Juve gives Italy a place at Euro top table
Print Edition
AFTER years of watching teams from other countries battle through the closing stages of the UEFA Champions League, Serie A can once again claim a place at Europe’s top table thanks to Juventus.
The Turin side’s 3-0 destruction of a waning Barcelona on Tuesday — where everyone shone, from 39-year-old goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon to precocious forward Paulo Dybala — showed it is as good as anything on offer in this season’s competition.
The victory left Juventus as a firm favorite to advance to the semifinals, unless Barcelona can pull off a repeat of its previous round’s comeback against Paris-Saint Germain when it lost the first leg 0-4 but won the second 6-1.
After Inter Milan won the UCL in 2010, Italy endured four successive seasons without managing to get a team beyond the quarterfinals — a far cry from the days when its clubs dominated European competition.
With clubs unable to compete with the television revenue of their English counterparts, stadiums falling into disrepair and attendances slumping, Serie A fell into a downward spiral.
Juventus, which itself spent a season in Serie B after being relegated due to a match-fixing scandal, was quickest to react.
It demolished the over-sized, windswept Stadio Delle Alpi and replaced it with the compact, atmospheric Juventus Stadium, becoming in the process the first Serie A club to own its own arena. Its opening heralded a new era of domestic dominance with Juventus winning five successive Serie A titles from 2011/2012 onwards. Even so, it still seemed to be a long way from Europe’s elite.
After being comprehensively outplayed by Bayern Munich in their 2012/13 quarterfinal, then-coach Antonio Conte warned that it would be a very long time before a Serie A club won the UCL. Conte left in 2014, having achieved domestic dominance, and was replaced by Massimiliano Allegri, who saw Europe as the one area he could outdo his predecessor.
Allegri replaced Conte’s hell-for-leather approach with a more controlled style that worked well in Europe, and in his first season led Juventus to the UCL final, beating Real Madrid on the way. Although it was ultimately outclassed by Barcelona 1-3 in Berlin, Juventus has continued building since.
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