When Juventus fly to London for the reverse fixture against Chelsea, the five players involved in Italy’s triumph at the European Championship last summer will be forgiven for forgetting about their Champions League game for a moment to look out the window and catch a glimpse of the Wembley arch. The green rectangle below has always loomed large in calcio’s consciousness. Winning there for the first time with a late goal from Fabio Capello in 1973 has always been one of the most celebrated results in Italy’s history. But even that was surpassed on an epic night in July when England were beaten in a major final that seemed destined to go their way.
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“What I mainly remember in the lead up to the game was the bus ride to Wembley,” Leonardo Bonucci tells The Athletic. “We were all ‘tranquilli’, ‘sereni’ — as calm as could be. There wasn’t the same electricity as before other finals.” None of the twitchiness and restlessness he may remember from 2012 when Italy succumbed to Spain or the Champions League finals of 2015 and 2017. “We were all so relaxed,” he recalls. “The music was banging.” Lorenzo Insigne introduced the players to a song from Naples about eating meatballs and “cotoletta” (breaded veal) and forgetting about going on a diet, which soon became one of the soundtracks to this Italy team’s summer. “We then got to the ground and there were a load of England fans hurling insults and abuse at us.”
The atmosphere was not for the faint-hearted. Wembley Way had been packed since the morning of the game and resembled the last day of a carnival. The ticketless rushed the turnstiles, desperate to attend the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity represented by a potential England trophy lift. The home crowd was much bigger than anticipated. Whistles rang out as the Italian national anthem played. A Tricolore flag was set alight.
“It didn’t bother us one bit,” Bonucci says. “The way we looked at it, it was a challenge and we thought, ‘Tonight we’re going to show you’. Before the game, I gave a speech to the team telling them that if we’ve made it this far, it’s down to the team spirit we’ve got, the willingness to sacrifice ourselves for each other and because we have never felt any pressure to prove anything to anyone.
“The opposite was true of England. The pressure was on their shoulders. All we had to think about was enjoying ourselves and playing our own game. As long as we did that the result would take care of itself just as it had done in the other games.”
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It didn’t matter that Luke Shaw scored so soon after the game kicked off and Wembley became even more delirious at the prospect of England winning a major tournament for the first time since 1966. Other teams might have trembled in that environment. Italy drew strength from it, rallying like gladiators thrown to the lions.
“Even after going behind, we kept playing our game without letting the scoreline or what was going on around us affect us. At half-time, we all knew we were going to bring it home and that a goal was coming.”
Bonucci found the equaliser, turning in a stooped header from the smallest player on the pitch, Marco Verratti. “When I scored we honestly thought we’d win it before it got to penalties,” Bonucci says. “We had a couple of chances. The one Domenico Berardi had comes to mind and they only added to our confidence that we were going to win it. I could see fear in the England team, particularly during extra time. They were afraid of conceding the goal that would bring the knockout blow. Then came the shootout and it’s always a lottery.”
Bonucci knows this better than most.
As the Francesco De Gregori song goes, he has never been afraid to take a penalty kick, even as a centre-back. Bonucci ensured Italy’s quarter-final with Germany at Euro 2016 went to penalties by stepping up in normal time and beating Manuel Neuer from 12 yards — only to miss in the shootout. But this time, his aim didn’t waver. “We did a great job from the spot and got our just reward,” Bonucci says. As was the case in Russia in 2018, “football’s coming home” came to be used against England. Back then, Luka Modric felt it projected “arrogance”, with the song’s original intention and sense of humour lost in translation.
“We didn’t pay much attention to it until the Spain game,” Bonucci says. “Then the anger inside of us began to mount. We wanted to show them that the final hadn’t already been decided. That they hadn’t already won. Hearing that song on repeat and the comment from Declan Rice saying England were 10 times more motivated to win than us… well, they’re the kind of mistakes young players make. You don’t say that. You should never say you want something more than somebody else or you’re better than somebody else.
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“You should always put yourself on the same level as your opponent, keep a low profile and strike at the right moment. That’s what we did. We never said we were going to win, just that we were an inch away from going all the way and getting the right result. We were never presumptuous about it. We stayed humble and that’s what made the difference. We had a great team, a great coach and a great staff behind us. To give our country and ourselves that kind of joy was something truly special.”
Bonucci and Chiellini also came full circle. After the heartache of Kyiv almost a decade beforehand, the success these two centurions had pursued together at international level finally arrived with one of them aged 34 and the other 36. Chiellini, in particular, seemed to reach a Zen-like state of grace, playing with a smile on his face as if this major international tournament was a simple game. Jordi Alba, for instance, has still yet to recover from the coin toss preceding the shootout that decided the semi-final.
