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ReJUVEnated: The Serie A has silenced the doubters

20th May, 2015
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No Pirlo, No Party. Image: AFP PHOTO/ CURTO DE LA TORRE
Roar Guru
20th May, 2015
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1037 Reads

It wasn’t long ago that the Serie A was considered dead – a worthless, uncompetitive league that had been rapidly overtaken by its English, Spanish and German counterparts.

Now, on the back of Juventus’ European success, Italian football is rising once again.

Cast your mind back to the 11th of December, 2013. Italian champions Juventus had just lost to Turkish giants Galatasaray in the Champions League and failed to make it past the group stage.

Just a few months later Atletico Madrid resoundingly knocked the lone Italian hope, Milan, out of the Round of 16 after a 5-1 win on aggregate.

Italian football was deemed a joke, with even its biggest and brightest stars unable to match it with the fourth-best teams in other leagues.

They failed on the European scene they once dominated.

The way in which Juventus claimed their third title in a row, 17 points in front of their nearest competitor, after finishing with a nine-point lead the season before only fuelled claims that a competitive edge had been lost on the Serie A.

People have short memories in sport, and it seems that pundits and fans alike forgot that in 2003, Juventus and Milan battled it out in the Champions league final.

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They may also have forgotten that both Milan-based teams won the Champions League in 2007 and 2010 respectively, showing that they had the upmost stature among Europe’s best just three years before the supposed collapse of a footballing empire.

With that being said, followers of the league did their best to remember the 2006 Calciopoli scandal that saw Juventus relegated, tarnishing the reputation of what was arguably the world’s best league at the time.

Many would suggest that this was the beginning of the end for Italian football, that it was the catalyst for its fall from grace.

With the way AC and Internationale Milan performed in the following years, as well as how the national team made the Euro final in 2012, we can gather that the people who said such things are probably the same people who thought Andrea Pirlo’s career was finished in 2011.

Sure, the top Serie A teams went missing in Europe from 2011 until now, but was it really that bad?

Was Italian football actually dead?

No, it was not.

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In hindsight, surely we can admit that a three-year hiatus from European dominance has been a minor hurdle for Italian football.

Juventus now have the chance to prove all of their doubters wrong, and to firmly stamp Italy back on the map as an irreplaceable contributor to world football.

And with Napoli and Fiorentina making the semi-finals of the Europa League, it is inevitable that Italian football will rise again, leaving the haters of the last couple of seasons to question their sanity.

Let me put it this way – no English team made it past the Champions League round of 16 this year and Chelsea wrapped up the title three weeks early in a league renowned for its competitiveness. Are people going to claim that the BPL is dead?

No, don’t be so stupid.

While the BPL has a fair way to go to reach the lows the Serie A did, the comparisons cannot be ignored.

You only have to look as far as some of the home-grown and foreign talent on display to see why the league is reclaiming its stature.

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Paul Pogba is the hottest young prospect in world football right now, and he joins the list of youngsters such as Felipe Anderson, Pablo Dybala, Manolo Gabbiadini, Domenico Berardi, Alvaro Morata and Mauro Icardi who are set to take the world by storm.

These names are the most exciting aspect of this resurgence, as the league is being rebuilt from the ground, up, providing that ‘individual brilliance’ and ‘fantasy’ that Ned Zelic always bangs on about.

So kudos to Juventus for pumping some much needed life back into the Serie A, and for being the beacon of hope for Italian football supporters.

The underdogs are real contenders now, but whether they can cap off their incredible run remains to be seen.

Nonetheless, it’s clear that the Serie A is well and truly back from the dead, even if it wasn’t really dead to begin with.

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