Massimiliano Allegri (563 Viewers)
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Evolved from what? In the last 10 years Mourinho, Ancelotti and Di Matteo have won CL titles playing 'italian' style. Heynckes, Guardiola and Klopp attacking style.
Very little difference between Zidane and Allegri stylistically. Did I dream RM winning 5 CL and LaLiga trophies recently?
In the national competitions Chile 2x, Uruguay, France and Portugal have won with italian style. Germany and Spain 2x possession and attacking.
Guardiola hasn't made a final in almost a decade. Simeone is dominating Spain this year, knocked out Liverpool last year. Conte and Ranieri won the EPL recently. Allegri and Simeone made two finals each. So what exactly has 'evolved'?
Stop pretending there's only one way that is right or one way that is better. If there was everyone would be doing it.
Very little difference between Zidane and Allegri stylistically. Did I dream RM winning 5 CL and LaLiga trophies recently?
In the national competitions Chile 2x, Uruguay, France and Portugal have won with italian style. Germany and Spain 2x possession and attacking.
Guardiola hasn't made a final in almost a decade. Simeone is dominating Spain this year, knocked out Liverpool last year. Conte and Ranieri won the EPL recently. Allegri and Simeone made two finals each. So what exactly has 'evolved'?
Stop pretending there's only one way that is right or one way that is better. If there was everyone would be doing it.
https://theathletic.com/2391431/2021/02/17/does-allegri-still-appeal-to-big-clubs/
Any Athletic subscribers? Do your thing please and copy paste this
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Never mind, I tried to get a trial, clicked the wrong thing and now I'm subscribed for a year, 30$ lmao
Is there any way to refund this thing?
Story in the spoiler for anyone who wants to read.
Any Athletic subscribers? Do your thing please and copy paste this
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https://theathletic.com/2391431/2021/02/17/does-allegri-still-appeal-to-big-clubs/
Any Athletic subscribers? Do your thing please and copy paste this
Any Athletic subscribers? Do your thing please and copy paste this
Is there any way to refund this thing?
Story in the spoiler for anyone who wants to read.
The Paris Saint-Germain job came and went, and then the vacancy at Chelsea was filled. Massimiliano Allegri remains on the market. He was the most successful coach available then and still is now. As the Champions League knockout stage begins, it’s strange not to see the 53-year-old passing on instructions from a technical area in one of Europe’s mythical arenas.
Of the coaches who didn’t get to lead Barcelona and Real Madrid over the last decade, only Jurgen Klopp managed to reach the competition’s final on more occasions than Allegri.
When Zinedine Zidane walked away from Real Madrid after winning a third straight Champions League in the summer of 2018, the coach to whom their president Florentino Perez turned was Allegri, who was then in charge of Juventus. “I spoke to the president (Andrea Agnelli) and once I’d given him my word, out of respect, I couldn’t not stay,” he told Sky Italia. “It was a question of respect. I have to thank Perez for giving me the chance to coach Real Madrid.”
A year later, the club Allegri showed loyalty to decided the time had come to move on. Change before you have to is one of the codes Agnelli lives by and Allegri went out on top after delivering a fifth straight title and before things started to go stale. It was, Agnelli acknowledged, the hardest decision of his decade at the helm of Juventus.
Over the years, the pair had become close friends. They were neighbours in the same apartment block and in the news conference the club called as a gesture of their appreciation for all Allegri had done over the past five seasons, both of them found it emotional and had to take breaks to choke back the tears.
Casual observers and Twitter trolls — the ones who type “farmers’ league” without having watched a Serie A game in years — think coaching Juventus is easy. Allegri may have made it look that way at times, but it isn’t. The 18 months since he left is testimony to that and although the circumstances are very different from what happened at AC Milan in 2014 when Silvio Berlusconi sacked him, clubs tend to regress shortly after thinking a change from Allegri would do them good.
Allegri won the Serie A title in all of his five seasons at Juventus to add to one with Milan (Photo: Massimiliano Ferraro/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
In Juventus’ case, it manifested itself in them going out of the Champions League earlier (last 16, to Lyon) and only winning the scudetto by a point last season after an average margin of nine under Allegri. Milan haven’t finished in the top four, let alone won the title, since Allegri was in their dugout, and it’s a minor miracle he got them on the podium in his final full season of 2012-13. Or, come to think of it, gave them their last big European night — a 2-0 win over Barcelona in the first leg of a Champions League last-16 tie eight years ago this week.
The Barca result was, in retrospect, nothing short of astonishing when you look at the starting XIs. Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Thiago Silva were sold to PSG the previous summer, Andrea Pirlo had left on a free a year earlier, Alessandro Nesta and Pippo Inzaghi were recently retired and Clarence Seedorf and Gennaro Gattuso also left San Siro before that season.