“Giorgio realised that’s how he had to approach the Euros,” Bonucci says of his friend and team-mate. “It was his last chance to play in this competition.” Had it gone ahead on schedule in the summer of 2020, Chiellini would have missed it with an anterior cruciate ligament tear.
“We said to ourselves the only way for us to approach the tournament was with serenity and what we had to do was pass that on to the younger players. We had lots of really good players, but not many of them had a huge amount of experience at international level.” Verratti, for instance, was a kid at the 2014 World Cup, missed Euro 2016 through injury and watched the World Cup in Russia in 2018 on the sofa as Italy failed to qualify for the first time in 60 years. It was a similar story for Ciro Immobile, Insigne and Jorginho. Eighteen of Roberto Mancini’s 26-man squad had never been to a senior tournament before.
“Our job was to get them to the games in a state of maximum serenity,” Bonucci explains. “We put music on in the bus, we laughed and joked. Then, when the time was right, the most charismatic leaders on the team — me and (back-up goalkeeper Salvatore) Sirigu, for instance — drew a line under it and said: ‘Right, from now on there’s no more joking around. When the ref blows the whistle all of you have to give it your all’. At our age, me and Giorgio know how to manage a game. That’s not the case with the younger players. They don’t have the experience to do it but they knew they could count on us for a laugh and a joke and then that we’d fight together as a team all the way to the end.
“That was the secret behind our success, the togetherness. We couldn’t wait to get back to (Italy’s training base in) Coverciano for a barbecue the day after a game and spend all day together, watching the other matches in the video room, chatting about them and having a laugh. Those 45 days were ‘bellissimi‘, really they were.”
As great as it was to watch Italy play the exciting, counter-cultural and avant-garde style of football that Mancini has introduced to the national team, when the going got tough in the knockout stages, it was reassuring to see the old traits that have defined this country’s football identity for so long, such as the pride taken in defending and knowing what it means to suffer die hard. “It’s fundamental,” Bonucci nods. “They say defence wins championships and it’s the truth.” Particularly in Serie A, where Maurizio Sarri’s Juventus were an outlier insofar as they became the first team to win the league in Serie A without having the best defence since 2004.
“For defenders like us, stopping a goal from going in, making a challenge or a sliding tackle is better than scoring.” It’s enough to recall Chiellini’s reaction to Leonardo Spinazzola’s goalline clearance against Belgium. He could have kissed him.
“We were lucky that in our hour of need everyone on the team adopted this mentality. The Austria game was maybe the hardest from a physical perspective. They played at a high tempo and got through a lot of running. Against Spain, it was difficult on account of their possession game and we couldn’t play our own way. But mentally and physically we dug deepest that night against Austria and once the final whistle blew, we knew we could go all the way. By winning ugly, we realised we had another gear to go through and we had to go for the trophy.”
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As the green, white and red ticker tape fell on Italy and a hungover Nicolo Barella became a cult hero at the audience with Italy’s president Sergio Mattarella, attention in the media turned to awards season and who from this team would be in the running for the Ballon d’Or. Jorginho was named UEFA’s player of the year and deservedly so after winning the Champions League, European Championship and European Super Cup in a matter of months. Italy’s revival under Mancini ultimately stemmed from the decision to give the deep-lying Chelsea playmaker the conductor’s baton and let him and Verratti make sweet music from midfield. But Chiellini and the defence almost stole the show, throwing up the question: why hasn’t a centre-back received the votes needed to win the Ballon d’Or since Fabio Cannavaro in 2006?
“It’s the strikers and most gifted midfielders who sell tickets, entertain the fans and make the difference,” Bonucci says. “The difference made by a goalscorer or a No 10 is much more obvious, much more visible than that made by a defender. For us Italians, Fabio Cannavaro is an icon of defending and it was only fair that he won after the World Cup in Germany even if Gigi (Buffon) also deserved the Ballon d’Or as the No 1 goalkeeper in the world that summer. It’s just harder for a defender to win it. Virgil van Dijk got closer than anyone two years ago (coming second to Lionel Messi).
“Defenders just don’t catch the eye of fans or journalists in the same way. We’re ‘operai’,” Bonucci says. Labourers at the service of the team. And yet if we look at trends in the Premier League over the last couple of years, the hinge on which the title race swung has been a season-ending injury to a centre-back. That was the case in 2019 when Aymeric Laporte went down for Manchester City and in 2020 with Van Dijk at Liverpool.
