Category: Italy Serie A

After spending big there was optimism in Florence, but their season has been a mess that may get worse

Daniele Pradè had described Fiorentina v Lecce as a “question of life or death”, but as the occasion approached he remembered football’s third option: you can always just walk away. On Saturday, a little more than 24 hours before this game was due to take place, he left his role as sporting director of the Viola by mutual consent.

The timing was a surprise, but not the decision. Fiorentina had made a shockingly poor start to the season, collecting four points from their first nine games, and Pradè was adamant that he alone should shoulder the blame. “The club put €90m at my disposal to build the team,” he pointed out last month. “If anyone is responsible for the current situation, it’s me.”

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• Lamine Yamal and Rashford on target in win over Elche

• Milan, Roma and Inter all a point behind leaders Napoli

Goals from Lamine Yamal, Ferran Torres and Marcus Rashford guided Barcelona to a 3-1 victory against Elche on Sunday, propelling the defending champions to second place in La Liga with 25 points, five adrift of the leaders, Real Madrid.

Looking to bounce back after their 2-1 defeat against Madrid in last weekend’s clásico, Barcelona wasted no time in asserting their dominance at Montjuïc’s Olympic Stadium. They made the most of two defensive errors by Elche in the opening minutes to grab a two-goal lead with strikes by Lamine Yamal and Torres in the ninth and 11th minutes.

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• Real Madrid 4-0 Valencia | Bayern Munich 3-0 Bayer Leverkusen

• Coach Patrick Vieira leaves Genoa by mutual consent

Kylian Mbappé netted twice as Real Madrid eased to a 4-0 victory over struggling Valencia, with Jude Bellingham and Alvaro Carreras also scoring to help the La Liga leaders claim their 13th win from 14 matches in all competitions.

The victory extended Real’s commanding lead, putting them seven points clear of second-placed Villarreal and eight ahead of third-placed Barcelona, who sit level with Atlético Madrid on 22 points but have a game in hand.

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Club’s winless streak finally ended on Wednesday against Udinese but a significant task awaits the next manager

It was an oddly coy way to announce Serie A’s first sacking this season. “Igor Tudor is no longer the manager of Juventus,” read the Turin club’s social media post on Monday – as though this had happened by accident or mutual consent. The Bianconeri had not, in fact, lost him down the back of the sofa, but instead relieved him of his duties after an eight-game winless run.

That was their longest dry stretch since 2009. Claudio Ranieri got the boot back then, and it was no surprise to see Tudor meet the same fate now. Juventus had failed to score a goal in his final four matches, culminating in a 1-0 loss to Lazio on Sunday night. “I’m living in the present,” he insisted afterward. “I don’t give a stuff about the future.” Yet it came for him the next day all the same.

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• Tudor departs after just seven months in the job

• Sunday’s defeat to Lazio was third loss in the last week

Juventus have sacked their head coach, Igor Tudor, after failing to win their last eight matches in all competitions, the Serie A club said on Monday.

“Juventus FC announces that it has today relieved Igor Tudor of his duties as coach of the men’s first team, along with his staff,” the Italian club said in a statement, a day after their 1-0 defeat to Lazio. Massimo Brambilla, head coach of the reserve team, will temporarily take over as the first team manager, the club added.

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Serie A’s best player last season showed his class against Inter despite his coach getting mouthy with former players

Scott McTominay could have been forgiven for a moment of self-pity after Napoli’s 6-2 defeat to PSV in the Champions League last week, a night when he scored twice and still wound up on the wrong end of a historic shellacking. Instead, he was the voice of reason.

While Antonio Conte debuted a new line of complaint, putting aside a career’s worth of laments about employers failing to back him in the transfer market to this time protest that Napoli had bought him too many new players, McTominay said simply: “It’s football. You have to take it on the chin.”

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• Juventus have not won since 13 September

• Roma win 1-0 at Sassuolo to keep pace with Napoli

Juventus lost 1-0 at Lazio in Serie A on Sunday to pile more pressure on their coach, Igor Tudor. The Bianconeri have not won in any competition since 13 September, when they defeated Inter 4-3, and they went a fourth successive match without scoring a goal as they lost in Rome.

A mistake from the Juventus forward Jonathan David led to Lazio’s goal in the ninth minute. The Canada international was deep in his own half and under no pressure when he headed the ball to the home side’s Danilo Cataldi, who laid it off to Toma Basic to drive into the bottom right corner.

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• Kimmich, Guerreiro and Karl capitalise on Castrop red

• De Bruyne off injured after scoring as Napoli beat Inter

Bayern Munich needed more than an hour before breaking the resistance of Borussia Mönchengladbach, to earn a 3-0 victory over opponents who spent more than 75% of the game with 10 men. It was the Bundesliga leaders’ 13th win in 13 matches across all competitions this season.

Joshua Kimmich slotted in after 64 minutes and the substitute Raphaël Guerreiro added another five minutes later before the teenager Lennart Karl, who had scored in their Champions League win over Club Brugge on Wednesday, made it 3-0 in the 81st. Bayern have a maximum 24 points from eight league matches, five ahead of RB Leipzig, 6-0 winners at Augsburg.

