With Juventus players coming back from their respective holiday vacations, there’s one thing you expected to see besides training photos considering the state of the world we’re living in right now — a couple of positive COVID-19 tests coming to light.
On Friday, we got that.
Juventus announced that Brazilian midfielder Arthur and No. 3 goalkeeper Carlo Pinsoglio have tested positive for COVID-19 and have gone into isolation. Per Juve’s announcement, “The aforementioned players are already observing the regulations and have been placed in solitary confinement, in compliance with the health protocol in force.” They are the first two players to test positive for the coronavirus since players came back for training, and are the first Juve players to get COVID since Adrien Rabiot tested positive over the last international break of the calendar year.
COVID-19 | First team players test positive.https://t.co/j0MV1gOajT pic.twitter.com/6TksydIBEj
— JuventusFC (@juventusfcen) December 31, 2021
Arthur and Pinsoglio are Juventus’ first two senior team players to test positive during this post-holiday break round of testing. Juventus’ Under-23 team has seen a handful of players test positive, including players who have recently gotten call-ups to the senior team like Matias Soulé, Koni De Winter and Fabio Miretti. Juventus Women has also seen about a third of its roster test positive over the last two weeks, with some of them starting to be allowed out of isolation after going through the correct protocols.
Giorgio Chiellini, meanwhile, has also been in quarantine after coming in direct contact with somebody who has recently tested positive for COVID.
None of this should come as a surprise knowing that players went all the place to find some warmer weather during the final days of 2021. Combine that with how the new omicron variant is currently ripping through Europe and other parts of the world right now — seriously, just go look at Italy’s COVID curve — and Juve were bound to get bitten at some point soon.
There could be others who test positive. There may be nobody else. But you know for damn sure that with the fact that Juve’s month of January is so incredibly important that it wouldn’t be a surprise that the current protocols are being reminded to just about everybody at JTC Continassa.
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