was not excusing the racist abuse Lukaku experienced. Far from it. Danilo tweeted he believes “every act of racism must be strongly condemned” and has led Juventus’ initiatives on this issue.
One of these has seen him partner with the Sulla Razza podcast, which confronts institutional racism, cultural appropriation and hate speech. Danilo has participated in season two.
“There needs to be more curiosity around this issue,” he says. “In this day and age, it’s important to have empathy and to understand the experiences of people from other backgrounds. We can’t just think about ourselves. I learned new things doing the podcast. The hosts (Nadeesha Uyangoda, Maria Catena Mancuso and Nathasha Fernando) told me about their own experiences. Their families aren’t from Italy but they were born here and people look at them as if they’re not Italian.”
The children of immigrants in Italy, as was the case with Mario Balotelli, are still absurdly denied citizenship until their 18th birthday and reform of the legislation has not progressed. “This surprised me,” Danilo says. “I didn’t know it was like that.”
Juventus meanwhile have identified the two fans filmed aiming monkey chants at Lukaku and reported them to law enforcement. The intention, once the Questura has confirmed their identities, is to ban one, who is still a minor, for 10 years and the adult for life. Similar action was taken when AC Milan goalkeeper Mike Maignan was racially abused at the Allianz earlier this season.
A tier of the south stand will also be closed for Juventus’ next home league game against Napoli, which brings us to the non-event that is the 2022-23 title race.
The Scudetto is long gone, even though Juventus will go clear in second place if their 15-point penalty is overturned at a hearing next Tuesday. It isn’t where Danilo envisioned the team to be. “Juventus don’t start the season to finish second or third,” he says. “It isn’t possible. We can’t allow that. I started the season thinking about the title and going as far as possible in the other competitions. Napoli have been great this season. They’re one of the best teams in Europe and other things have happened too.
“We’ve won a lot of games since the points penalty and have progressed in the Europa League and the Coppa Italia. We’re right up there in the league — second until they say otherwise. We’ve earned the points on the pitch. So considering everything that’s gone on, we’re having a good season.”
Trust The Philosopher to be all philosophical about it.
“Every now and then they call me ‘The Philosopher’,” he tells The Athletic. It is meant with respect, unlike when Zlatan Ibrahimovic applied the same sobriquet to Pep Guardiola during his brief spell at Barcelona, where the Swede at least followed the Socratic method in challenging the coach’s ideas.
Allusions to Kant and Descartes in the Juventus dressing room are, on the contrary, a nod to Danilo’s intelligence. He has emerged as quite the cerebral leader since joining from Manchester City in a swap deal that saw Joao Cancelo move in the opposite direction almost four years ago.
Danilo has played more minutes than anybody else for Juventus this season, captaining the side 22 times in the absence of Leonardo Bonucci due to injury — and is likely to make that 23 in their Europa League quarter-final first leg at home to Lisbon’s Sporting tonight (Thursday). Few would have tipped him for the armband when he came to Turin in the summer of 2019. Matthijs de Ligt, Manuel Locatelli and Paulo Dybala were all expected to skipper the team after Giorgio Chiellini, who departed to MLS at the end of last season, and Bonucci.
“Leo is a person and a player I can lean on,” Danilo explains. “I put myself out there and see if I can help our less experienced players.”
After all, Danilo has won everything there is to win in the club game. He scored the winner in the 2011 Copa Libertadores final as a team-mate of Neymar at Santos before heading to Europe the following January to join Porto. He has Champions League winners’ medals from both his seasons at Real Madrid, enjoyed back-to-back Premier League triumphs with City, as well as both domestic cups, and has won everything domestically in Italy.
(Photo: Chris Brunskill Ltd/Getty Images)
The wisdom he has to pass onto the kids from Juventus’ Next Gen programme, the likes of Samuel Iling-Junior, Nicolo Fagioli, Fabio Miretti, Matias Soule and Enzo Barrenechea, is considerable.
The Philosopher nickname in part derives from football’s enduring surprise at anyone having an interest in books. When Danilo steps off the bus and walks down the slope to the locker rooms at the Allianz Stadium, he is as likely to be carrying a paperback as a washbag.
“I like to read and to study new things,” he says. Usually, it’s psychology over philosophy. Martin Seligman, the author of Learned Optimism, is someone he turns to and, boy, have Juventus needed to learn to be optimistic this season. “Do you think any other team could have done what we’re doing if, along with all the injuries (to Paul Pogba, Federico Chiesa and Angel Di Maria), the same things had happened to them?”
The setbacks Juventus have experienced, a series of injustices in Danilo’s and the club’s view, could have overwhelmed the team and crushed morale. In September, a stoppage-time winner at home against Salernitana was ruled out because the VAR did not have the camera angle that showed Antonio Candreva was playing goalscorer Arkadiusz Milik onside. That decision cost Juventus two points and, to add insult to injury, Milik received a second yellow card for celebrating a goal that ultimately didn’t stand.
Danilo still looks gobsmacked six months later. “For me, it was unbelievable,” he says. Internally, the incident set the tone for the rest of their season.
Massimiliano Allegri and his players were already under pressure. Early results weren’t good enough. Defeats to newly promoted Monza and then Maccabi Haifa were embarrassing as Juventus experienced elimination from the Champions League after the group stage for the first time in almost a decade and #AllegriOut started trending online again.
No sooner had Juventus turned things around with an impressive run of six straight wins and as many clean sheets leading up to the World Cup break than Andrea Agnelli and the board suddenly resigned while all eyes were on Qatar 2022.
Upon the resumption of Serie A in January, a 5-1 defeat away to Napoli was followed by a 15-point penalty, all in the same week. Juventus went from the prospect of fighting for the title to pondering relegation in a matter of days. None of this was under the players’ control. It could have floored them. Instead, they came out swinging.
