Oh, yes, the dumbest international break is back — but thankfully almost over.
What’s better than a random stoppage three weeks into the brand new season to watch random friendlies and/or the Nations League a competition that remains forgettable at best and downright prejudicial to players who already have a heavy workload to begin with.
Now that the break is about to be over and we can be spared of titanic matchups like Mexico vs. New Zealand clogging up the airwaves, Juventus are gearing back up to start the season, in earnest, with the return of the familiar Champions League midweek grindfest starting up as we have Juventus back on the European stage in less than a week.
After a season last year in which Juventus played exclusively in domestic completion and the season before that where they crashed out in embarrassing fashion in the group stage, it’s been a while since we have seen our beloved club play in the premier club competition in the continent and potentially had, you know, hope.
After a pretty decent soft opening to the Thiago Motta era, the real season starts now for the new coach and his new-look team.
Bring it on.
Let’s cook.
Expectations Game
On the latest episode of The Old Lady Speaks Podcast, we discussed what should the expectations be for this new-look Juventus. While there is a decent argument to make that we shouldn’t expect a triumphant return to unimpeded domination right away, I do think that expecting a top-four finish and not much else is aiming low for this squad.
Here are some things that I believe are true:
- With the rebuild on the fly that Cristiano Giuntoli managed to engineer, this team is more talented and deeper than last year’s roster.
- Motta is a better manager than Max Allegri at this current point in both of their respective careers.
- This squad is tailor made specifically for what Motta wants to play.
- The investment made into retooling this team is far and away the largest that the club has made in a while. (Even if it took some creative accounting to get it done.)
If you concede the aforementioned points, what you have is a more cohesive, talented, better coached team than last year and a team that has a ton more of investment behind it, too.
If the lesser squad coached by the lesser manager last year finished in the top four and managed a Coppa Italia win, shouldn’t the requirement for this squad be, you know, more than that? I understand that a new process takes time and I’m by no means advocating that if Juventus don’t win the treble that this whole season is a failure, but you don’t make the massive moves Juventus made — and the very real possibility that the club mortgaged their future if they don’t pan out — if the expectation is just a slight improvement over the last year.
You just don’t think that way.
I think they have to fight for the Scudetto or even win it. I think they have to go back to the quarterfinals of the Champions League — a stage they haven’t reached since 2019, by the way — and look like they belong when they inevitably face up against the big boys of Europe.
Juve fans love to vanaglóriate about how we are a “big” club. Well, big clubs don’t go into a season with any other expectation than to lift some silverware. It’s about time Juventus remembers that.
Speaking of Europe ...
Fixing a thing that is not broken
So, the new Champions League format is weird, huh?
I don’t have a very strong opinion on it yet. I’m not sure if it’s going to be better or worse than what we used to have, but the whole thing just feels like unnecessarily tinkering with something that by all intents and purposes didn’t need to be tinkered with.
Sure, I get why they made the change. After all, it’s not a coincidence that the total match count of the competition grew from 125 to a whooping 189. More games, more money. The math is pretty simple there.
Obviously, the very big first issue is the fact that players are not robots. There is going to be a point in which so many games inevitably lead to bigger workloads and more injuries across the board, and this is just a thing that is going to happen so might as well accept it as part of the new normal. Do squads get more bloated? Does depth become an outright necessity for teams with any expectation of playing in multiple competitions?
You also have the weird fact of a league format in which you don’t play all the other teams in the league — defeating the purpose of the league if you think about it — and you don’t get home and away matchups which brought parity to the seedings, either. A quasi-round of 32 and a bye for the top eight teams?
This feels like those random tournaments you could create in FIFA when you were bored with friends, not the best club competition in the world. Time will tell if this new format catches on and maybe it does lead to more excitement, variance and all around a better tournament.
All I can hope, at the very least, is that Juventus manages to not embarrass themselves for a change.