18 May 2019
Juventus and Massimiliano Allegri will go their separate ways after five years and 11 trophies. It is important to immediately underline, and many times, what has been won in these years, however, to limit it to just the team would be an understatement to tell one of the most epic adventures of football. Because "the Juve of Allegri" ends today but will remain forever in history. A story that he has helped rewrite from day one.
Everything happened in one night, from the July 15 to 16 in 2014. The confirmation arrived in the afternoon: that Juventus had a new coach, Massimiliano Allegri. The news took everyone off guard, even the coach himself couldn’t believe it… “For me it was a bolt from the blue,” he revealed in his first press conference on the same day. At that juncture he revealed his recipe: "Results, work, respect and professionalism.” It’s an understanding that demonstrated the ability to maintain balance over the succeding five years, in which he proved to be the only coach in history capable of winning five league titles in a row, to which he added four Italian Cups and two Italian Super Cups. It has been five years in which he left an undeniable mark, where he became the tactician with the highest win percentage (75.5%) in Serie A.
The numbers that mark his years in Turin are as impressive as the footprint he managed to give to the team, season after season. Through his intuitions, which would be nicknamed "happy", almost a homage to his Tuscan humour, he gave his men new awareness both in Italy and in Europe, creating different stimuli everytime. And it is through these that he created masterpieces like the comeback of the Scudetto, in the 2015/16 season, where in the space of a few months, with 15 consecutive victories, he overturned Juve's position on the log, after sitting in the bottom half of the ranking in October. In February, he elected leaders destined for the yet another escape.
That journey is worth the example, because the list would be infinitely long; the inventions with which he changed the outcome of so many matches. To succeed, you can't improvise, you need preparation and an exemplary work ethic, but what is truly extraordinary is how Allegri has instead managed to make every success seem "simple", which is in full coherence with his philosophy to football. It wasn’t like that, of course, but today when we salute him, it is right to do it with the same language. Thank you, Max. "Simply" thank you.
