Behind the scenes on the ‘old Juve’: inside the Juventus dressing room

There was a strong and almost infallible Juve in all fields. Which almost never stopped in Serie A as in the Champions League, so much so that twice in the space of a few years it had held its own against teams much richer in turnover, reaching the final of the top European competition. For a long time, ideas had overcome differences on an economic level, bringing the gap between budgets and results closer together: thanks to a project that had a rational logic, which pushed for the search for results with pragmatism. Ambition after Cardiff had pushed him to carry out an operation never imagined until then, the coup of the century: Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the football champions of all time. But the arrival of the Portuguese will not have the desired effect: that is, the victory of the Champions League. It is good to start from here to contextualize the before and after of the radical change that characterized the end of the last Juventus era.

END SWITCH

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In recent days, several protagonists of Allegri’s old Juve, the one from the first five years, have returned to talking about those extraordinary years. A little Buffon and a little Bonucci, who also responded to Szczesny about a consideration that the Polish goalkeeper had made a few months ago on how the defender loaded up the matches in the locker room. There is a big difference, however, between the first Juve that won and the one that tried to extend the winning streak: equally capable of achieving important results but not as solid as the first, according to what filters through. It was Allegri himself, at the end of his first five-year term, who argued in the control rooms that a revolution in the squad would be necessary, since he considered a large part of the players to be at the end of their run. However, the management was not of the same opinion and decided to sack him, calling Sarri.

CHANGE

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Until that moment, Juve’s strength was represented above all by the Italian hard core: by the BBC to protect Buffon, by Pirlo and Marchisio who had paved the way for the subsequent inclusion in the project of Pogba, Vidal and again Pjanic or Mandzukic, Dybala and Higuain. For a long period, the Juventus senators had been well recognizable and recognized inside and outside the Juventus context, also fundamental in uniting the group in difficulties. “We didn’t deserve the imaginative reconstructions of a fight at half-time in Cardiff and I felt hurt because I was the captain of that team,” was the summary of Buffon, who returned to the issue a few days ago. From that extra gear, driven by the great sense of belonging of the group’s hard core, we moved on to something less brilliant and homogeneous in a few years, breaking up the leadership.

LEADERSHIP

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In the season with Sarri, Chiellini – who inherited the captaincy from Buffon – had to deal with a long injury, leaving Bonucci with the task of guiding his teammates. In the meantime, Juve was scoring important goals at a European level such as De Ligt or Danilo, but above all clinging to the leadership of a CR7 not always supported in the best way by their teammates. So much so as to reduce the weight of talent within the locker room over time, while forcing the club to maintain fairly high spending standards. Juve’s strongest change in that period was not so much characterized by the results as by the references that began to disappear in a short time: first with the retirement of Barzagli, then with the sale of Buffon (who later agreed to return to act as deputy to Szczesny) and fewer and fewer world-class top players like Khedira or Matuidi.

LIMITS

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A documentary recounted the season under Pirlo’s management, in which there were many young people and only a few veterans of the old guard: from Bonucci to Cuadrado, supporting promising players like Chiesa, as well as a Cristiano Ronaldo who was increasingly less happy with the context . Behind the champion who kept the team going, making it achieve results, the hard core that had ensured a great sense of belonging for many years continued to crumble, also because it was no longer fed with replacements worthy of those who were leaving. A limiting condition also during the Allegri bis, in which old disagreements with Bonucci resurfaced (especially the argument in a Juventus-Palermo match) and it was never possible to find a way to make the insertion of players take root well important, even of the caliber of Paredes or Di Maria, precisely because of the weakness of the historical nucleus.

QUICK AND RESPONSE

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A few months ago Szczesny, announcing his farewell to football, had talked about how in Italy the pre-match was lived with great excitement in the locker room, referring above all to how Bonucci (captain and leader of Juve) tried to charge his teammates inside of the locker room before taking to the pitch. The defender responded to him in a recent interview by implying that he did not appreciate the revelation of a “locker room secret”, even if the relationship between the two is remembered as being quite good. Basically, the different management of the moment simply emerged: with the tendency of Northern European footballers (hence the reference to De Ligt) to approach matches with more silence than Italians. Nothing that has uncovered who knows what past rifts between Szczesny and Bonucci, but certainly a back and forth between two former Juventus pillars that reveals the internal limits of the group of a few years ago.