We’ve seen plenty of instances of starting off the new season with a couple of wins and then a disappointing result that probably shouldn’t have happened. We all remember those back-to-back 3-0 wins under Thiago Motta last season before the seemingly million or two draws kicked in, right? It’s a winning start we’ve seen before.
But winning your first three games of the new season like Juventus have now done thanks to Saturday’s wild 4-3 victory over Inter Milan in the Derby d’Italia? That’s something
we haven’t seen in a while.
Like back to the Max Allegri days kind of a while. Or, better yet, the Allegri 1-0 days.
As ilbianconero.com noted on Sunday, Juventus winning their first three games of a new campaign is something that hasn’t happened since Allegri’s final season at the club following his appointment to replace the sudden preseason departure of Antonio Conte. In that season, the 2018-19 campaign, Allegri wins over Chievo, Lazio and then Parma, the beginnings of a run to start the year that included victories in the first eight games and 16 of their first 17 as Juventus rolled to their fifth straight Serie A title under Allegri and eighth overall that decade between Antonio Conte and the man who took over for him after his sudden preseason departure.
Now, over half a decade later under Igor Tudor, Juve have recorded season-opening wins against Parma and then Genoa before the first international break, with the three goals that Inter scored in Saturday’s first Derby d’Italia of the season snapping the Bianconeri’s shutout streak to open the new campaign.
Following Sunday’s results, Juventus are level on points with their old boss Conte, as he’s got his title defense at Napoli off to a strong start with three straight wins of their own. Napoli — who have wins over Sassuolo, Cagliari and most recently Fiorentina on Saturday night — are sitting ahead of Juventus only due to a better goal differential.
Of course, these three wins to begin the 2025-26 season have all been different kinds of wins that Tudor’s squad have maneuvered their way through. The season-opening win over Parma was one in which they were in control for much of the time. The next weekend was a total grind-fest at the Marassi in which they needed some Dusan Vlahovic heroics off the bench to get the three points. And, well, the Derby d’Italia was the kind of roller coaster ride that we hadn’t really seen since the first Juve-Inter matchup last season, if not longer than that.
It’s all added up to Tudor and Juventus having a three-game winning run to start a new season in which expectations — at least from the outside — were somewhat tempered knowing what had gone on just a few months earlier. But if this is the early-season momentum that Tudor needed to get his team really believing in things, then three straight wins that include a big, comeback win over your most hated rival is a good way to go about it.