“Where there’s a crisis, I see opportunity,” Danilo says. “We needed it to bring us closer together, to become even more of a family, to have an even greater sense of belonging to Juventus. You can see that on the pitch. There are times out there when we’re unable to play our best football but you can see the determination, the sacrifice and the attachment. That’s the best thing about Juve.”
Whatever your opinion of the club’s off-the-pitch turmoil, the ability of Allegri and his players to quieten the noise around them and grind out results has been quite remarkable.
One of the books Danilo is reading at the moment is by a priest, Fabio De Melo (no relation, it seems, to Felipe Melo or Arthur Melo). “It talks about finding your essence, about putting all the things that don’t represent you to one side, about not letting things that perhaps through the influence of others and the environments in which we live feel like a reflection of ourselves but really aren’t a reflection of ourselves.”
To watch Juventus of late is to get the impression Danilo has gone out and bought everyone in the squad a copy.
The club have stayed true to themselves regardless of external perception. They have found their essence over the course of 12 wins in 15 games since the start of February, a run which has taken them to the last eight of the Europa League and Coppa Italia semi-finals.
Deep down, Juventus have always been a blue-collar team. Their games at Turin’s old Comunale stadium were recreation at the end of a hard week for workers in the FIAT factories in Lingotto and Mirafiori. The corporate identity has, at its core, always been about making something solid and reliable that everyone wants, something that goes the distance. Fino alla Fine.
The style, or perceived lack of one, has once again been a matter of debate this season, even though it echoes the club motto: “Winning isn’t important, it’s the only thing that counts.” How doesn’t matter, whether it’s by a few furlongs or, as Allegri the horse-racing enthusiast says, by ‘corto muso’ — a nose.
This has been misconstrued to mean Allegri wants his team to take the lead, then sit back and see the game out rather than go looking for another goal. “I’m fed up with the BS you come out with,” he vented after Juventus got their noses in front only to draw 1-1 at home to Nantes in February in the first leg of a play-off to reach the Europa League’s round of 16. “I don’t want to always win 1-0. I’ve never wanted that.” Juventus then went and won the decider 5-1 in France.
Angel Di Maria celebrates scoring in the rout against Nantes (Photo: Daniele Badolato – Juventus FC/Juventus FC via Getty Images)
Danilo echoes his coach.
“We look to score two or three goals in every game. It would be better to win (by a bigger margin) with more peace of mind. But if we can’t find another goal and things aren’t going as we’d like, we have this ability to not concede. We defend like a family and leave everything out on the pitch. Our new signings don’t get it at first, but then they learn. There’s always someone who is prepared to put in that extra sliding tackle, to speak up, to double up to help his team-mate out. That’s the beauty of Juve.”
The dirty work. The ugly side of the game.
“If people analyse the 1-0 win against Inter (at San Siro on March 19), they can talk about the (Adrien Rabiot) handball. But we had lots of chances. What I mean by that includes the decision up to the final ball — the decision up to taking a shot. We could have scored two or three more goals and the game would have been different. In the end, we only won 1-0 and the perception is different.
“We always try to do the things you need to do in order to see a game out, and we try to help ourselves by managing our energy, making subs with the upcoming games in mind. Unfortunately, it’s not always possible (to find that extra goal). But I prefer to win 10 games in a row 1-0 (than not win).”
This way of looking at things, the Juventus state of mind, clashes on a cultural level with the Brazilian approach to football. Dani Alves left them only a season after joining. He even claimed the club made a mistake by signing him. “If you put an extremely defensive player in a team like Barcelona, it makes no sense,” he said. “By the same token, if you put an attacking full-back in a team set up to defend, it isn’t the right place for him. Structurally Juventus were built to defend whereas I want to get forward and this conflicted with the idea they had for the team and meant I didn’t play as much as I would have liked.”
Historically, when you think about the South Americans who have played for Juventus, the players who come to mind tend to be gritty Uruguayans such as the enforcer Paolo Montero, honest pros in the Rodrigo Bentancur mould, and the steely, streetwise flair of Argentinians including Omar Sivori and Carlos Tevez rather than the silk of Dybala.
Other than Jose Altafini, stylistically Juventus and Brazil tend not to go together (anyone remember Diego Ribas flopping in Turin?), at least not in the way Milan and Brazil did in the past. “Over the last decade, things have changed,” Danilo counters. The game’s elite no longer look to Brazil only for strikers such as Ronaldo or the flicks and tricks of a Ronaldinho.
“Look at the top sides and they all have Brazilians who are either captains or hard workers. There’s Marquinhos at PSG, Thiago Silva at Chelsea, Casemiro at Madrid and then Man United. Alisson at Liverpool. Ederson at City, and Fernandinho before him. The perception of Brazilian footballers has changed and so where there was once a clash with Juve, all of these players could come here and be in the team for years.
“I’d love to have Casemiro. He’d be at home here.”
(Photo: Angel Martinez/Real Madrid via Getty Images)
Renowned for their defending, Juventus’ back line has been all-Brazilian for much of this season with Danilo and Alex Sandro reinventing themselves as centre-backs on either side of Gleison Bremer. “A Brazilian defence in Italy is a source of pride,” Danilo says. “There’s a school of defending here and we’ve learned well because we play with guys like Bonucci, who come through the university of defending with Giorgio (Chiellini) and Andrea (Barzagli).”
One cap away from his half-century, Danilo hopes to get there under a new coach whether they are Brazilian or from elsewhere, amid reports of the FA talking to Madrid’s Italian boss Carlo Ancelotti. “If the decision is taken to go for a good, experienced foreign coach, I’d have no problem with it,” Danilo says. “If he gets good results, the people will learn to trust him even if he’s a foreigner. It wouldn’t be a problem.” Brazil have to be open-minded, in his opinion.
Danilo was a fan of previous national-team coach Tite and played the same hybrid role for him as he did at City under Guardiola and Juventus under Andrea Pirlo, stepping into midfield beside the anchorman to allow the No 8 to get forward and form a five-man front line. It’s why Manchester United expressed an interest in signing him before he committed his future to Juventus last month.
