Report: Max Allegri wants Andrea Barzagli to be part of his coaching staff

One of the most natural things to wonder whenever a club like Juventus brings in a high-profile manager like Max Allegri is what the roster is going to look like. You only naturally go there because of what Juve’s roster currently is, what the current time of the year it happens to be and the fact that Allegri is very much a different kind of manager as the two guys before him.

But there’s also this: What is Allegri’s coaching staff going to look like?

We at least have an idea of one person he’s thinking to bring aboard. And like so many of the other Allegri-influenced rumors over the last few days, it’s a name we know well.

According to Goal Italia’s Romeo Agresti, Allegri would like to bring former Juventus defender Andrea Barzagli back to the club as an assistant coach. Coaching at Juventus wouldn’t be something that’s new to Barzagli — he was an assistant as part of Maurizio Sarri’s coaching staff, namely tasked with the terzino-ing of Juan Cuadrado and coaching up the Colombian. Barzagli, however, left Sarri’s staff amid the COVID-19 lockdown in Italy citing personal and family reasons, but one has to think that his positive relationship with Allegri at a club he knows so well will be quite the right environment to begin his coaching career in earnest.

Within his report about Barzagli, Agresti makes it sound like there’s a pretty good chance of Barzagli coming back to Turin as an assistant on Allegri’s coaching staff. While his potential role isn’t defined, one would think he would be working in the same kind of role he had under Sarri with the defenders. And, maybe most important of all, the fact that he’s had a little over a year away from the club seems to have done plenty of good knowing what the world was like when he stepped away in May 2020.

To do so with a manager that he clearly has a quality working relationship with, too? That just seems like the perfect kind of situation to give this coaching thing another go of it. We know the man has plenty of things to teach simply because of how good of a player he was and what kind of playing style he had. Now it’s just about doing so under this manager, one that respected him quite a bit as a player and now obviously holds Barzagli in high enough regard in his post-playing career to want to give him this chance.