Risorgimento
First published May 2015
How nice to see that the Old Lady has returned to the summit of European football. Juventus may not end up as Champions League winners in Berlin on Saturday, but the very fact they are there is tribute to the rimbalzabilità (see: rebondissabilité/Rücksprungsfähigkeit) of a club brought low by its own audacity.
Nearly a decade has passed since Juve were stripped of what would have been their 28th and 29th scudetti in the aftermath of calciopoli and resultantly cast into the doldrums of Serie B. The intervening years brought some dark times for the Turin club, but the past four seasons have seen them recover their place as the pre-eminent team in Italy. Since 2012, challenges to their status as Serie A’s best have been almost non-existent, but in this period one thing was conspicuously absent: a serious, deep run in a European competition and the international recognition this would bring. Now, though, Juventus are officially returned to the continental élite.
As well as the return-of-the-prodigal-son motif, there’s plenty more symbolism to be found here. There’s the location, Berlin, scene of Italy’s World Cup final win in 2006 — a triumph lent great pathos given the calciopoli scandal was dogging Italian football as a whole at the time. Two of the current Juve side’s most totemic figures, Andrea Pirlo and Gigi Buffon, played every minute of that match.
Then there’s the fact that Juve reaching the final can be seen as a symptom of a wider, quiet revival of the glorious, insufferable world of calcio. The bianconeri became the first team from Serie A to make it this far since Mourinho’s Inter in 2010, but had things gone slightly differently, we could even have had an all-Italian Europa League final — both Fiorentina and Napoli lost out in the semi-finals. Serie A may not regain the imperiousness of the nineties, but Juve’s presence in Berlin is a reminder of the league’s golden heritage.
On a darker note, there’s also the reality that Juve return to prominence on the world stage in a year that marks a tragic anniversary. The European Cup final of thirty years ago ought to have been the crowning moment of the Platini-generation, the valediction of a stylish Juve team nurtured to greatness by Giovanni Trapattoni. Instead, it turned out to be the bleakest moment in the club’s history. “Juventus are European champions: but football weeps,” wrote David Miller in The Times shortly after the final. The events at Heysel on 29 May 1985 became a byword for the decay of a society of which Juventus were not even part, the final straw in an era of brutality that led to the exclusion of an entire nation from European football. It was a festival of sport turned into a massacre by organisational incompetence and the dregs of the English populace.
“Heysel was the disgraceful culmination of more than a decade of ugly incidents involving English supporters on their European travels,” writes Oliver Kay for The Anfield Wrap. “Tottenham Hotspur in Rotterdam in 1974 and 1983, Leeds United in Paris in 1975, Manchester United in St Etienne in 1977, the national team in Basle in 1981 and so on until the spiral of moronic violence reached its tragic conclusion — logical in one sense, crazy in all others — in Brussels.”
We should never forget Heysel, or the people whose lives were taken there. Perhaps Juventus can finally lay to rest the spectre of 1985 with victory on Saturday. Or perhaps not; it would be incredibly trite, not to mention delusional, to suggest that the loss of 39 lives can be compensated for with the mere winning of a football match on a symbolic anniversary. This is a wound that can never truly heal.
However, with Juve’s progress in this year’s Champions League, the less immutable damage done to the club by the mid-2000s match-fixing scandals has, at last, been conclusively mended. Calciopoli was a furore that almost did for the Old Lady, but the exploits of Massimo Allegri’s team this year have helped banish memories of Luciano Moggi, Serie B and the dispossession of those two league titles in 2005 and 2006.
The great irony of Calciopoli is that Juve ended up stronger as a result. As former bianconeri midfielder Marco Tardelli recently pointed out to the Daily Mail: “Other teams who acted the same way were not relegated and did not get the clean break. The club has gone back to the days of being a Juventus club with another Agnelli as president, Andrea, the son of Umberto. It is going back to the glory days. There’s still a way before they have the presence on an international level like Barcelona, Real Madrid or Bayern Munich. They’re not the ultimate dream team yet. But it’s starting to get back to that.”
Juve’s initial decline as a result of the rulings made by the FIGC in 2006 has evolved into a risorgimento: a decline followed by a resurgence. The club was promoted after just one season of enforced exile in the second tier, and immediately shot back into the Champions League placings, finishing third. A runners-up spot followed in 2008/09, and despite a period of mediocrity from 2009 to 2011, the second decade of the 21st-century has belonged to Juventus. Since they regained the scudetto in 2012, no other Italian team has come close to being on a par with the Turin side. In the past three seasons, no-one has managed to finish within nine points of a club whose hegemony in Italy has begun to look unassailable. Juventus are back, and they look more powerful than ever. Four Serie A titles in a row and a Champions League final are proof of that. As pointed out by Ed Vulliamy in The Guardian, “they return to the summit of Europe this week, a shade less arrogant than before the storm.”
And finally, how about a little more symbolism to round things up? The last time Juve played in Europe’s showpiece match was back in 2003, a game they lost to a Milan team directed by a young regista named Andrea Pirlo. Twelve years later, this could be the last time we see Pirlo kick a football in a competitive game. Like it does for his team-mate Buffon, Berlin holds good memories for Pirlo — he scored one of the penalties that won Italy the World Cup. How these two grandi figure would love to lift another trophy at the Olympiastadion in what could be the swansong for one or both of them.
In their way stands one of the most dangerous attacks the competition has ever seen. If Juventus are going to overcome Barcelona this Saturday, they will need their two oldest, finest stagers — two of the forces behind the risorgimento — to be at their best.