Juventus sits seventh in Serie A, 12 points behind Napoli, the early leader. Last weekend, Atalanta won in Turin for the first time in more than 30 years. Relative minnows, like Sassuolo, and actual minnows, like Empoli, have returned from Juventus’s Allianz Stadium with victories.

Allegri’s team has lost five games in Serie A already this season. Juventus had realized, it seemed, that the fact of winning was more central to its identity than the nature of it. His task was to prioritize “results,” as he has put it, over the pursuit of style that had captivated the club when it decided, a couple of years ago, that it had outgrown Sarri. After the failed experiments with Sarri and Pirlo, Juventus restored Massimiliano Allegri as coach this summer. If that seemed like the nadir, it was not. Under his replacement, the novice Andrea Pirlo, Juventus barely scraped into the Champions League - relying on Napoli’s stumbling at home on the final day to make it - and then, over the course of the summer, discovered that Cristiano Ronaldo, the player it had brought in to turn domestic hegemony into continental success, no longer wanted to stick around. In comparison, of course, that year under Sarri would come to be seen as the last chapter of the golden era. The coach, an unlikely appointment who turned into an unpopular incumbent, had gone Agnelli would not, he said, tolerate a repeat. The year in question was the one before last, the one in which Maurizio Sarri led Juventus to a ninth straight Serie A title.

With an expletive or two thrown in, he tells the players that the previous season was not up to scratch. There is a scene in the first episode of the club’s edition of the “All Or Nothing” documentary series - which started airing on Amazon Prime late last month, and over which the team’s executives hung like hawks, every step of the way - in which Agnelli gathers the members of the playing squad and lets them know, in no uncertain terms, the expectations. It would be easy, then, to see more than a little hubris in Juventus’s on-field travails this season. The police have already raided the club’s training facility and its offices. The authorities are said to be considering various charges of false accounting and reporting. And then, more serious still, there is the investigation by Italy’s financial authorities into six current and former executives - including Agnelli and Pavel Nedved, the club’s vice president - into Juventus’s transfer dealings.

Old netflix font