“Working with Pep changed how I see football almost 100 per cent,” Danilo says. “What he’s best at is teaching players. He manages to get his ideas across to everyone and that makes things easier. The way I look at football is based on space: ‘Where’s the opponent and the ball?’. I go where the spaces are.
“When Juventus appointed Pirlo, he had the same idea (as Pep). We just got each other from day one. I really enjoy myself in that hybrid role. To me it’s not only the game’s present, it’s the future as well. It’s getting harder to find space and to surprise your opponent, so in my opinion we’re at the stage where roles don’t matter anymore.” It’s the end of the position game as we know it.
After winning the title under Maurizio Sarri, and the Coppa Italia and Supercoppa with Pirlo, Danilo hopes to add more trophies, such as this season’s Europa League, under Allegri. If it happens, they will come in a different guise to his successes at the club.
“Sarri and Pirlo were different but thought about football in the same way. They wanted short passes and for everyone to play close together and build up through the thirds. Allegri sees football in a more direct way, with long balls, with aggression, which is another way of winning. I’ve learned from all of them but I think the Mister (Allegri) is the right guy for Juventus right now. He’s an unbelievable ‘gestore’.”
Danilo could have said “allenatore” – trainer — there. Instead he went with the Italian word for manager. It does not underplay Allegri’s instincts, his reading of the game and his coaching acumen. On the contrary, it emphasises his ability to handle people, groups and situations.
“Of everyone I’ve worked with he’s the best man-manager,” Danilo says, “and that shouldn’t be taken for granted because managing relationships with human beings isn’t easy. I don’t know if other coaches would have been capable of what he is doing, motivating the players in such a way as to stay focused on the pitch. It hasn’t been an easy season and he’s handled the situation in the right way.”
(Photo: Valerio Pennicino/Getty Images)
Generally unflappable in demeanour and blessed with the sort of humour to make light of things in the most dramatic and tense of times, Allegri’s steady and calm hand at the tiller has navigated Juventus through a storm.
Keeping his aplomb has been more of a challenge this season, and understandably so.
The players also lost their cool in last week’s Coppa Italia semi-final first leg at home to Inter, reacting badly to Romelu Lukaku’s stoppage-time equaliser. His usual goal celebration was misinterpreted as a lack of respect for the Juventus fans and led to a bust-up that saw Juan Cuadrado sent off. Lukaku went too for a second booking, a decision that seemed harsh and insensitive amid the horrible racist abuse he suffered although Inter, curiously, have not appealed it, not even as a symbolic gesture.
Danilo drew some criticism afterwards for standing by team-mate Cuadrado and calling the decision to show Lukaku a second yellow card “normal” — a view shared by Italy’s industry of refereeing experts. He was not excusing the racist abuse Lukaku experienced. Far from it. Danilo tweeted he believes “every act of racism must be strongly condemned” and has led Juventus’ initiatives on this issue.
One of these has seen him partner with the Sulla Razza podcast, which confronts institutional racism, cultural appropriation and hate speech. Danilo has participated in season two.
“There needs to be more curiosity around this issue,” he says. “In this day and age, it’s important to have empathy and to understand the experiences of people from other backgrounds. We can’t just think about ourselves. I learned new things doing the podcast. The hosts (Nadeesha Uyangoda, Maria Catena Mancuso and Nathasha Fernando) told me about their own experiences. Their families aren’t from Italy but they were born here and people look at them as if they’re not Italian.”
The children of immigrants in Italy, as was the case with Mario Balotelli, are still absurdly denied citizenship until their 18th birthday and reform of the legislation has not progressed. “This surprised me,” Danilo says. “I didn’t know it was like that.”
Juventus meanwhile have identified the two fans filmed aiming monkey chants at Lukaku and reported them to law enforcement. The intention, once the Questura has confirmed their identities, is to ban one, who is still a minor, for 10 years and the adult for life. Similar action was taken when AC Milan goalkeeper Mike Maignan was racially abused at the Allianz earlier this season.
A tier of the south stand will also be closed for Juventus’ next home league game against Napoli, which brings us to the non-event that is the 2022-23 title race.
The Scudetto is long gone, even though Juventus will go clear in second place if their 15-point penalty is overturned at a hearing next Tuesday. It isn’t where Danilo envisioned the team to be. “Juventus don’t start the season to finish second or third,” he says. “It isn’t possible. We can’t allow that. I started the season thinking about the title and going as far as possible in the other competitions. Napoli have been great this season. They’re one of the best teams in Europe and other things have happened too.
“We’ve won a lot of games since the points penalty and have progressed in the Europa League and the Coppa Italia. We’re right up there in the league — second until they say otherwise. We’ve earned the points on the pitch. So considering everything that’s gone on, we’re having a good season.”
Trust The Philosopher to be all philosophical about it.
His scoring record back at Porto was decent. Took penalties and had a decent long range strike. His natural tendency to get forward and regularly provide overlapping runs lent itself more to being a full back than a CB so I can see why he hasn’t been considered for the role in the past.
At Madrid and Man City he rarely had a run of games due to alternative options and injuries.
At Madrid and Man City he rarely had a run of games due to alternative options and injuries.
https://theathletic.com/4396581/2023/04/13/danilo-interview-juventus-allegri/
Juventus’ leader Danilo: ‘Do you think any other team could have done what we’re doing?’
Juventus’ leader Danilo: ‘Do you think any other team could have done what we’re doing?’
Danilo’s Juventus team-mates have a nickname for him.
“Every now and then they call me ‘The Philosopher’,” he tells The Athletic. It is meant with respect, unlike when Zlatan Ibrahimovic applied the same sobriquet to Pep Guardiola during his brief spell at Barcelona, where the Swede at least followed the Socratic method in challenging the coach’s ideas.