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Italy’s top clubs – and Real Madrid – watched as the Argentinian overshadowed Kenan Yildiz in battle of playmaking prodigies

The pre-game buzz had this as a showdown between two of world football’s most intriguing young No 10s, Como’s Nico Paz v Juventus’s Kenan Yildiz. A 21-year-old Argentina international whose dazzling debut campaign in Serie A persuaded Tottenham to make an unsuccessful €70m bid to buy him in the summer, taking on the 20-year-old trequartista with 25 appearances already for Turkey’s national team.

Fabio Capello could not pick between them, ranking Paz and Yildiz alongside Roma’s Matías Soulé as the finest “fantasisti” – artistic playmakers – in Serie A today. The newspaper Il Giornale played on the players’ shirt number and young age as they billed it as a battle “da ‘10’ (e lode)”. In the Italian academic system, a grade of 110 e lode (with honours) is the highest one can achieve.

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• Serie A: Como 2-0 Juventus, Milan 2-1 Fiorentina

• Juve now winless in six games in all competitions

Juventus lost 2-0 at Como in Serie A on Sunday, suffering another disappointing result after five successive draws in all competitions for Igor Tudor’s side.

Como took the lead in the fourth minute when the defender Marc-Oliver Kempf volleyed in from close range at the far post following Nico Paz’s curling cross. Juventus thought they had equalised in the 36th minute when Jonathan David slotted home from close range, but the Canadian’s effort was ruled out for offside in the buildup.

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• Kane scores as Bayern Munich beat Borussia Dortmund

• Barcelona edge Girona via Araújo’s stoppage-time winner

Harry Kane scored once and helped set up another as Bayern Munich battled past Borussia Dortmund 2-1 in the Bundesliga’s Klassiker to maintain their perfect start to the season with their seventh straight win. Bayern had to survive considerable second-half pressure from the visitors before making sure of their 11th win in 11 matches across all competitions.

They lead the Bundesliga race with 21 points, five ahead of second-placed RB Leipzig. Dortmund, who suffered their first loss in 10 matches across all competitions, dropped to fourth on 14. Kane gave the hosts a deserved lead when he scored his 12th league goal in seven matches with a glancing header from a Joshua Kimmich corner in the 22nd minute.

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• Como insist relocating Milan game ‘not a matter of greed’

• Italian side highlight gulf in revenues to Premier League

The Italian club Como have released a statement on their potential Serie A match against Milan in Australia, claiming that taking games abroad is about “ensuring survival” for the league.

Uefa has reluctantly given approval for the match – a home league fixture for Milan – to take place in Perth next February. In addition, Villarreal’s La Liga match against Barcelona in December is set to take place in Miami, Florida.

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A ‘more mature’ player after two seasons on loan, the winger is glad to be back and may be ready to live up to his potential

The Stadio Olimpico was not a happy place just after 3pm on Saturday afternoon. Lazio were losing at home to Torino, who had been outscored by their previous five league opponents by a combined 10 goals to two. Ultras from the Curva Nord were wrapping up the latest protest in their never-ending feud with the club’s owner, Claudio Lotito.

Was Lazio’s season coming unstitched, or had there never been a thread holding it together in the first place? They reappointed Maurizio Sarri as manager this summer, only for him to later acknowledge that the club had not mentioned the transfer ban they were about to receive for financial irregularities. Rumours that he might quit were unfounded, but he did say Lotito had “swindled” him.

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• Governing body says go-ahead shouldn’t set precedent

• Barcelona poised to play in US and Milan in Australia

Uefa has given its “reluctant” approval to Serie A and La Liga each playing a domestic game abroad this season. The decision clears a path for Barcelona and Villarreal to meet in Miami in December and for Milan and Como to play in Perth, Australia, in February.

Uefa said in a statement that it had “reiterated its clear opposition to domestic league matches being played outside their home country” but that because “the relevant Fifa regulatory framework – currently under review – is not clear and detailed enough, the Uefa Executive Committee has reluctantly taken the decision to approve, on an exceptional basis, the two requests referred to it”.

The move comes after the Italian and Spanish football federations applied for those matches to be played abroad. Uefa said its national associations had agreed to engage with it before submitting any future requests.

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Genoa’s England Under-21s full-back on his coach in Serie A and the card game that helped make Lee Carsley’s side European champions

If there was a secret to the togetherness among the England Under-21s players as they retained their European title this summer then Brooke Norton-Cuffy may have let it slip: a card game called Werewolf. Introduced to the senior England camp during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, it pits a small informed group called the wolves against the uninformed majority known as the villagers as they attempt to deceive each other to win, in a format similar to the popular TV show The Traitors.

“We were playing every night,” says Norton-Cuffy. “It really helped us bond because you get to know people. In this day and age when everyone can be on their phones, you sit down, you have a laugh, you have a joke … the group was really, really tight, everyone was together, and you saw that on the pitch when we ended up going and winning it.”

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