New big upheaval at Juventus: less than 24 hours after being eliminated by Lyon in the Champions League, the Turin club dismissed Maurizio Sarri and inducted, to everyone’s surprise, Andrea Pirlo, bombarded coach of one of the biggest clubs in the world without any experience of the position.
Juve therefore changed completely in one day and the famous “few days of reflection” that President Andrea Agnelli spoke about on Friday after the elimination really passed very quickly. The management of Juventus has in fact acknowledged the failure of Sarri, the transplant never having taken with the former coach of Napoli and Chelsea, whose promises of good play were not kept.
But, with Pirlo, it is a new radical choice that Agnelli made. Certainly, unlike Sarri, the 2006 world champion knows the environment perfectly well having played at Juventus from 2011 to 2015 and he corresponds to it. But the former superb midfielder of the Nazionale has never coached, neither at this level, nor below, nor among young people. He had just been appointed coach of the Juventus Under-23 team and has yet to lead a session.
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From “Maestro” to “Mister”
“The choice made today is based on the conviction that Pirlo has all the cards to lead from his debut on the bench an experienced and talented team in order to achieve new success,” said Juve in his statement. When he had presented him as coach of the young people of Juve, Agnelli had all the same slipped that he saw a future upstairs for Pirlo, in which he places, according to the Italian media, a very great confidence . “He is starting this adventure in order to one day be able to train the first team”, declared the Turin president.
The adventure therefore accelerated and, as Juventus wrote in its press release, Pirlo has now gone from “Maestro”, one of the nicknames that accompanied him during his career, to “Mister”, the term used in Italy to refer to football coaches, regardless of level or age category. But there it is all the same launched in the deep end in a brutal way. Because, if his name is added to a long list of great players of the 1990s and 2000s who became coaches (Zidane, Guardiola, Xavi, Lampard, Gerrard, Vieira, Gattuso, Henry…), he does so without learning. Most of his now counterparts have indeed started with young people, or as assistants, or in small clubs. It starts at the top.
Gianluigi Buffon older than his coach
We know everything about his playing skills, the natural elegance, the unique passing quality, the excellence on set pieces and the innate sense of football’s geometry. But who is “coach Pirlo”? Since the end of his playing career in 2017 in the United States, the native of Brescia has been a discreet player in the world of calcio. He turned down a post in the Italian federation to keep activities on the Sky channel, where he was a consultant without enthusiasm or enthusiasm.
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His elegance as a fashion and wine lover, as well as his jaded demeanor, in a few advertisements and magazines has brought him new popularity on the Internet around the slogan “Pirlo is not impressed” (Pirlo is not impressed). impressed). But, at 41, the former player of AC Milan, Inter Milan and Juventus will now rediscover the frantic pace of elite football, which has been his for twenty years.
He will also find some players who were his teammates, such as Gianluigi Buffon, now older than his coach. “So now should I call you Mister?” The goalie joked on Twitter. In 2011, a few months after the arrival at Juve of Pirlo, left free by AC Milan, Buffon had already spoken of this transfer as “the deal of the century”. Nine years later, Juventus is trying the bet again.