Allusions to Kant and Descartes in the Juventus dressing room are, on the contrary, a nod to Danilo’s intelligence. He has emerged as quite the cerebral leader since joining from Manchester City in a swap deal that saw Joao Cancelo move in the opposite direction almost four years ago.
Danilo has played more minutes than anybody else for Juventus this season, captaining the side 22 times in the absence of Leonardo Bonucci due to injury — and is likely to make that 23 in their Europa League quarter-final first leg at home to Lisbon’s Sporting tonight (Thursday). Few would have tipped him for the armband when he came to Turin in the summer of 2019. Matthijs de Ligt, Manuel Locatelli and Paulo Dybala were all expected to skipper the team after Giorgio Chiellini, who departed to MLS at the end of last season, and Bonucci.
“Leo is a person and a player I can lean on,” Danilo explains. “I put myself out there and see if I can help our less experienced players.”
After all, Danilo has won everything there is to win in the club game. He scored the winner in the 2011 Copa Libertadores final as a team-mate of Neymar at Santos before heading to Europe the following January to join Porto. He has Champions League winners’ medals from both his seasons at Real Madrid, enjoyed back-to-back Premier League triumphs with City, as well as both domestic cups, and has won everything domestically in Italy.
(Photo: Chris Brunskill Ltd/Getty Images)
The wisdom he has to pass onto the kids from Juventus’ Next Gen programme, the likes of Samuel Iling-Junior, Nicolo Fagioli, Fabio Miretti, Matias Soule and Enzo Barrenechea, is considerable.
The Philosopher nickname in part derives from football’s enduring surprise at anyone having an interest in books. When Danilo steps off the bus and walks down the slope to the locker rooms at the Allianz Stadium, he is as likely to be carrying a paperback as a washbag.
“I like to read and to study new things,” he says. Usually, it’s psychology over philosophy. Martin Seligman, the author of Learned Optimism, is someone he turns to and, boy, have Juventus needed to learn to be optimistic this season. “Do you think any other team could have done what we’re doing if, along with all the injuries (to Paul Pogba, Federico Chiesa and Angel Di Maria), the same things had happened to them?”
The setbacks Juventus have experienced, a series of injustices in Danilo’s and the club’s view, could have overwhelmed the team and crushed morale. In September, a stoppage-time winner at home against Salernitana was ruled out because the VAR did not have the camera angle that showed Antonio Candreva was playing goalscorer Arkadiusz Milik onside. That decision cost Juventus two points and, to add insult to injury, Milik received a second yellow card for celebrating a goal that ultimately didn’t stand.
Danilo still looks gobsmacked six months later. “For me, it was unbelievable,” he says. Internally, the incident set the tone for the rest of their season.
Massimiliano Allegri and his players were already under pressure. Early results weren’t good enough. Defeats to newly promoted Monza and then Maccabi Haifa were embarrassing as Juventus experienced elimination from the Champions League after the group stage for the first time in almost a decade and #AllegriOut started trending online again.
No sooner had Juventus turned things around with an impressive run of six straight wins and as many clean sheets leading up to the World Cup break than Andrea Agnelli and the board suddenly resigned while all eyes were on Qatar 2022.
Upon the resumption of Serie A in January, a 5-1 defeat away to Napoli was followed by a 15-point penalty, all in the same week. Juventus went from the prospect of fighting for the title to pondering relegation in a matter of days. None of this was under the players’ control. It could have floored them. Instead, they came out swinging.
“Where there’s a crisis, I see opportunity,” Danilo says. “We needed it to bring us closer together, to become even more of a family, to have an even greater sense of belonging to Juventus. You can see that on the pitch. There are times out there when we’re unable to play our best football but you can see the determination, the sacrifice and the attachment. That’s the best thing about Juve.”
Whatever your opinion of the club’s off-the-pitch turmoil, the ability of Allegri and his players to quieten the noise around them and grind out results has been quite remarkable.
One of the books Danilo is reading at the moment is by a priest, Fabio De Melo (no relation, it seems, to Felipe Melo or Arthur Melo). “It talks about finding your essence, about putting all the things that don’t represent you to one side, about not letting things that perhaps through the influence of others and the environments in which we live feel like a reflection of ourselves but really aren’t a reflection of ourselves.”
To watch Juventus of late is to get the impression Danilo has gone out and bought everyone in the squad a copy.
The club have stayed true to themselves regardless of external perception. They have found their essence over the course of 12 wins in 15 games since the start of February, a run which has taken them to the last eight of the Europa League and Coppa Italia semi-finals.
Deep down, Juventus have always been a blue-collar team. Their games at Turin’s old Comunale stadium were recreation at the end of a hard week for workers in the FIAT factories in Lingotto and Mirafiori. The corporate identity has, at its core, always been about making something solid and reliable that everyone wants, something that goes the distance. Fino alla Fine.
The style, or perceived lack of one, has once again been a matter of debate this season, even though it echoes the club motto: “Winning isn’t important, it’s the only thing that counts.” How doesn’t matter, whether it’s by a few furlongs or, as Allegri the horse-racing enthusiast says, by ‘corto muso’ — a nose.
This has been misconstrued to mean Allegri wants his team to take the lead, then sit back and see the game out rather than go looking for another goal. “I’m fed up with the BS you come out with,” he vented after Juventus got their noses in front only to draw 1-1 at home to Nantes in February in the first leg of a play-off to reach the Europa League’s round of 16. “I don’t want to always win 1-0. I’ve never wanted that.” Juventus then went and won the decider 5-1 in France.
Angel Di Maria celebrates scoring in the rout against Nantes (Photo: Daniele Badolato – Juventus FC/Juventus FC via Getty Images)
Danilo echoes his coach.
“We look to score two or three goals in every game. It would be better to win (by a bigger margin) with more peace of mind. But if we can’t find another goal and things aren’t going as we’d like, we have this ability to not concede. We defend like a family and leave everything out on the pitch. Our new signings don’t get it at first, but then they learn. There’s always someone who is prepared to put in that extra sliding tackle, to speak up, to double up to help his team-mate out. That’s the beauty of Juve.”
