Juventus were seized by defeatist moods – Newspaper Kommersant No. 173 (7374) of 09/20/2022

Juventus looks like the main loser of the starting segment of this season among European football giants. The defeat – 0:1 – in the next round of the Italian championship from the newcomer of the top division “Monza” lowered him to the middle of the standings. And mediocre results in this tournament coexist with catastrophic results in the Champions League: in it, Turin lost both matches.

The outcome of this match of the seventh round of the Italian championship was, of course, doomed to turn into an informational hit. The flagship of Italian football played away with a team that made it to the top division for the first time and has so far aroused interest only because of the figure of the owner: it is the former prime minister of the country, Silvio Berlusconi, who controlled Milan for a long time and achieved its transformation into continental giant. Berlusconi’s new project, however, has not given any reason to think that something similar will happen to him soon.

Monza approached the match with Juventus with the most modest baggage: one point in six matches, the goal difference was “minus 11”. She also just appointed Raffaele Palladino, a man with no experience at all, who had previously managed the youth and junior club teams, to replace the fired Giovanni Stroppa as head coach.

But the doomed hosts won 1-0. And the main feature is the style of their first victory in the elite. It was not born out of happy circumstances, not out of patience, but precisely out of a playing advantage, which is illustrated, for example, by ball possession statistics: 60% to 40% in favor of an outsider. Of course, he was provided in many ways earlier, even at the end of the first half, by the removal of Juventus midfielder Angel Di Maria. But in any case, the picture turned out to be very remarkable – especially given the context. And this success of Monza fit perfectly into it. We are talking about the problems of Juventus, which make us assume that the club is going through some kind of serious crisis, and one that did not arise from scratch.

In the past decade, Turintsy, even though they had already parted with the status of a European trendsetter, continued to dominate in their homeland. They won nine Italian championships in a row and, it seemed, they were ready to reign forever. Well, there’s no one around. The feeling turned out to be false.

Juventus constantly carried out personnel changes in order to refresh the squad, making it, apparently, more suitable for storming the Champions League, in 2018 they even bought Cristiano Ronaldo from Real Madrid, changed coaches. But instead of taking off, in the end there was a fall.

In 2021, Juventus was left without the gold of the national championship, falling to fourth place, and last season, having already sent Ronaldo to Manchester United, again finished in the top three in the championship and for the first time in ten years did not win a single trophy.

So, the current season suggests that an even more noticeable catastrophe awaits him in it, and another transfer shake-up (the club in the summer broke up with Matthijs de Ligt, Paulo Dybala, Alvaro Morata, Arthur, Aaron Ramsey, but has gained Di Maria, Paul Pogba, Leandro Paredes, Arkadiusz Milik, Filip Kostic) will not lead to anything good. Among the European giants, perhaps, there are no such that they started in it so unsuccessfully. The loss to Monza was the first for Juventus in the Italian championship, but there were only two wins – the modest Sassuolo and Spezia had four draws. And in the table, the Turinites have now dropped to, strictly speaking, shameful eighth place for them – seven points behind the leading Atalanta and Napoli. And in the main European Cup, things are going even worse. Juventus lost in the opening two matches of the group stage – PSG and Benfica – and it seems to be seriously “hung”. And the team’s play in these meetings does not hint at the immediacy of the crisis and the inevitable quick way out of it.

It is not surprising that for various Italian media resources, even before the misfire with Monza, the topic of the fate of Juventus head coach Massimiliano Allegri became relevant. But, oddly enough, the Turin management has not yet even indicated at least the possibility of the mentor’s resignation, and the entire recent history of the club proves that it, no matter what the results, most likely will not happen in the near future. In the 12 years that Andrea Agnelli has been in charge of Juventus as president, he has never fired a mentor in the middle of the season, always waiting for the point when he can sum up his final results. Albeit very sad.

Alexey Dospekhov