“What these examples show is how important it is to have a charismatic defender with a big personality,” Bonucci says. “It’s not enough on its own to be great at defending. You have to be able to lead a team too. Look at the impact Ruben Dias made at Man City, a team I watch a lot for obvious reasons.”
We’ll get to why in a minute.
“Dias deserved full marks for his first season in England, 10 out of 10. It was a great season. When you lose a top defender it’s no coincidence that results don’t come. It goes to show how valuable they are within a group.”
It’s also why centre-backs are fetching bigger and bigger transfer fees, with Harry Maguire going for €87 million, Matthijs de Ligt €85.5 million, Van Dijk €84.5 million, Lucas Hernandez €80 million, Dias €68 million and Laporte €65 million. Bonucci doesn’t have a master’s degree in economics and commerce like Chiellini but it’s obvious to him that the market determines the price based on supply. “There are fewer and fewer top defenders around,” he says, “and this raises their transfer value. When you want a great player you have to pay up. The fees are recognition from insiders.” By which Bonucci means scouts, sporting directors, coaches, talent evaluators. In short, football men and women.
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“The people who judge us, on the other hand, like journalists often find it harder to spot the small details that differentiate one defender from another. Take a sliding tackle — that will catch the eye more than me shouting at a team-mate to make an adjustment. But the shout is more important because it will help my team-mate make a better decision. I can then avoid having to make the sliding tackle because I’ve alerted him to the danger he did not see before.
“These are the kinds of situations that people who live and breathe football on a daily basis know how to read. Maybe it’s harder for those on the outside who don’t get to watch training every day and the finer detail escapes them. Many of the people who judge us and talk about football have never played the game before and this has the effect of changing the judgment of a player.”
The reason Bonucci keeps tabs on City in his spare time is understandable enough given they have made multiple attempts to sign him under Pep Guardiola. “I had this dream of being coached by Pep,” Bonucci says. “The closest we came was in 2016. I was on the brink of joining City. We were down to the very last details then Juventus decided not to sell. We decided to stay together. Then when I went to AC Milan I could have gone to City but several things had to fall into place for it to happen. I’d also given my word to Milan. Last year, I spoke to Pep again. He wanted me but I told him: ‘Juventus is my home. I’m happy here. I feel at home here’. I wanted to make up the ground I lost by going to Milan for a season. Becoming a symbol of Juventus again is the most exciting thing I could be doing in my career right now.”
Tonight, Bonucci and Chiellini will come face-to-face with the player who unstitched the scudetto from their black and white shirts after nine years of domination in Italy.
“Romelu Lukaku has proven himself to be a complete striker,” Bonucci says. “He can win games on his own. When you come up against him you have to be switched on for 100 minutes a game. Unfortunately for us defenders, we can’t disengage our brains even for 10 seconds because those 10 seconds might be lethal. You must never engage Lukaku in a physical battle or play touch-tight. Instead, be ready to drop off because when his team has the ball, he will try to run in behind. In the box, he’s great at playing man-to-man so you need to be on the front foot, try to read the game and play hard. If you let him take up a position and he gets ahead of you, you won’t be able to step out and anticipate what’s coming.”
Bonucci’s approach resulted in Lukaku failing to score from open play against Juventus, not to mention in Belgium’s Euro quarter-final against Italy in Munich (although he did score penalties in this summer’s match and in a 3-2 defeat for Inter last season).
Uncharacteristically, clean sheets have been hard to come by for the Turin giants this year. Juventus have gone 20 league games without one, the longest streak since 1955, a statistic that contrasts with the record Bonucci and Chiellini helped set at the Euros with Italy going 19 and a half hours without conceding. How does Bonucci explain it? By his reckoning, it comes down to mentality and identity.
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“I think over the last two years with Sarri and (Andrea) Pirlo there have been difficulties in the transition. We’ve lost guys like Sami Khedira, Mario Mandzukic, Blaise Matuidi, Gonzalo Higuain — big characters who had great ability — to rejuvenate the team. Over the years, Juve has built its success on being a team that never gives up, a team that never surrenders. Even when all seems lost it never gives the impression of being beaten. That’s the mentality. It’s been hard these last two years to get that into the heads of our younger players. For a while, we were able to maintain it but the transition from one generation to another has been hard. Now that our younger players have 50 games under their belts at Juve they’re beginning to understand the ‘operaia’ mentality.”
Juventus have always been a blue-collar club even with the blue blood of the Agnelli dynasty running through it, a trait that reflects the work ethic on the factory floor at Fiat’s old Mirafiori and Lingotto plants.