The dirty work. The ugly side of the game.
“If people analyse the 1-0 win against Inter (at San Siro on March 19), they can talk about the (Adrien Rabiot) handball. But we had lots of chances. What I mean by that includes the decision up to the final ball — the decision up to taking a shot. We could have scored two or three more goals and the game would have been different. In the end, we only won 1-0 and the perception is different.
“We always try to do the things you need to do in order to see a game out, and we try to help ourselves by managing our energy, making subs with the upcoming games in mind. Unfortunately, it’s not always possible (to find that extra goal). But I prefer to win 10 games in a row 1-0 (than not win).”
This way of looking at things, the Juventus state of mind, clashes on a cultural level with the Brazilian approach to football. Dani Alves left them only a season after joining. He even claimed the club made a mistake by signing him. “If you put an extremely defensive player in a team like Barcelona, it makes no sense,” he said. “By the same token, if you put an attacking full-back in a team set up to defend, it isn’t the right place for him. Structurally Juventus were built to defend whereas I want to get forward and this conflicted with the idea they had for the team and meant I didn’t play as much as I would have liked.”
Historically, when you think about the South Americans who have played for Juventus, the players who come to mind tend to be gritty Uruguayans such as the enforcer Paolo Montero, honest pros in the Rodrigo Bentancur mould, and the steely, streetwise flair of Argentinians including Omar Sivori and Carlos Tevez rather than the silk of Dybala.
Other than Jose Altafini, stylistically Juventus and Brazil tend not to go together (anyone remember Diego Ribas flopping in Turin?), at least not in the way Milan and Brazil did in the past. “Over the last decade, things have changed,” Danilo counters. The game’s elite no longer look to Brazil only for strikers such as Ronaldo or the flicks and tricks of a Ronaldinho.
“Look at the top sides and they all have Brazilians who are either captains or hard workers. There’s Marquinhos at PSG, Thiago Silva at Chelsea, Casemiro at Madrid and then Man United. Alisson at Liverpool. Ederson at City, and Fernandinho before him. The perception of Brazilian footballers has changed and so where there was once a clash with Juve, all of these players could come here and be in the team for years.
“I’d love to have Casemiro. He’d be at home here.”
(Photo: Angel Martinez/Real Madrid via Getty Images)
Renowned for their defending, Juventus’ back line has been all-Brazilian for much of this season with Danilo and Alex Sandro reinventing themselves as centre-backs on either side of Gleison Bremer. “A Brazilian defence in Italy is a source of pride,” Danilo says. “There’s a school of defending here and we’ve learned well because we play with guys like Bonucci, who come through the university of defending with Giorgio (Chiellini) and Andrea (Barzagli).”
One cap away from his half-century, Danilo hopes to get there under a new coach whether they are Brazilian or from elsewhere, amid reports of the FA talking to Madrid’s Italian boss Carlo Ancelotti. “If the decision is taken to go for a good, experienced foreign coach, I’d have no problem with it,” Danilo says. “If he gets good results, the people will learn to trust him even if he’s a foreigner. It wouldn’t be a problem.” Brazil have to be open-minded, in his opinion.
Danilo was a fan of previous national-team coach Tite and played the same hybrid role for him as he did at City under Guardiola and Juventus under Andrea Pirlo, stepping into midfield beside the anchorman to allow the No 8 to get forward and form a five-man front line. It’s why Manchester United expressed an interest in signing him before he committed his future to Juventus last month.
“Working with Pep changed how I see football almost 100 per cent,” Danilo says. “What he’s best at is teaching players. He manages to get his ideas across to everyone and that makes things easier. The way I look at football is based on space: ‘Where’s the opponent and the ball?’. I go where the spaces are.
“When Juventus appointed Pirlo, he had the same idea (as Pep). We just got each other from day one. I really enjoy myself in that hybrid role. To me it’s not only the game’s present, it’s the future as well. It’s getting harder to find space and to surprise your opponent, so in my opinion we’re at the stage where roles don’t matter anymore.” It’s the end of the position game as we know it.
After winning the title under Maurizio Sarri, and the Coppa Italia and Supercoppa with Pirlo, Danilo hopes to add more trophies, such as this season’s Europa League, under Allegri. If it happens, they will come in a different guise to his successes at the club.
“Sarri and Pirlo were different but thought about football in the same way. They wanted short passes and for everyone to play close together and build up through the thirds. Allegri sees football in a more direct way, with long balls, with aggression, which is another way of winning. I’ve learned from all of them but I think the Mister (Allegri) is the right guy for Juventus right now. He’s an unbelievable ‘gestore’.”
Danilo could have said “allenatore” – trainer — there. Instead he went with the Italian word for manager. It does not underplay Allegri’s instincts, his reading of the game and his coaching acumen. On the contrary, it emphasises his ability to handle people, groups and situations.
“Of everyone I’ve worked with he’s the best man-manager,” Danilo says, “and that shouldn’t be taken for granted because managing relationships with human beings isn’t easy. I don’t know if other coaches would have been capable of what he is doing, motivating the players in such a way as to stay focused on the pitch. It hasn’t been an easy season and he’s handled the situation in the right way.”
(Photo: Valerio Pennicino/Getty Images)
Generally unflappable in demeanour and blessed with the sort of humour to make light of things in the most dramatic and tense of times, Allegri’s steady and calm hand at the tiller has navigated Juventus through a storm.
Keeping his aplomb has been more of a challenge this season, and understandably so.
The players also lost their cool in last week’s Coppa Italia semi-final first leg at home to Inter, reacting badly to Romelu Lukaku’s stoppage-time equaliser. His usual goal celebration was misinterpreted as a lack of respect for the Juventus fans and led to a bust-up that saw Juan Cuadrado sent off. Lukaku went too for a second booking, a decision that seemed harsh and insensitive amid the horrible racist abuse he suffered although Inter, curiously, have not appealed it, not even as a symbolic gesture.
