Juventus’ Max Allegri: ‘Football is happiness - but in the end it is winning that counts’

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/apr/13/juventus-max-allegri-champions-league-monaco

Version 0 of 1.

Curious scenes are unfolding at Juventus’s Vinovo training ground. A gigantic throne made of swords has just been wheeled through the front gate. Office staff are congregating in doorways and gawping. Massimiliano Allegri bowls past with barely a glance.

He has taken more improbable developments in his stride over the past nine months. In mid-July he was out of work with no obvious prospect of landing a job in club football before the start of the season. Today he is in charge of a Juventus side who stand a few victories shy of an extraordinary treble.

“But we have not achieved anything yet,” he cautions, eschewing the throne as he ducks into an interview room and folds his 6ft frame into a mundane office chair. “We still need more points to win the league, and we still have to play the Coppa Italia final. The Champions League remains a dream in which our objective is simply to do our best and aim to achieve a great result. For now, that could be reaching the semi-final.”

Such circumspection is understandable and last Saturday Juve were beaten in Serie A by the bottom club, Parma. Even so, they remain 12 points clear at the top with eight games left. The bookmakers make them solid favourites to overcome Lazio in the Coppa Italia final and Monaco in the Champions League quarter-final, with the first leg on Tuesday night.

Allegri’s phone buzzes incessantly on the table in front of him, humming with an urgency that was absent for so much of last summer. “My plan was to stay without work,” he says. “I wanted to travel around and learn English. I wanted to see different ways of working, to learn a little bit about the working culture in different countries.” He had begun this exploration, spending two months in England after he was fired by Milan at the start of 2014. Allegri took in games all over the country and was granted glimpses behind the scenes at Arsenal and Tottenham. He makes no secret of his fascination with English football, telling the BBC last October he hopes to manage in the Premier League one day. Which is not to say he considers it an inherently superior competition.

“We need to start from a presupposition,” he says. “Namely that there is no ‘better’ football and no ‘worse’ kind of football, just different styles and cultures that belong to each country.”He notes, as many others have before him, that English football is faster and more physical, while Italian clubs prioritise tactics to a higher degree. But he stresses the little things, too – the fact that players living in two different countries will have different diets, different waking hours, different experiences of day-to-day life. These things add up to create footballing cultures that are, to a great extent, immutable.

“Nobody should imagine that they could go to England and change the way that football is played there,” says Allegri. “Just as nobody should imagine that they could come to Italy and change the culture or the DNA of Italian football. Or even the DNA of the club where they work.”

Better for a manager to embrace what is there and mould a team subtly according to his vision, adding “little devices” along the way. That is precisely what Allegri has done at Juventus, initially preserving the 3-5-2 used by his predecessor, Antonio Conte, and only gradually introducing new formations as the season has progressed. Even now he continues to revert to the old system when it suits his team best.

Not every manager would have had the courage to replace Conte – a man who had steered the Old Lady to three consecutive Scudetti. After all, how could anyone hope to improve on a team who last year became the first in Serie A history to shatter the 100-point barrier? Conte had appeared to conclude it was impossible, walking out at the end of his team’s first day of pre-season training.

Allegri saw things differently. “When Juventus called me, I didn’t have to think about it,” he says. “I already had some clear ideas about what their potential was. It was a team that still had lots to give and lots of room to improve.”

Most obviously, Juventus could do better in Europe. Under Conte they had reached one Champions League quarter-final but then failed to even make it out of the group stage in 2013-14. Conte had blamed a lack of transfer funds, arguing it was unrealistic to believe you could dine at a €100 restaurant when you only have a €10 note in your wallet. Perhaps it is simply a question of knowing your way around the menu. “The difference in economic potential between clubs in Italy, those in England, or the big two in Spain is very high,” Allegri says. “To reduce this gap we need to use our ingenuity. We need to go out and find talented young players, we need to have a solid core of Italian players on which to build – as Juventus does – and then we need foreigners who can provide a really high technical quality to the group. Above all Juventus has had the opportunity, and the skill, to land a [Carlos] Tevez, a [Paul] Pogba, an [Arturo] Vidal and this year also [Roberto] Pereyra from Udinese.”

The first three of those players were acquired for a combined fee of just over €25m, while Pereyra will set Juventus back a further €14m should they choose to make his transfer permanent this summer. Today, Pogba alone holds a market value of close to €80m – though it is Tevez who has done more than any other individual to drive his team’s progress in this campaign.

The Argentinian sits on top of Serie A’s scoring charts with 17 goals in 27 games and has set a personal record by netting six times in Europe. He is also Juventus’s leading provider of assists. Allegri describes him as “an extraordinary player, a generous player, a player of great character”. These were not the adjectives that might have sprung to the mind of Manchester City fans when Tevez allegedly refused to budge from the bench during that infamous defeat to Bayern Munich three seasons ago. “In life, things do not always stay the same,” shrugs Allegri. “There are certain alchemies that marry together at particular moments in particular places, with particular people.

“Sometimes you can go for 10 years without finding the right balance, but then you arrive at that moment when you are at the right stage in your maturation, with the right people around you. That is what Tevez has found, and it is allowing him to have one of the best years of his career.”

The manager deserves a large slice of the credit. Conte, too, had Tevez, Pogba and Vidal at his disposal but his tactical rigidity and insistence on constant high-tempo pressing during the latter part of his tenure made Juventus too predictable in Europe. Allegri has been more flexible, not only adapting his formations but also encouraging his team to vary their rhythm and manage their energies over the course of each game.

He does not know how long Juventus will be able to keep hold of Tevez, acknowledging that the player – whose contract expires in 2016 – will most likely finish his career in Argentina. But Allegri is convinced his team will continue progressing regardless, stating that Juventus’s long-term goal must be “to establish itself as one of the top eight clubs in Europe”.Reaching the quarter-finals of the Champions League this season is a start but does not mean that the goal has been achieved. “It is a competition apart,” Allegri says, “in the sense that you have no chance for a do-over if you mess up one match or if events conspire against you. You only have to look this year at Chelsea going out in the last-16 against Paris Saint-Germain, Arsenal going out against Monaco.” He is convinced that the absence of any English clubs at this stage of the tournament is nothing more than a blip, and one that will be rectified next season. He actively hopes to see Manchester United back leading the way for Premier League clubs, arguing that without teams such as them and Milan, “the Champions League loses part of its appeal”.

For now, though, Allegri’s focus rests on his team’s quarter-final against Monaco. Proving the point about how readily circumstances can impinge on a side’s Champions League fate, Juventus must play the first leg without Pogba – out until mid-May with a hamstring injury – and possibly without Andrea Pirlo – who has missed the last nine games with a calf problem – as well.

None of this will diminish the expectations placed on Allegri’s team. Six years ago, when serving as manager of Cagliari, he contrasted himself to José Mourinho by insisting that, “for me, football is happiness and enjoyment”. When those words are put to him now, he hurries to set them in a new context.

“I think that football is happiness and fun but in football you still need to think about winning because that’s the thing that counts. To arrive at this objective, the objective of winning games, we need to take the path of playing beautiful football, having great intensity, working on tactics and technique – there are many aspects.

“Mourinho is an extraordinary manager who has won a lot. In football, a person can be liked or not liked. I can be liked, Mourinho can be liked, another person might not be liked, but in the end the thing that matters is our results.”

With that, our interview is at an end.

On the way out we pass two men struggling to manoeuvre the throne of swords down a hallway. It is here as part of the promotional push for the new season of Game of Thrones but Allegri has other places to be.

As well as he has done these last nine months he knows better than anyone that his first season in Turin is yet to arrive at its crowning moment.