'Winning is the only thing that counts' - Juventus hope Allegri heralds a return to domination
James Horncastle
10-12 minutes
Andrea Agnelli nudged Juventus’ former chief football officer Fabio Paratici and pointed out the window. They were on a bus hopping from one hotel to another as it shuttled guests of UEFA to Wembley for the 2013 Champions League final. “I reckon that’s the next coach of Juventus,” he said. Following Agnelli’s indication, Paratici looked out the glass and spotted Massimiliano Allegri, then still in charge of AC Milan, bounding out the lobby to catch his ride for the game.
A little over a year later, Allegri got the call to replace Antonio Conte, who resigned at the beginning of pre-season just six weeks after giving Agnelli his word that he would see out the final year of his contract. The fanbase did not initially approve the appointment, judging Allegri harshly on losing a fiercely contested title race to Juventus and for marginalising deep-lying playmaker Andrea Pirlo while at Milan. Supporters gathered outside the training ground ready to throw eggs and give a good kicking to the car carrying Allegri to his new office. After being briefed about the reception awaiting Conte’s successor, the driver, Matteo, thought it was maybe for the best if he took in Allegri through a second entrance.
Agnelli stopped him.
“Go in through the front,” he said. “We’ve got nothing to hide. We’re going to drive past with our heads held high, confident in the decision we’ve made.” Allegri joined Juventus at the last minute amid hostility and scepticism. At the time, it felt like the club’s place at the top of the Italian game had suddenly been thrown into jeopardy. Juventus could have panicked when Conte ditched them and picked the wrong guy to succeed him. In the end, they could not have chosen better.
Allegri went on to win five league titles in a row. He ended a 20-year wait for the Coppa Italia and twice came close to doing the treble, taking Juventus back to the Champions League final for the first time since 2003. His points-per-game ratio and win percentage are the highest in the Old Lady’s history. With a heavy heart, Agnelli, acting on the advice of Paratici and vice-president Pavel Nedved, moved on from Allegri two years ago. As a show of esteem for their departing coach, Juventus’ players sat in the front row and applauded him at the press conference announcing the decision. Agnelli and Allegri both laughed and, most poignantly of all, cried.
It was clear that their bond went beyond the clock-in, clock-out, hit-your-targets nature of most boss and employee relationships. Agnelli and Allegri had become very close friends. They were neighbours in the same apartment complex for 18 months, used to have breakfast and go out to dinner together, watched each other’s kids grow up and wanted one another’s opinions on more than just football. So, although the coaches changed at Juventus, the ties that bind remained as strong as ever. It seemed only a matter of time before Allegri returned, particularly as the 53-year-old from Livorno appears to be to Agnelli what Marcello Lippi or Giovanni Trapattoni had been to his father Umberto and uncle Gianni.
A second spell at Juventus felt overdue, to be honest, in as much as Allegri should never have been sacked in the first place with the interim appointments — first Maurizio Sarri then Andrea Pirlo — being dismissed as a “waste of time” in sections of the local press. Allegri spent the first year on sabbatical — still on the Juventus payroll — and although he intended to get back to work last July, the pandemic made it less than ideal with no pre-season and no money to spend. He was also unprepared to take a step down and manage a club without the history and tradition, budget and structure he’d enjoyed at Milan and Juventus, which limited the number of clubs that appealed to him to less than a handful.
“I am very attached to Juventus,” Allegri said on Sky Calcio Club in March. “I’m very attached to the club on a personal level.” Guesting on the show just hours after Juventus lost to Benevento at the Allianz Stadium, Allegri felt, without putting too fine a point on it, that the team’s struggles were down to completely changing the midfield and the sense Juventus have lost their “anima”.
“Barzagli is no longer there; Chiellini is playing less,” he observed. “You’ve got to rebuild the soul of the team. Calm is needed too. The players are not machines.” After nine years of winning non-stop, it was perhaps understandable that the players weren’t as hungry as before and too tired to go again having had no time off from their last league title clinched under the stress and strain of a pandemic compressed fixture list. “Juventus have the chance to win the cup final (which they did against Atalanta), and if they make the top four, I think it’s a positive year,” Allegri opined. “They could perhaps be closer to Inter.”