Danilo drew some criticism afterwards for standing by team-mate Cuadrado and calling the decision to show Lukaku a second yellow card “normal” — a view shared by Italy’s industry of refereeing experts. He was not excusing the racist abuse Lukaku experienced. Far from it. Danilo tweeted he believes “every act of racism must be strongly condemned” and has led Juventus’ initiatives on this issue.
One of these has seen him partner with the Sulla Razza podcast, which confronts institutional racism, cultural appropriation and hate speech. Danilo has participated in season two.
“There needs to be more curiosity around this issue,” he says. “In this day and age, it’s important to have empathy and to understand the experiences of people from other backgrounds. We can’t just think about ourselves. I learned new things doing the podcast. The hosts (Nadeesha Uyangoda, Maria Catena Mancuso and Nathasha Fernando) told me about their own experiences. Their families aren’t from Italy but they were born here and people look at them as if they’re not Italian.”
The children of immigrants in Italy, as was the case with Mario Balotelli, are still absurdly denied citizenship until their 18th birthday and reform of the legislation has not progressed. “This surprised me,” Danilo says. “I didn’t know it was like that.”
Juventus meanwhile have identified the two fans filmed aiming monkey chants at Lukaku and reported them to law enforcement. The intention, once the Questura has confirmed their identities, is to ban one, who is still a minor, for 10 years and the adult for life. Similar action was taken when AC Milan goalkeeper Mike Maignan was racially abused at the Allianz earlier this season.
A tier of the south stand will also be closed for Juventus’ next home league game against Napoli, which brings us to the non-event that is the 2022-23 title race.
The Scudetto is long gone, even though Juventus will go clear in second place if their 15-point penalty is overturned at a hearing next Tuesday. It isn’t where Danilo envisioned the team to be. “Juventus don’t start the season to finish second or third,” he says. “It isn’t possible. We can’t allow that. I started the season thinking about the title and going as far as possible in the other competitions. Napoli have been great this season. They’re one of the best teams in Europe and other things have happened too.
“We’ve won a lot of games since the points penalty and have progressed in the Europa League and the Coppa Italia. We’re right up there in the league — second until they say otherwise. We’ve earned the points on the pitch. So considering everything that’s gone on, we’re having a good season.”
Trust The Philosopher to be all philosophical about it.
“Every now and then they call me ‘The Philosopher’,” he tells The Athletic. It is meant with respect, unlike when Zlatan Ibrahimovic applied the same sobriquet to Pep Guardiola during his brief spell at Barcelona, where the Swede at least followed the Socratic method in challenging the coach’s ideas.
Allusions to Kant and Descartes in the Juventus dressing room are, on the contrary, a nod to Danilo’s intelligence. He has emerged as quite the cerebral leader since joining from Manchester City in a swap deal that saw Joao Cancelo move in the opposite direction almost four years ago.
Danilo has played more minutes than anybody else for Juventus this season, captaining the side 22 times in the absence of Leonardo Bonucci due to injury — and is likely to make that 23 in their Europa League quarter-final first leg at home to Lisbon’s Sporting tonight (Thursday). Few would have tipped him for the armband when he came to Turin in the summer of 2019. Matthijs de Ligt, Manuel Locatelli and Paulo Dybala were all expected to skipper the team after Giorgio Chiellini, who departed to MLS at the end of last season, and Bonucci.
“Leo is a person and a player I can lean on,” Danilo explains. “I put myself out there and see if I can help our less experienced players.”
After all, Danilo has won everything there is to win in the club game. He scored the winner in the 2011 Copa Libertadores final as a team-mate of Neymar at Santos before heading to Europe the following January to join Porto. He has Champions League winners’ medals from both his seasons at Real Madrid, enjoyed back-to-back Premier League triumphs with City, as well as both domestic cups, and has won everything domestically in Italy.
(Photo: Chris Brunskill Ltd/Getty Images)
The wisdom he has to pass onto the kids from Juventus’ Next Gen programme, the likes of Samuel Iling-Junior, Nicolo Fagioli, Fabio Miretti, Matias Soule and Enzo Barrenechea, is considerable.
The Philosopher nickname in part derives from football’s enduring surprise at anyone having an interest in books. When Danilo steps off the bus and walks down the slope to the locker rooms at the Allianz Stadium, he is as likely to be carrying a paperback as a washbag.
“I like to read and to study new things,” he says. Usually, it’s psychology over philosophy. Martin Seligman, the author of Learned Optimism, is someone he turns to and, boy, have Juventus needed to learn to be optimistic this season. “Do you think any other team could have done what we’re doing if, along with all the injuries (to Paul Pogba, Federico Chiesa and Angel Di Maria), the same things had happened to them?”
The setbacks Juventus have experienced, a series of injustices in Danilo’s and the club’s view, could have overwhelmed the team and crushed morale. In September, a stoppage-time winner at home against Salernitana was ruled out because the VAR did not have the camera angle that showed Antonio Candreva was playing goalscorer Arkadiusz Milik onside. That decision cost Juventus two points and, to add insult to injury, Milik received a second yellow card for celebrating a goal that ultimately didn’t stand.
Danilo still looks gobsmacked six months later. “For me, it was unbelievable,” he says. Internally, the incident set the tone for the rest of their season.
Massimiliano Allegri and his players were already under pressure. Early results weren’t good enough. Defeats to newly promoted Monza and then Maccabi Haifa were embarrassing as Juventus experienced elimination from the Champions League after the group stage for the first time in almost a decade and #AllegriOut started trending online again.
No sooner had Juventus turned things around with an impressive run of six straight wins and as many clean sheets leading up to the World Cup break than Andrea Agnelli and the board suddenly resigned while all eyes were on Qatar 2022.