Big names like these tend to be used against Allegri. Critics seek to diminish his achievements by citing the talent-loaded teams he presided over. But here’s the thing: Milan hadn’t won the league in six years until he came along.
Juventus had been left in the lurch by Antonio Conte in the 2014 pre-season and hadn’t done the double in 19 years. Infamously, they’d also gone out of the Champions League at the group stage in Conte’s final season before debutant Allegri exceeded all expectation and led them to the final for the first time in 12 years. His predecessor had resigned in the belief it couldn’t be done, saying Juventus were sending him to a Michelin-starred restaurant where dinner was €100 a head and he only had €10 in his pocket.
Allegri gave the club more bang for its buck and when Pirlo, Arturo Vidal, Fernando Llorente and Carlos Tevez all left after Juventus lost to Neymar, Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez’s Barcelona in Berlin, it didn’t stop him from taking a different team to the final in Cardiff two years later. As he showed in the past, his team could cash in and either impose austerity, as Berlusconi did at Milan, or retool, as they did at Juventus. He’d make sure they could go again. Allegri had the Old Lady 90 minutes away from winning the treble twice in three years and it’s not like Maurizio Sarri’s Napoli allowed them to win Serie A with ease in 2017-18, either.
How is it, then, that Allegri has missed out on some of the openings at elite clubs outside Italy? After all, he has shown himself able to rebuild, handle superstars like Ibrahimovic and Cristiano Ronaldo, go deep in Europe and, crucially, “manage up” without clashing with powerful owners and influential sporting directors.
The first thing to say is this is no ordinary market.
Allegri spent the first half of last season on sabbatical. Juventus paid him the final year of his contract, he visited art galleries, read Amedeo Modigliani biographies, watched some Liverpool games, and was preparing to take on a new challenge in the summer. Then, the pandemic hit.
Seasons got suspended, then extended, and the turnaround between one campaign and the next became very short. It also downsized budgets, discouraged clubs from making changes and dissuaded some coaches from getting back in the game on account of a lack of pre-season and money to shape a team in their chosen image.
Allegri was not going to leap at the first offer to come his way, regardless. It has to be the right job — particularly if it’s not in Italy — and a project showing genuine ambition. Otherwise, you settle, and when you settle, you relax and lose your competitive edge. One bad gig can also lead to revisionist history about the rest of your career, casting a different light on past achievements, and that’s obviously to be avoided.
Where you go after Juventus is another conundrum. The list of clubs with comparable status is very, very short.
Allegri is not on the rebound with something to prove, as was maybe the perception of Carlo Ancelotti and Jose Mourinho when they accepted offers from Everton and Tottenham Hotspur after being fired by Napoli and Manchester United. Allegri’s stock should still be close to its peak.
He also has a reputation that creates expectation and his next club has to at least possess the foundations for him to match it with a credible structure behind the coach, too. Without it, the lack of a coherent strategy causes confusion and that can undermine a manager, as Allegri discovered towards the end of his time at Milan when, rather than choose between one and the other, Berlusconi made his daughter Barbara joint-chief executive with Adriano Galliani.
The duo had contrasting ideas on the club’s direction of travel, Allegri was caught in the crossfire, he got the sack, and in the end, Milan went south very fast.
Few clubs around Europe have reference points with the authority of a Galliani or Giuseppe Marotta-style figure at board level.
How many jobs really appeal to Allegri is a question that can equally be flipped on its head. Does he appeal to them?
We live in an era when German coaching has never been so cool. Klopp’s success has opened up opportunities for his compatriots in the same way Mourinho did for his Portuguese contemporaries. Three of the four teams in the Champions League semi-finals in August had Germans in their dugout and the last two winners of the competition were managed by men who had previously delivered the Bundesliga title, in Klopp and Hansi Flick.
Allegri’s Juventus were 90 minutes from winning trebles in 2014-15 and 2016-17 (Photo: Matthias Hangst/Getty Images)
Attuned to that trend, Chelsea replaced Frank Lampard with Thomas Tuchel and focused their search for a new coach almost exclusively on German candidates, partly in light of the heavy investments made in Timo Werner and Kai Havertz last summer. Tense experiences with trophy-winners Conte and Sarri were perhaps another reason Chelsea did not go Italian again, regardless of Allegri’s more emollient, non-abrasive character.
As for PSG, a decade into the Qatari ownership of the club, you might say they are still looking to consolidate an identity. It’s why they went back to Leonardo for a second spell as sporting director/director of football. His past as a player at the Parc des Princes was an important factor in his appointment and it also made ex-PSG defender Pochettino a natural choice to succeed Tuchel.
With Allegri, it’s easy to get the impression winning is no longer enough. This was one interpretation of Juventus’ decision to replace him with Sarri, whose style at Napoli transcended Serie A and perhaps drew more attention than Allegri breaking records and getting to Champions League finals.
