The Serie A Title Race
This season has felt like the revival of Italian football as Inter Milan, one of the historically most successful Italian clubs, are back in contention for silverware and the Serie A title race is split three ways.
This has come after years of Juventus’ comfortable reign, with the only exception being the 2017/18 season when Napoli took them to the wire but ultimately fell short.
The Serie A has therefore been branded a one team league and has been under a lot of scrutiny in recent years.
What wasn’t helping Italian football’s cause was the Italian national team being so underwhelming and even failing to make the 2018 World Cup.
The league lacking its previously very competitive nature as well as a much weaker national side compared to what we had seen in the past, resulted in Italian football hitting rock bottom.
Domination: Juventus have won the last 8 Serie A titles consecutively.
The Resurgence
The resurgence of the Italian league has unsurprisingly come hand in hand with vast improvements of the national team.
It started in 2018 when Roberto Mancini became the Italian National Team manager and he’s done a brilliant job ever since, leading Italy to Euro 2020 qualification with three games to spare.
Earlier that same year, Italian football was in its darkest place and so the transformation was very impressive.
Now I know this can’t be directly linked with the Serie A becoming more competitive but a lot of key players in the Italian squad do play in the Italian league. For example, Ciro Immobile is top scorer in Serie A for a Lazio side that is challenging for the title alongside Inter Milan and Juventus.
There are also a handful of AC Milan players in the Italian squad and despite having a poor first half of the season, since Pioli was appointed, they’ve started to look like a side that could challenge for silverware again in future years.
Donnarumma is one of those Milan players who has become an established member of the Italian National Team over recent years.
The most encouraging thing of all though is that it really feels like the Serie A is back on the map. It’s produced standout games which have brought the sort of attention the league used to get on a regular basis.
The game of the season to date was the Milan derby last weekend, it was a compelling affair and a great advert for Italian football. Inter won 4-2 having comeback from 2-0 down at half-time - but that isn’t half of the story.
The game had everything.
From Ibrahimovic rolling back the years by setting up the first goal and then scoring the second, to an Eriksen free-kick from 40 yards out that hit the crossbar and left Donnarumma helpless.
The game was exciting, end to end and most importantly got a lot of publicity.
To me it really felt like Serie A finally being back at its best. The league has the potential to become a global phenomenon like it once was.
New Inter signing Christian Eriksen was inches away from scoring his first goal for Inter from a 40-yard Free-Kick attempt.
Inter Milan
Conte at Inter has done a great job and their style of play reminds me a lot of Mourinho’s time at the club.
Defensively, Conte’s Inter are hard to breakdown and in attack they are ruthless, making them a very hard team to beat.
It’s also evident that he’s taken a lot from his time in the Premier League, as he’s primarily looked to England to make his signings and so far, they’ve all been successful.
Since departing from Manchester United, Lukaku has taken his game to the next level and has been prolific.
Lukaku recently became Inter’s fastest player to reach 20 goals in the club’s history.
Despite again being plagued by injuries, when he has played Sanchez has looked sharp and the January signings of Moses, Young and Eriksen have all made good early impressions.
They find themselves joint top with Juventus on 54 points after 23 games but are just the point ahead of Lazio.
I think Juventus are still the favourites because of their experience of being in this situation and overcoming it, but Inter are a force to be reckoned with and if Eriksen can get back to his best, anything is possible.
Juventus
Sarri’s first season as Juventus manager has been a mixed one and similarly to his time at Chelsea, I think he’s made some odd decisions.
He is clearly an intelligent man and a charismatic manager, and he was the man behind Napoli’s title challenge during the 2017/18 season, but I’m still unconvinced by him.
Ronaldo is currently saving Juventus week after week and for his age he’s having a remarkably good season, so keeping him onside should be top of Sarri’s agenda. However, you can see their relationship breaking down and I don’t get the impression that Ronaldo is in awe of him like he was of Sir Alex Ferguson and to an extent Zidane.
There have already been tensions with the two as Sarri subbed Ronaldo off in two consecutive games and Ronaldo didn’t react well to it at all. There’s been nothing publicly said but you can tell a lot from body language and even in Ronaldo’s recent hot run, there has been nothing to suggest he respects Sarri.
35-year-old talisman Cristiano Ronaldo is having a solid season, having scored 20 goals in 20 games across all competitions for the Old Lady.
The biggest call the Italian has made and, in my opinion, the worst one he could make, is side-lining Dybala who had previously been the clubs star player.
As great as Ronaldo’s signing appears to be on the surface, bringing in a player of his stature only works if he has good chemistry with the rest of the attacking players and helps them enhance their game.
When you have a player of Dybala’s quality and one of the all-time best players in Ronaldo in the same team, I think it’s important to get them playing together each week so that they can build up that understanding and connection.
When Dybala has played this season, he’s shown moments of magic and he’s reminded everyone of why he was so highly rated in the first place. Therefore, it really does baffle me that Sarri is overlooking him and was even happy to let him go last summer.
Lazio
This has been one of the surprises of the season, after finishing in a mediocre 8th last season, Lazio have slowly found themselves in a title challenge and it’s really starting to build momentum.
They are the most in form team out of the three title hopefuls and so their fans will be starting to believe that this really could be their year.
Their next game is against Inter Milan which is a massive match in the title race, but if they were to win then they would leapfrog Inter in the table and have so much more confidence going into the reminder of the season.
The other advantage they have over their rivals is that whilst Juventus are one of the favourites to win the Champions League and Inter are one of the favourites to win the Europa League, Lazio don’t have any European distractions anymore after getting knocked out of the Europa League in the group stages.
The form of Immobile is critical to them though as he’s been the club’s main source of goals with 25 already in the league this season.
Their next highest scorer is Caicedo with just 8 goals. so it’s evident that Lazio do heavily rely on their number 9.
It would be an unlikely title and quite a remarkable one considering the strength of both Inter and Juventus and the considerably cheaper squad Lazio have in comparison to them.
Ciro Immobile’s 25 goals in Serie A this season have resulted in Lazio mounting a title challenge, amongst being the second highest scoring team this season.
Article by: Harry Dunnett
Edited by: Samuel Slaney
Thumbnail by: Samuel Slaney
Images from: Getty Images & Footy Renders