Upon the resumption of Serie A in January, a 5-1 defeat away to Napoli was followed by a 15-point penalty, all in the same week. Juventus went from the prospect of fighting for the title to pondering relegation in a matter of days. None of this was under the players’ control. It could have floored them. Instead, they came out swinging.
“Where there’s a crisis, I see opportunity,” Danilo says. “We needed it to bring us closer together, to become even more of a family, to have an even greater sense of belonging to Juventus. You can see that on the pitch. There are times out there when we’re unable to play our best football but you can see the determination, the sacrifice and the attachment. That’s the best thing about Juve.”
Whatever your opinion of the club’s off-the-pitch turmoil, the ability of Allegri and his players to quieten the noise around them and grind out results has been quite remarkable.
One of the books Danilo is reading at the moment is by a priest, Fabio De Melo (no relation, it seems, to Felipe Melo or Arthur Melo). “It talks about finding your essence, about putting all the things that don’t represent you to one side, about not letting things that perhaps through the influence of others and the environments in which we live feel like a reflection of ourselves but really aren’t a reflection of ourselves.”
To watch Juventus of late is to get the impression Danilo has gone out and bought everyone in the squad a copy.
The club have stayed true to themselves regardless of external perception. They have found their essence over the course of 12 wins in 15 games since the start of February, a run which has taken them to the last eight of the Europa League and Coppa Italia semi-finals.
Deep down, Juventus have always been a blue-collar team. Their games at Turin’s old Comunale stadium were recreation at the end of a hard week for workers in the FIAT factories in Lingotto and Mirafiori. The corporate identity has, at its core, always been about making something solid and reliable that everyone wants, something that goes the distance. Fino alla Fine.
The style, or perceived lack of one, has once again been a matter of debate this season, even though it echoes the club motto: “Winning isn’t important, it’s the only thing that counts.” How doesn’t matter, whether it’s by a few furlongs or, as Allegri the horse-racing enthusiast says, by ‘corto muso’ — a nose.
This has been misconstrued to mean Allegri wants his team to take the lead, then sit back and see the game out rather than go looking for another goal. “I’m fed up with the BS you come out with,” he vented after Juventus got their noses in front only to draw 1-1 at home to Nantes in February in the first leg of a play-off to reach the Europa League’s round of 16. “I don’t want to always win 1-0. I’ve never wanted that.” Juventus then went and won the decider 5-1 in France.
Angel Di Maria celebrates scoring in the rout against Nantes (Photo: Daniele Badolato – Juventus FC/Juventus FC via Getty Images)
Danilo echoes his coach.
“We look to score two or three goals in every game. It would be better to win (by a bigger margin) with more peace of mind. But if we can’t find another goal and things aren’t going as we’d like, we have this ability to not concede. We defend like a family and leave everything out on the pitch. Our new signings don’t get it at first, but then they learn. There’s always someone who is prepared to put in that extra sliding tackle, to speak up, to double up to help his team-mate out. That’s the beauty of Juve.”
The dirty work. The ugly side of the game.
“If people analyse the 1-0 win against Inter (at San Siro on March 19), they can talk about the (Adrien Rabiot) handball. But we had lots of chances. What I mean by that includes the decision up to the final ball — the decision up to taking a shot. We could have scored two or three more goals and the game would have been different. In the end, we only won 1-0 and the perception is different.
“We always try to do the things you need to do in order to see a game out, and we try to help ourselves by managing our energy, making subs with the upcoming games in mind. Unfortunately, it’s not always possible (to find that extra goal). But I prefer to win 10 games in a row 1-0 (than not win).”
This way of looking at things, the Juventus state of mind, clashes on a cultural level with the Brazilian approach to football. Dani Alves left them only a season after joining. He even claimed the club made a mistake by signing him. “If you put an extremely defensive player in a team like Barcelona, it makes no sense,” he said. “By the same token, if you put an attacking full-back in a team set up to defend, it isn’t the right place for him. Structurally Juventus were built to defend whereas I want to get forward and this conflicted with the idea they had for the team and meant I didn’t play as much as I would have liked.”
Historically, when you think about the South Americans who have played for Juventus, the players who come to mind tend to be gritty Uruguayans such as the enforcer Paolo Montero, honest pros in the Rodrigo Bentancur mould, and the steely, streetwise flair of Argentinians including Omar Sivori and Carlos Tevez rather than the silk of Dybala.
Other than Jose Altafini, stylistically Juventus and Brazil tend not to go together (anyone remember Diego Ribas flopping in Turin?), at least not in the way Milan and Brazil did in the past. “Over the last decade, things have changed,” Danilo counters. The game’s elite no longer look to Brazil only for strikers such as Ronaldo or the flicks and tricks of a Ronaldinho.
“Look at the top sides and they all have Brazilians who are either captains or hard workers. There’s Marquinhos at PSG, Thiago Silva at Chelsea, Casemiro at Madrid and then Man United. Alisson at Liverpool. Ederson at City, and Fernandinho before him. The perception of Brazilian footballers has changed and so where there was once a clash with Juve, all of these players could come here and be in the team for years.
“I’d love to have Casemiro. He’d be at home here.”
(Photo: Angel Martinez/Real Madrid via Getty Images)
Renowned for their defending, Juventus’ back line has been all-Brazilian for much of this season with Danilo and Alex Sandro reinventing themselves as centre-backs on either side of Gleison Bremer. “A Brazilian defence in Italy is a source of pride,” Danilo says. “There’s a school of defending here and we’ve learned well because we play with guys like Bonucci, who come through the university of defending with Giorgio (Chiellini) and Andrea (Barzagli).”
One cap away from his half-century, Danilo hopes to get there under a new coach whether they are Brazilian or from elsewhere, amid reports of the FA talking to Madrid’s Italian boss Carlo Ancelotti. “If the decision is taken to go for a good, experienced foreign coach, I’d have no problem with it,” Danilo says. “If he gets good results, the people will learn to trust him even if he’s a foreigner. It wouldn’t be a problem.” Brazil have to be open-minded, in his opinion.