“It’s right to try and play good football but you also have to work hard, make sacrifices, be humble. You can’t leave anything to chance. Everything has to be done at 101 per cent — 100 per cent is not enough. If you go through history and look at when Juventus are winning, they have 10 top players, 10 good players and four workhorses on the team. Every one of them though has the same mentality and that’s, ‘We’ve got to win’. It doesn’t matter how. One game we play well and that’s enough. In another game we’ve got to fight for it and defend and that’s enough. But we’ve got to bring the three points home. Over the last two years this has kind of been put aside out of a desire to do something different, thinking that you can change Juventus’ history. However, I believe — and I’ve spoken to Buffon and Chiellini about this — that Barcelona win in the way they do because that’s Barcelona’s history since the days of Johan Cruyff. Liverpool win in the way they do because that’s their history. At Juventus, we have our own history.”
When The Athletic asks if signing Cristiano Ronaldo subconsciously had the effect of making some Juventus players think he was enough on his own to win games, Bonucci concurs. “This was the thing,” he says. “The idea that one player, even the best in the world, could guarantee Juventus victory. Cristiano’s presence had a big influence on us. Just training with him gave us something extra but subconsciously players started to think his presence alone was enough to win games. We began to fall a little short in our daily work, the humility, the sacrifice, the desire to be there for your team-mate day after day. Over the last few years, I think you could see that.
“Last season, we finished fourth and won the Coppa Italia because we became a team again. If you had thrown a piece of wood in the dressing room before those games it would have caught fire such was the electricity running through it. We missed that. Maybe it was taken for granted that if we gave the ball to Cristiano he’d win us the game. But Cristiano needed the team as much as we needed him. There had to be a trade-off because it’s the team that lifts the individual even if the individual is the best player on the planet.”
Listening to Bonucci and how deeply he thinks about the game, it isn’t hard to imagine him going into coaching once his playing days are over. We discuss why Italian football is opening up and becoming more and more attacking when it could have followed the template set out by Jose Mourinho’s treble-winning Inter Milan side at the beginning of the last decade. Back in the 1960s when there was less exposure to what was going on in other leagues, the style of that team would have influenced others in Italy. But from 2010 onwards, Guardiola’s ideas have arguably proven a greater source of inspiration to emerging Italian coaches.
“The difference,” Bonucci says, “is that Mourinho’s Inter had the players to play that kind of football. He had tremendous quality in those 14 or 15 players who led the team to the treble. Italian football is changing because the quality of the players isn’t as high (in Serie A) as it was in the past, so coaches now have to put more of themselves into the team. On that theme, Guardiola brought through lots of players from Barcelona’s academy who nobody knew anything about. He had three or four top players and started to pass on his ideas to a number of players from the academy who had quality but weren’t ‘grandissimi’. They became great players over time.
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“Mourinho is a fantastic coach and motivator. But his football was based more on individuals. He had Samuel Eto’o, Diego Milito, Wesley Sneijder, Esteban Cambiasso, Javier Zanetti, Lucio, Walter Samuel, Maicon, Christian Chivu… his brilliance was in getting even more out of the very best players. In Italy right now there are lots of coaches who are trying to get ideas across. Vincenzo Italiano is doing a great job at Fiorentina. Roberto De Zerbi gave Sassuolo an identity that they have built on and maintained. Sarri’s ideas led Chelsea to win the Europa League and Juventus to another scudetto.
“There are lots of coaches with different philosophies whose ideas are having a real impact but this doesn’t make winners out of them. Everyone has their own ideas but in football, there isn’t an exact rule or a perfect idea that makes you win. Tuchel was fired by PSG and won the Champions League and the Super Cup with Chelsea in the space of six months. You’ve got to find the right mix of everything.”
While Chiellini attended the Italian Tech Week conference in Turin last week and listened to Agnelli’s cousin, John Elkann, discuss the future with Elon Musk, Bonucci was likely reviewing the teachable moments from his last training session. “I’ve been putting things down in a notebook for some time now,” Bonucci says. “I’ve been doing it since I got to know (former Juventus and Italy coach) Antonio Conte. He was a really important coach for me and changed my career with the mentality he gave me and the football knowledge he passed on. Since then I’ve tried to take something from every coach I’ve worked with. I’ve been lucky enough to work with some great ones too so that’s certainly helped.”
It won’t be long before he takes his coaching badges then. “Absolutely,” Bonucci laughs, “even if my wife (Martina) is against it and would like me at home more, I’d still love to go into coaching. Right now though I’m focused on the present.”
On Chelsea, on stopping Lukaku and making Juventus champions of Italy again.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Sam Richardson)
