Overall score for Allegri this season: 3/10
Here's my attempt at a balanced appraisal of this past season.
It perhaps could have been a 0/10 year, but I don't want to disregard the huge mitigating circumstances outside his control this year.
The Mitigating Circumstances
The Injury crisis
We began the season with half a squad, and the injuries just kept coming. There is clear reason to believe that these were partly due to Allegri's staff's approach to training etc but the fact is he rarely if ever had a full squad available for any single game.
The Clown Courts
No need to explain this in detail. Constant distraction. You could argue Allegri should have drawn from it to rally the squad, but it still goes down as a mitigating circumstance imo.
Failed Transfers
The obvious one here is Paredes. A model of player Allegri famously likes in his squads, but the guy was just terrible. We were joking about him coming to unlock Locatelli but in seriousness, if we'd had a motivated and focused Paredes playing at his best this season could have gone a lot differently.
Second: what the hell was Di Maria doing? He was incredible for a 5-6 week stretch but before and after that he had the worst attitude of anybody in the team bar Paredes. We all expected better from him. If he'd bothered to play well all year it could have gone differently.
Kostic was good from the start, Gatti came good over time. Other than that our new players flopped. Partly Allegri's fault, sure. But you expect better from high profile players. Milik looked good for a short time then he also turned to shit, but maybe it's not fair to judge a bomber CF this year.
Disappointing Young Players
This may be controversial, and again it may be unfair to judge any inexperienced young professional players playing in a big team devoid of leadership. Most of the chances given to youngsters this season have been necessitated by first team injuries, and also a lot of them were thrown into big games with little or no ramping up.
With all that said, I think we all rightfully expected more from them. Iling Jr had two games where he had a notable impact- one in the Champions League. There was that one Barrenechea game where I fell in love with him and he looked like the guy Paredes was supposed to be, Soulé scored one or two goals, but besides Fagioli that's been about it. For a whole season from 4-5 young players that is really underwhelming in terms of impact especially when you consider how much gametime Miretti got, for example.
Fagioli is now clearly a first-team player. Even he had a bit of a steep learning curve. A couple of high-profile brain farts hit his confidence hard, but besides those moments he's been really impressive. None of the others have come close. I'm sure like us Allegri expected them to make a better job stepping up, so despite the lack of direction from experienced players and coaches I'd say that's a mitigating factor.
The Positives
The results on paper.
To be fair, give us back our ten points and it's clearly not a good season, but not an abject failure either. With all the fuckery mentioned above I don't think CL qualification and an EL semi final is really all that awful.
The Negatives
The Total Lack of Tactical Direction
In literally zero games this year have we looked like we have a coherent game plan. The only thing we've been able to guess at has been some sort of 'Push for a goal for 20 minutes, and regardless of the score after those 20 we defend till the 90'. There's no way that's the instructions from Allegri.
The truth is we have had no plan, not once. The shape barely stayed the same from one game to the next. In fact, our approach seemed to drastically change depending on who was playing. That says it all to me- it wasn't Allegri fitting the system to the available players, it was the players just playing football based on how they felt.
This obviously doesn't apply defensively- where to be fair we were pretty good. You just can't have the squad we have (really pretty good) and not give them a strategy to work with. Failure of leadership, failure of ideas, failure of coaching.
The Absence of Improvement when Players Returned
As I said, we began the season with several key players missing. However they slowly came back and regained match fitness as things progressed (with the exception of Il Polpo).
Unfortunately, the return of our first team did not herald any sort of improvement on the pitch. There was no sudden clicking of Allegri's grand vision for our squad, nobody unlocked anybody else and the only tactical evolution I can think of is that we moved away from the octagon. Besides that it didn't seem to matter if we had Chiesa or Soulé playing out wide, or Kean or Vlahovic in the centre.
All our players got worse
There is an argument that, as our squad makes no sense, this could be explained away via mitigating factors but there are absolutely enough quality pieces to be able to play good football, and perform strongly. We did neither.
We all saw Dusan's general play disintegrate in spectacular fashion. Some of that is confidence and a lack of a system which works for him, but honestly that was the most spectacular falling off of a player since Fernando Torres- and that was due to injury. Dusan meanwhile bangs them in for Serbia.
Chiesa comes back from a horrific injury, over time clearly regains full fitness and confidence and yet doesn't look close to the player he was before. Locatelli also looking like a different player, Di Maria also. All of these good players all underperforming at once can't be explained away by the mitigating circumstances. A large part of it falls on Allegri's shoulders for me.
The two who improved were Rabiot, which we can mostly guess why, and Gatti- who is the only one with a mentality resembling grinta juventina.
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Final score: 3/10
On paper we did ok this year, but the football was so bad that somehow we were lucky to do as 'well' as we did. There was a lot going on in the backdrop to the season which wasn't Max's fault but he completely failed to adapt to it.
Sack immediately.
Edit: Honestly to my smooth brain it seems like the simplest equation in the world when you have Kostic on the wing and some big CFs. I don't see how you could fail to get Kostic and Dusan (who clearly get on really well) rattling in huge piles of goals.