He is not associated with a concept like gegenpressing or a style like tiki-taka, and despite all his charm and charisma, no cult of personality formed around him in the way it did with Sarrismo and Cholismo (Atletico Madrid’s Diego Simeone).
He sought to be judged on merit, not marketing, and spent his last couple of years at Juventus engaging in debates with pundits doubling as purists on what constitutes “good” football. Is it not adapting to circumstance — knowing when to attack and when to defend? Is there not beauty in both sides of the game? Are counters and goalline blocks not as epic, dramatic and exhilarating as high lines and pressing? Can a coach not do both?
In the end, Allegri’s argument that football is a simple game and not a science, a game that should always be about the players and never about philosopher managers, maybe doesn’t capture the imagination of fans from Generation Z or boardroom executives who need a buzzword to cling to so they can understand what to expect from a coach, instead of going on his resume and testimonials of his remarkable feel for the game. But it’s intellectually honest and Allegri’s career speaks for itself.
The next club to wake up to that will be a very lucky one indeed.
Of the coaches who didn’t get to lead Barcelona and Real Madrid over the last decade, only Jurgen Klopp managed to reach the competition’s final on more occasions than Allegri.
When Zinedine Zidane walked away from Real Madrid after winning a third straight Champions League in the summer of 2018, the coach to whom their president Florentino Perez turned was Allegri, who was then in charge of Juventus. “I spoke to the president (Andrea Agnelli) and once I’d given him my word, out of respect, I couldn’t not stay,” he told Sky Italia. “It was a question of respect. I have to thank Perez for giving me the chance to coach Real Madrid.”
A year later, the club Allegri showed loyalty to decided the time had come to move on. Change before you have to is one of the codes Agnelli lives by and Allegri went out on top after delivering a fifth straight title and before things started to go stale. It was, Agnelli acknowledged, the hardest decision of his decade at the helm of Juventus.
Over the years, the pair had become close friends. They were neighbours in the same apartment block and in the news conference the club called as a gesture of their appreciation for all Allegri had done over the past five seasons, both of them found it emotional and had to take breaks to choke back the tears.
Casual observers and Twitter trolls — the ones who type “farmers’ league” without having watched a Serie A game in years — think coaching Juventus is easy. Allegri may have made it look that way at times, but it isn’t. The 18 months since he left is testimony to that and although the circumstances are very different from what happened at AC Milan in 2014 when Silvio Berlusconi sacked him, clubs tend to regress shortly after thinking a change from Allegri would do them good.
Allegri won the Serie A title in all of his five seasons at Juventus to add to one with Milan (Photo: Massimiliano Ferraro/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
In Juventus’ case, it manifested itself in them going out of the Champions League earlier (last 16, to Lyon) and only winning the scudetto by a point last season after an average margin of nine under Allegri. Milan haven’t finished in the top four, let alone won the title, since Allegri was in their dugout, and it’s a minor miracle he got them on the podium in his final full season of 2012-13. Or, come to think of it, gave them their last big European night — a 2-0 win over Barcelona in the first leg of a Champions League last-16 tie eight years ago this week.
The Barca result was, in retrospect, nothing short of astonishing when you look at the starting XIs. Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Thiago Silva were sold to PSG the previous summer, Andrea Pirlo had left on a free a year earlier, Alessandro Nesta and Pippo Inzaghi were recently retired and Clarence Seedorf and Gennaro Gattuso also left San Siro before that season.
Big names like these tend to be used against Allegri. Critics seek to diminish his achievements by citing the talent-loaded teams he presided over. But here’s the thing: Milan hadn’t won the league in six years until he came along.
Juventus had been left in the lurch by Antonio Conte in the 2014 pre-season and hadn’t done the double in 19 years. Infamously, they’d also gone out of the Champions League at the group stage in Conte’s final season before debutant Allegri exceeded all expectation and led them to the final for the first time in 12 years. His predecessor had resigned in the belief it couldn’t be done, saying Juventus were sending him to a Michelin-starred restaurant where dinner was €100 a head and he only had €10 in his pocket.
Allegri gave the club more bang for its buck and when Pirlo, Arturo Vidal, Fernando Llorente and Carlos Tevez all left after Juventus lost to Neymar, Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez’s Barcelona in Berlin, it didn’t stop him from taking a different team to the final in Cardiff two years later. As he showed in the past, his team could cash in and either impose austerity, as Berlusconi did at Milan, or retool, as they did at Juventus. He’d make sure they could go again. Allegri had the Old Lady 90 minutes away from winning the treble twice in three years and it’s not like Maurizio Sarri’s Napoli allowed them to win Serie A with ease in 2017-18, either.
