Juventus Have A Scoring Problem, Can Max Allegri Solve It In Time To Save His Job?

Can anyone help Juventus score goals?

After turning around what looked like a doomed ship at the beginning of the season, Max Allegri’s Juve are undergoing a crisis, and a big one.

At the tail end of last year and into the beginning of this season, it seemed like the gears were finally clicking for Allegri and Juve. Despite the absences of Paul Pogba, Federico Chiesa and Angel Di Maria, the club’s three most creative outlets, Allegri had managed to get Juve back on track and heading in the right direction.

Even amidst the points deduction, Juve were winning matches. They weren’t pretty performances; in fact they could only be described as brutally efficient – in every sense of the word – yet they were getting the job done.

Had it not been for the deduction, Juve would’ve been challenging Napoli for the Scudetto in the winter, albeit a huge distance behind the runaway leaders.

Now, however, things have changed. In all competitions they’ve only won three games from the last nine. Moreover, and more crucially, they’ve only scored a paltry six goals in that run. Looking at Juve’s results can resemble binary code: zeros and ones everywhere.

Juve have only scored 47 goals in Serie A this season, the least from any of the top seven sides in the league. In the top 10, only Monza, Bologna and Fiorentina have scored less.

The club’s top scorer is Dusan Vlahovic, and Adrien Rabiot, with eight. The fact that the Frenchman is joint-top with Vlahovic is a damming indictment of just how productive the striker has been this season. Vlahovic has constantly looked isolated in the Juve team and his confidence is at an all-time low. Bought just over a year ago from Fiorentina for €80m ($89m), there has been talk in the Italian media as of late that Juve could decide to offload Vlahovic at the end of the season, such has been the disappointment over his performances. Moreover, should they not be allowed entry into the Champions League next season amid possible UEFA
EFA
sanctions, they could be forced to sell Vlahovic regardless.

Allegri’s constant chopping and changing of players means he’s rarely played the same team twice since coming back to the club. The consequence of this is a team with little rhythm or continuity, it produces a side that chugs together, bailed out of games by one moment of brilliance or fortune.

Juve are in the bottom half of the table for possession per-game, with Italy’s biggest club averaging only 48% this season, less than the likes of Torino, Bologna, Sassuolo and Monza. Yes, possession for possession’s sake doesn’t equate to goals, but if you don’t have the ball, your chances of scoring diminish.

Allegri’s tactics has chiefly been to soak up pressure and hit on the counter, yet with two of his quickest players – Chiesa and Di Maria – out for portions of the season, this hasn’t worked so well. The end result is Juve plodding through games, dire in spectacle and difficult for the neutral fan to sit through.

Allegri, of course, cares little for footballing aesthetics, but yet while in his first stint at the club there was an identity about Juve, even if it was somewhat pragmatic, you knew what you were going to get. This iteration doesn’t know what it wants to be, nearly two full seasons in.

The pressure is growing on Allegri and, even if Juve win the Europa League this season, it may not be enough to save him. A report from Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera states that some within the squad have lost faith in the Tuscan, with one claiming the squad is ‘broken’ due to the incessant rotating of players.

In his first season at the club, Allegri took Juve to within 90 minutes of a treble. he hasn’t come close to making the same impact second time around. But in Allegri’s defense, he hasn’t been helped by misfiring strikers and injured creators.

Mix it all together and you have a squad that’s good on paper, but in reality is a mishmash and ill fitting.