Juventus F.C

A rough start to the season has been forgotten in Italy amid an executive housecleaning and a brief glimpse at the top of the league table.

It is that it has bought them with no apparent strategy beyond the idea that more is better. There is, certainly, some merit to the idea of abolishing a tournament that was only invented (in the 1960s) so that clubs could make money from newfangled floodlights. Brighton comes with a guarantee of entertainment in the Premier League. It is not that he did not give enough to the game. Since then, the club has spent something in the region of $380 million on reinforcements. It is that the game did not think enough of him. To the rest of Madrid’s players, the story went, it had felt like a deliberate snub. All of the criticism, all of the crisis, has helped bond Allegri’s players to one another and to their coach. It has helped them scrabble and claw their way out of misery and into the light. Nor has Allegri benefited from the sudden return to fitness of a phalanx of major stars. At the end of November, Agnelli — together with the rest of the Juventus board — had resigned his position, seemingly as a consequence of an 18-month investigation by Italian prosecutors into financial irregularities related to the team’s When it is prefaced by an admission that the team should be “ashamed” of its performance, it is significantly worse.