How is it, then, that Allegri has missed out on some of the openings at elite clubs outside Italy? After all, he has shown himself able to rebuild, handle superstars like Ibrahimovic and Cristiano Ronaldo, go deep in Europe and, crucially, “manage up” without clashing with powerful owners and influential sporting directors.
The first thing to say is this is no ordinary market.
Allegri spent the first half of last season on sabbatical. Juventus paid him the final year of his contract, he visited art galleries, read Amedeo Modigliani biographies, watched some Liverpool games, and was preparing to take on a new challenge in the summer. Then, the pandemic hit.
Seasons got suspended, then extended, and the turnaround between one campaign and the next became very short. It also downsized budgets, discouraged clubs from making changes and dissuaded some coaches from getting back in the game on account of a lack of pre-season and money to shape a team in their chosen image.
Allegri was not going to leap at the first offer to come his way, regardless. It has to be the right job — particularly if it’s not in Italy — and a project showing genuine ambition. Otherwise, you settle, and when you settle, you relax and lose your competitive edge. One bad gig can also lead to revisionist history about the rest of your career, casting a different light on past achievements, and that’s obviously to be avoided.
Where you go after Juventus is another conundrum. The list of clubs with comparable status is very, very short.
Allegri is not on the rebound with something to prove, as was maybe the perception of Carlo Ancelotti and Jose Mourinho when they accepted offers from Everton and Tottenham Hotspur after being fired by Napoli and Manchester United. Allegri’s stock should still be close to its peak.
He also has a reputation that creates expectation and his next club has to at least possess the foundations for him to match it with a credible structure behind the coach, too. Without it, the lack of a coherent strategy causes confusion and that can undermine a manager, as Allegri discovered towards the end of his time at Milan when, rather than choose between one and the other, Berlusconi made his daughter Barbara joint-chief executive with Adriano Galliani.
The duo had contrasting ideas on the club’s direction of travel, Allegri was caught in the crossfire, he got the sack, and in the end, Milan went south very fast.
Few clubs around Europe have reference points with the authority of a Galliani or Giuseppe Marotta-style figure at board level.
How many jobs really appeal to Allegri is a question that can equally be flipped on its head. Does he appeal to them?
We live in an era when German coaching has never been so cool. Klopp’s success has opened up opportunities for his compatriots in the same way Mourinho did for his Portuguese contemporaries. Three of the four teams in the Champions League semi-finals in August had Germans in their dugout and the last two winners of the competition were managed by men who had previously delivered the Bundesliga title, in Klopp and Hansi Flick.
Allegri’s Juventus were 90 minutes from winning trebles in 2014-15 and 2016-17 (Photo: Matthias Hangst/Getty Images)
Attuned to that trend, Chelsea replaced Frank Lampard with Thomas Tuchel and focused their search for a new coach almost exclusively on German candidates, partly in light of the heavy investments made in Timo Werner and Kai Havertz last summer. Tense experiences with trophy-winners Conte and Sarri were perhaps another reason Chelsea did not go Italian again, regardless of Allegri’s more emollient, non-abrasive character.
As for PSG, a decade into the Qatari ownership of the club, you might say they are still looking to consolidate an identity. It’s why they went back to Leonardo for a second spell as sporting director/director of football. His past as a player at the Parc des Princes was an important factor in his appointment and it also made ex-PSG defender Pochettino a natural choice to succeed Tuchel.
With Allegri, it’s easy to get the impression winning is no longer enough. This was one interpretation of Juventus’ decision to replace him with Sarri, whose style at Napoli transcended Serie A and perhaps drew more attention than Allegri breaking records and getting to Champions League finals.
He is not associated with a concept like gegenpressing or a style like tiki-taka, and despite all his charm and charisma, no cult of personality formed around him in the way it did with Sarrismo and Cholismo (Atletico Madrid’s Diego Simeone).
He sought to be judged on merit, not marketing, and spent his last couple of years at Juventus engaging in debates with pundits doubling as purists on what constitutes “good” football. Is it not adapting to circumstance — knowing when to attack and when to defend? Is there not beauty in both sides of the game? Are counters and goalline blocks not as epic, dramatic and exhilarating as high lines and pressing? Can a coach not do both?
In the end, Allegri’s argument that football is a simple game and not a science, a game that should always be about the players and never about philosopher managers, maybe doesn’t capture the imagination of fans from Generation Z or boardroom executives who need a buzzword to cling to so they can understand what to expect from a coach, instead of going on his resume and testimonials of his remarkable feel for the game. But it’s intellectually honest and Allegri’s career speaks for itself.
The next club to wake up to that will be a very lucky one indeed.
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Dope article. Last line sums it up perfectly.
“The next club to wake up to that will be a very lucky one indeed.”
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@JCK
Fuck Sarri and Sarriboiz
“The next club to wake up to that will be a very lucky one indeed.”
- - - Updated - - -
@JCK
Fuck Sarri and Sarriboiz