Danilo was a fan of previous national-team coach Tite and played the same hybrid role for him as he did at City under Guardiola and Juventus under Andrea Pirlo, stepping into midfield beside the anchorman to allow the No 8 to get forward and form a five-man front line. It’s why Manchester United expressed an interest in signing him before he committed his future to Juventus last month.
“Working with Pep changed how I see football almost 100 per cent,” Danilo says. “What he’s best at is teaching players. He manages to get his ideas across to everyone and that makes things easier. The way I look at football is based on space: ‘Where’s the opponent and the ball?’. I go where the spaces are.
“When Juventus appointed Pirlo, he had the same idea (as Pep). We just got each other from day one. I really enjoy myself in that hybrid role. To me it’s not only the game’s present, it’s the future as well. It’s getting harder to find space and to surprise your opponent, so in my opinion we’re at the stage where roles don’t matter anymore.” It’s the end of the position game as we know it.
After winning the title under Maurizio Sarri, and the Coppa Italia and Supercoppa with Pirlo, Danilo hopes to add more trophies, such as this season’s Europa League, under Allegri. If it happens, they will come in a different guise to his successes at the club.
“Sarri and Pirlo were different but thought about football in the same way. They wanted short passes and for everyone to play close together and build up through the thirds. Allegri sees football in a more direct way, with long balls, with aggression, which is another way of winning. I’ve learned from all of them but I think the Mister (Allegri) is the right guy for Juventus right now. He’s an unbelievable ‘gestore’.”
Danilo could have said “allenatore” – trainer — there. Instead he went with the Italian word for manager. It does not underplay Allegri’s instincts, his reading of the game and his coaching acumen. On the contrary, it emphasises his ability to handle people, groups and situations.
“Of everyone I’ve worked with he’s the best man-manager,” Danilo says, “and that shouldn’t be taken for granted because managing relationships with human beings isn’t easy. I don’t know if other coaches would have been capable of what he is doing, motivating the players in such a way as to stay focused on the pitch. It hasn’t been an easy season and he’s handled the situation in the right way.”
(Photo: Valerio Pennicino/Getty Images)
Generally unflappable in demeanour and blessed with the sort of humour to make light of things in the most dramatic and tense of times, Allegri’s steady and calm hand at the tiller has navigated Juventus through a storm.
Keeping his aplomb has been more of a challenge this season, and understandably so.
The players also lost their cool in last week’s Coppa Italia semi-final first leg at home to Inter, reacting badly to Romelu Lukaku’s stoppage-time equaliser. His usual goal celebration was misinterpreted as a lack of respect for the Juventus fans and led to a bust-up that saw Juan Cuadrado sent off. Lukaku went too for a second booking, a decision that seemed harsh and insensitive amid the horrible racist abuse he suffered although Inter, curiously, have not appealed it, not even as a symbolic gesture.
Danilo drew some criticism afterwards for standing by team-mate Cuadrado and calling the decision to show Lukaku a second yellow card “normal” — a view shared by Italy’s industry of refereeing experts. He was not excusing the racist abuse Lukaku experienced. Far from it. Danilo tweeted he believes “every act of racism must be strongly condemned” and has led Juventus’ initiatives on this issue.
One of these has seen him partner with the Sulla Razza podcast, which confronts institutional racism, cultural appropriation and hate speech. Danilo has participated in season two.
“There needs to be more curiosity around this issue,” he says. “In this day and age, it’s important to have empathy and to understand the experiences of people from other backgrounds. We can’t just think about ourselves. I learned new things doing the podcast. The hosts (Nadeesha Uyangoda, Maria Catena Mancuso and Nathasha Fernando) told me about their own experiences. Their families aren’t from Italy but they were born here and people look at them as if they’re not Italian.”
The children of immigrants in Italy, as was the case with Mario Balotelli, are still absurdly denied citizenship until their 18th birthday and reform of the legislation has not progressed. “This surprised me,” Danilo says. “I didn’t know it was like that.”
Juventus meanwhile have identified the two fans filmed aiming monkey chants at Lukaku and reported them to law enforcement. The intention, once the Questura has confirmed their identities, is to ban one, who is still a minor, for 10 years and the adult for life. Similar action was taken when AC Milan goalkeeper Mike Maignan was racially abused at the Allianz earlier this season.
A tier of the south stand will also be closed for Juventus’ next home league game against Napoli, which brings us to the non-event that is the 2022-23 title race.
The Scudetto is long gone, even though Juventus will go clear in second place if their 15-point penalty is overturned at a hearing next Tuesday. It isn’t where Danilo envisioned the team to be. “Juventus don’t start the season to finish second or third,” he says. “It isn’t possible. We can’t allow that. I started the season thinking about the title and going as far as possible in the other competitions. Napoli have been great this season. They’re one of the best teams in Europe and other things have happened too.
“We’ve won a lot of games since the points penalty and have progressed in the Europa League and the Coppa Italia. We’re right up there in the league — second until they say otherwise. We’ve earned the points on the pitch. So considering everything that’s gone on, we’re having a good season.”
Trust The Philosopher to be all philosophical about it.
I like him a lot just as other cerebral players, just a shame for him that he's in this era of Juve.
Yeah I used to like Horncastle, at one point he was one of the best and least biased Italian football journos around (he’s a Romanista) but unfortunately he’s fallen badly down the “Juve are absolutely guilty of everything the FIGC accuse them of” rabbit hole lately.
Also, his simping of Napoli has been over the top. He has been implying that they are amongst the best ever italian teams this season. Just mind boggling. Napoli is the new Dortmund in terms of football hipster wankers fawning all over them.
Also, his simping of Napoli has been over the top. He has been implying that they are amongst the best ever italian teams this season. Just mind boggling. Napoli is the new Dortmund in terms of football hipster wankers fawning all over them.
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