CHAMPIONS OF EUROPE WHO FACE LOSING THEIR CROWNS
▶ Title-holders Juventus, Liverpool and Real Madrid are finding life tough at the top on domestic fronts this season
Pippo Inzaghi, once a Juventus goalscorer, now manager of Benevento, wanted the achievement recognised. “Taking four points off Juventus isn’t something that happens very often,” Inzaghi beamed after Benevento’s 1-0 win proved October’s draw with the champions had been no fluke.
Benevento are 16th in Serie A, and Sunday’s victory counted as another lowlight of a dispiriting month for Juventus, freshly eliminated from the last-16 of the Champions League by Porto. Juve are 10 points behind Italian league leaders Inter Milan, with 11 matches left.
Barring an Inter collapse and Juventus’s novice manager sparking a miraculous revival, an era is over. Andrea Pirlo is set to become the first Juventus manager in almost a decade not to win the scudetto.
Benevento. Verona. Bottomof-the-table Crotone. Juventus have dropped points against all of them. Fiorentina, 14th, beat them 3-0.
Meanwhile Napoli, who have already beaten Juve at home in the league, come to Turin just after the current international break. Much hinges on that visit.
Fifth-placed Napoli are just two points behind Juventus in third. The real battle for Pirlo is to ensure Juventus make the top four, and the next Champions League.
Even if he achieves that, there are no guarantees he keeps the job. His predecessor, Maurizio Sarri was sacked when a last16 exit from the European Cup was deemed a failure.
The manager before Sarri, Max Allegri, was shown the door because he had only claimed two runners-up medals in the Champions League. Serie A was a given for both: At this stage in 2019-20, Sarri had Juventus on 11 points more than they have now.
The season before – Allegri’s last of five in charge – they were 20 points better off. It all adds up to steep decline. Nor can it be soothed by that helpful term ‘transition’.
“Transition is not a word that exists at Juventus,” Fabio Paratici, the club’s football director, said after the loss at Benevento, while reiterating that Cristiano Ronaldo, bought in 2018 and contracted until 2022 explicitly to deliver a European title, would not be leaving this summer.
But there is no successful sporting institution where transition is not a key part of strategy and this has been a challenging time for the best strategists, the richest buyers, the most accomplished fitness specialists.
Pirlo had never coached at a significant level before last August.
Yet he was thrust into a compacted calendar, a transfer market whose values have been scrambled by the economic impact of the Covid-19 crisis and had to make his mark in a Juventus stadium, traditionally a fortress, without spectators.
To harness momentum – and Juve’s nine league titles on the trot is some momentum – under those circumstances requires agility. Even the most experienced tacticians have found 2020-21 taxing.
In the Premier League, another champion is about to be deposed. Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool were the definition of momentum before the crash.
The reasons for their drop in form are well-chronicled – fatigue-related injuries, especially in central defence; a pressing game style undermined by a sapping fixture list; an empty Anfield where there was a rousing noise few arenas could match for much of a 68-match unbeaten league run dating back to April 2017.
The cost for the English champions’ slide is heavy. Liverpool are five points off the Champions League places, with nine matchdays left.
Meanwhile, Spain anticipates a dethroning of Real Madrid. The 2019-20 champions’ momentum of 10 successive wins late last summer has not been replicated, even if they have lately turned harder to beat. The gap to Liga leaders Atletico Madrid, whose last title came in 2014, remains at six points.
Paris Saint-Germain, French champions seven times in the last eight years, face an unexpected joust with Lille, with whom they share the leadership of Ligue 1.
In Portugal, the duopoly of Porto and Benfica, is being torn apart, as Sporting line up their first title since 2002, nestled on a 10-point lead over champions Porto. That is a situation that hardly comforts Pirlo. The same Porto, a distant second in Portugal, knocked Juventus out of Europe, with 10 men for the last hour.