Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing – Juventus’ quest for European domination

Jose Mourinho managed against Juventus in the Derby d’Italia for two years. He managed Real Madrid for three years and, fractiously as it ended, might be expected to support the favourites in the Champions League final. Judging by his words after the Europa League final, he might be cheering on Juventus. “There are lots of poets in football but poets, they don't win many titles,” said the Portuguese. The Manchester United manager has a poet’s ability to conjure a memorable phrase and a pragmatist’s view of football.

And Juventus should be the pragmatists’ choice in Cardiff. There is romance in the 39-year-old Gianluigi Buffon’s bid to finally add the Champions League to the World Cup he won 11 years ago, in his third final and after 16 years in Turin, but otherwise they deal in prose, not poetry.

That is no criticism. There can seem a timelessness about Juventus, and their age-defying defence in particular, but they can also seem a team out of time, one whose guiding principles make them the antidote to their contemporaries.

They are not defined by passing or pressing. Instead, their focus on defending makes them look an anachronism when, among their Champions League rivals this season, only Atletico Madrid seem to have a remotely similar emphasis on keeping the ball out of the net. When others gaze far into the future, there is a short-termism about Juventus. They signed the 33-year-old Dani Alves last summer. They paid a club record €90 million for Gonzalo Higuain, a fee they will never recoup for a man who has since turned 29. They prioritised the immediate in a bid to win the Champions League. They are 90 minutes from succeeding.

Seven of the players who started in either leg of the semi-final against Monaco are in their thirties. Higuain will soon join them. Juventus do not promise to dominate European football for a generation. But the last Serie A side to become Champions League winners was Mourinho’s ageing Inter group in 2010, for whom five thirty-somethings and three 29-year-olds began the final. The Portuguese was not planning for the long term – or not at Inter, anyway, because he promptly decamped to Real – but without such short-termism, Inter would probably still have not conquered Europe since 1965.

That Inter side, like this Juventus team, can reflect the lack of ageism that is a feature of Italian football. A greater premium can be placed on experience, when it is allied with positional discipline and tactical nous, in Serie A; the slower pace of play allows the savvy to extend their careers for longer.

They are underpinned by common sense. They have concentrated on their own strengths. When others get carried away trying to copy Barcelona, Juventus have remained impervious to the influence of tiki-taka. In an era when everyone else has been confronted by the problem that they do not have Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, they have formulated their own, old-fashioned answer. They do not outgun their peers. They man the barricades with greater diligence instead. They went 690 minutes without conceding in the Champions League before Kylian Mbappe’s semi-final strike for Monaco. If, as received wisdom suggests, the hardest thing in football is scoring a goal, Juventus perfected the simpler side of the game with practised, pragmatic diligence.

Emblematic figures abound in their unfashionable, effective approach. Juventus may be that rarity in modern football, a team where the goalkeeper is the star. Unlike Real, they may not have the world’s best forward, but they do possess arguably its finest centre-back, in Leonardo Bonucci. Alves is the serial winner a club with five successive Serie A titles recruited to make them still likelier trophy gatherers.

And yet, in his own way, Higuain may reveal the most. Not because of his mediocre scoring record in the Champions League’s knockout stages, but because he is the least flashy player to have a Galactico’s price tag. His waistline may make him a throwback, but so did his scoring exploits when he equalled Gino Rossetti's 87-year-old record for most goals in a Serie A season. Signing the best player from the second strongest team in the league was the most ruthless, most hard-headed and most logical of steps to secure Serie A. Compared to most of the other costliest transfers ever, it was not a deal to generate commercial partnerships or spark shirt sales. It was a footballing choice. Higuain deals in the cold, hard currency of goals.

Juventus leave flights of fancy to others, perhaps to those unnamed poets Mourinho scorned for their supposed lack of silverware. Should they triumph in Cardiff, they may not be remembered as the most exciting, most stylish Champions League winners but a team who have already eliminated Barcelona without conceding will have prevailed with the aid of pure pragmatism. But at its heart, football is not about showbusiness or ideological invention. It is about winning, and Juventus have shown greater clarity of thought than anyone else in recognising that.

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