“It hurts my eyes, it hurts my heart. I can’t watch Juventus any more.”
How many Juventus supporters recognise themselves in those words? Many. Perhaps too many for a club whose greatness carries proportional responsibilities towards the people who love it. And it is not the absence of a Scudetto or any particular trophy that wounds — it is the fact of not even coming close. It is not merely the defeats, but the manner in which they arrive.
The moral inconsistency of Juventus is an affront to the love of those who support them — and increasingly, endure them. The absence of genuine character on the pitch has, in recent years, transformed ordinarily painful defeats into epoch-defining disasters, leaving behind them deep scars and the cold sensation that this is not a clean break between the club and its people, but a slow and dangerous drift. A progressive abandonment — almost a form of self-protection that supporters are increasingly adopting towards their own feelings.
Leaders Are What This Requires
Defeats matter up to a point. What matters more is the attitude of certain players — from whom you perceive no authentic sense of belonging, no visceral identification with the shirt. After five years of lean times, patience has been consumed or is being consumed. Resentment simmers. Spoiled? Yes, undoubtedly. But the point is a different one: those who, only in the last decade, witnessed Mandzukic and Tevez cannot stomach the character yielding of a Koopmeiners or a Kolo Muani. Because the Juventus people do not necessarily demand to see champions — but they demand to see men. These are people who enjoyed Platini and Zidane, but who loved Furino and Montero.
Juventus had already lost at Reggio Emilia against Sassuolo before. It was 28 October 2015 — the fourth defeat in ten league matches. A 1-0 to the Emilian side, an ugly and confused performance, a miserable position in the table. A squad that appeared to be at the end of its cycle, playing badly, tired and demotivated. After the match, Gigi Buffon and Patrice Evra went to stand outside the dressing rooms. What followed was a few words of maximum substance — and then twenty-five victories and a draw. It is clear to everyone that the sporting feat of 2015-16 is unreachable for this Juventus — and it is unreachable precisely because of the desolate absence of leaders, even before the question of technical quality is raised.
A Crisis of Faith — and an Examination of Conscience
This is what puts faith in crisis. This is what turns off the television sets, what darkens the mood: you can lose — but not like this, without pride and without courage. And we are not speaking of the crude verbal violence of social media, where the worst of humanity spews forth under cover of anonymity. We are speaking of the silent majority who cannot understand how their passion is increasingly transformed into humiliating suffering. People who do not call for the manager’s head at the end of the first half of the first match — supporters who do not care about the coach’s name, but who demand to see Juventus behave like Juventus, even in defeat, avoiding crumbling without honour.
In the last five years — weighed down by accumulated grievances and disappointments — the worst defeats have not been those against objectively stronger sides. They have been those against opponents who could have been beaten, but were approached limply, distractedly, fearfully. The panic attacks that last season cost fourth place — lost against Verona and Fiorentina, sides clearly and indisputably inferior, in front of whom the Juventus players stood immobile and terrified, incapable of responding to the first difficulty.
Of course, they have not had an Evra, a Chiellini, a Buffon who taught them the basic principles, who shook them with a roar during the match, who metaphorically took them by the ear and forced them to drive out the ghosts. The progressive dismantling of the squad of the nine Scudetti, without a solid handover that guaranteed the conservation of its inheritance, is the original sin of the club in recent years. You can sign the wrong players and, in some way, recover. But if you systematically sign the wrong men, then any reconstruction becomes more complex, longer, and more expensive.
Because without someone to identify with, without someone who gives the sensation that — even in the bad seasons — there is a flame that keeps the spirit alive, you risk losing something more precious than any trophy: the love and the attention of the supporters. To this examination of conscience, today’s Juventus is being called. Eight million people invest their feelings in these performances. They deserve more respect.
