If Andrea Agnelli wants to re-order European football to ensure his club don’t lose so much, he should perhaps start with what the game and his job are supposed to be about: building a proper team in the first place.
Juventus are instead a dysfunctional and bloated mess, that fell out of the Champions League in one of those glorious pieces of poetic justice that sport offers up. For all Agnelli’s self-serving suggestions, his team – and his big star – couldn’t save themselves.
Juventus fell to their many problems as much as they fell to a brilliant Porto.
The Italian champions have very quickly gone from one of the best run clubs in Europe to one of the worst examples of legacy entitlement, incapable of delivering the Champions League so desperate to change it.
The Juventus president has put out some dreadful ideas of late – among them the suggestion Champions League clubs shouldn’t buy off each other – but it’s possible that one of his worst was buying Cristiano Ronaldo. The signing has backfired spectacularly. His contribution to Porto’s final fateful goal encapsulated this and offered such fitting symbolism, as he turned his back on Sergio Oliveira’s free-kick to let it go through his leg.
It capped Juve turning their back on football logic. That’s what the basic rationale behind the signing represented.
It was almost as if the thinking was that Juve were just short of winning the competition, so signed its most frequent champion to push them over the line. It has just seen them fall further and further back, getting eliminated earlier and earlier, to financially poorer sides. Ronaldo’s time at Juventus has seen them go out to Ajax, Lyon and Porto – either second-tier teams or teams from second-tier leagues. So much for Agnelli’s idea of the elite.
This is not to diminish Ronaldo’s obvious greatness. The first problem is that, at this point in his career, he requires a very specific way of playing. It means relatively constrained football.
The irony is that Juventus have bought a good group of young players that will be good for this system. Federico Chiesa, Weston Mc-Kennie and Dejan Kulusevski even illustrated this during this defeat to Porto.
Juventus are instead a dysfunctional and bloated mess, that fell out of the Champions League in one of those glorious pieces of poetic justice that sport offers up. For all Agnelli’s self-serving suggestions, his team – and his big star – couldn’t save themselves.
Juventus fell to their many problems as much as they fell to a brilliant Porto.
The Italian champions have very quickly gone from one of the best run clubs in Europe to one of the worst examples of legacy entitlement, incapable of delivering the Champions League so desperate to change it.
The Juventus president has put out some dreadful ideas of late – among them the suggestion Champions League clubs shouldn’t buy off each other – but it’s possible that one of his worst was buying Cristiano Ronaldo. The signing has backfired spectacularly. His contribution to Porto’s final fateful goal encapsulated this and offered such fitting symbolism, as he turned his back on Sergio Oliveira’s free-kick to let it go through his leg.
It capped Juve turning their back on football logic. That’s what the basic rationale behind the signing represented.
It was almost as if the thinking was that Juve were just short of winning the competition, so signed its most frequent champion to push them over the line. It has just seen them fall further and further back, getting eliminated earlier and earlier, to financially poorer sides. Ronaldo’s time at Juventus has seen them go out to Ajax, Lyon and Porto – either second-tier teams or teams from second-tier leagues. So much for Agnelli’s idea of the elite.
This is not to diminish Ronaldo’s obvious greatness. The first problem is that, at this point in his career, he requires a very specific way of playing. It means relatively constrained football.
The irony is that Juventus have bought a good group of young players that will be good for this system. Federico Chiesa, Weston Mc-Kennie and Dejan Kulusevski even illustrated this during this defeat to Porto.