The Benevento defeat was a delicate moment for Pirlo, coming so swiftly after Juventus’ elimination from the Champions League at the hands of Porto. It also subsequently emerged Agnelli had caught up with Allegri at Forte dei Marmi on the weekend of the Turin derby, nothing to worry about apparently, a social visit and nothing more that Juventus’ president had personally briefed Pirlo on in advance. Yet the timing of it did little to calm the speculation around the rookie coach’s future as the shadow of Allegri began to loom larger and larger.
If winning the scudetto had not been enough for Sarri to retain his job,
lifting the Coppa Italia and qualifying for the Champions League was unlikely to save Pirlo. The standards Agnelli expects are high. Contrary to the idea projected by the media about Juventus breaking with the past and attempting to play a different, counter-cultural style of football at odds with the club’s history, the president has always stayed true to the Old Lady’s motto of “Winning isn’t important, it’s the only thing that counts”. It’s truly all that matters to him. How Juventus achieve it is secondary, and Allegri understands that implicitly.
While on sabbatical, he told me an anecdote about the club’s mentality. “Some time ago, I was talking to someone who did a thesis 30 years ago on the correlation between productivity at Fiat and Juventus’ results. When Juventus won on a Sunday, productivity increased by 21 per cent. That explains why Juventus’ objective half a century ago was to be No 1 in Italy. Everyone wants to win of course but more so at Juventus. How can you think about going there and changing the DNA of the club when this has been rooted in it for so long?
That’s Italian football.”
Refocusing the players to that effect is the priority now, and it was appropriate that Juventus cryptically announced Allegri’s appointment with a photo of the blazer he tossed to the ground in anger at the prospect of the team ruining his Christmas by dropping points to Carpi at the Stadio Braglia in 2015. Juventus triumphed 3-2 in the end as part of the astonishing 15-game winning streak that reversed a disastrous start to the season that had reduced them to 12th going into November. Allegri had lost Pirlo, Arturo Vidal and Carlos Tevez after the Champions League final in Berlin, but he rebuilt the team and turned things around. Memories of that season had some Inter fans rather nervously looking in their rearview mirrors this spring, expecting a strong finish from Juventus. But the resurgence never came because, as Chiellini discerned, the team was unable to win more than three games in a row. It never came because a coach of Allegri’s calibre and experience was no longer in the Juventus dugout.
Paratici’s exit earlier this week foreshadowed a shakeup at Continassa. His vision for the club did not align with Allegri’s in 2019 and culminated in the coach’s dismissal. No longer calling the shots, his departure cleared the way for Allegri’s come back, and the former midfielder is expected to have more of an influence in transfer decisions. Quite how much remains to be seen given Paratici’s deputy Federico Cherubini is in line for a promotion after setting up Juventus’ under-23s team, who play in Italy’s third division.
“Juventus’ squad is an excellent squad,” Allegri claimed in March, acknowledging the process of rejuvenation personified by the signings of Matthijs de Ligt, Federico Chiesa, Dejan Kulusevski and
Weston McKennie, however, it’s still short and could use a left-back, a deep-lying playmaker, a midfielder more adept at playing between the lines and a back-up striker. Chiellini is now expected to put off retirement for another season to provide some of the “anima” the team is missing, and Allegri apparently hopes to count on Paulo Dybala too, whose contract is up at the end of next season.
But
what of Cristiano Ronaldo, whose deal also expires in June 2022? The five-time Ballon d’Or winner’s future remains in doubt with the comments he made under Sarri resurfacing this week. Ronaldo had appeared to welcome the change of manager, saying before a Champions League game against Lokomotiv Moscow that Juventus had improved and were playing more attacking football than in his one season working with Allegri. Hearing that won’t faze the Tuscan, though. Handling superstars has always been a strong point of Allegri’s management, and his philosophy — Allegri rolls his eyes at the word — has always been as straightforward as getting the ball to the best player so he can win you games. That won’t change whether Ronaldo stays or not.
Allegri does not return to the game promising anything new. If the circumstances demand Juventus defend in their own penalty area or kick it long, he won’t be ashamed to do it. Some fundamentals never go out of date. “Football is like a grey suit,” Allegri recently said. “A grey suit never goes out of fashion. Pocket squares and those patterned shirts come and go. But a grey suit is a classic.” Allegri and Juventus also go very well together, and this time Agnelli didn’t need to point him out to someone. Presumably, when he saw him again this week he felt the same as in 2013. Deep down he probably already knew. “I reckon that’s the next coach of Juventus.”
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