It’s been 37 long days. Thirty-seven long days since Juventus last won a game in Serie A. As we are well aware of, a whole lot of badness has happened over the course of those 37 days, and it has drastically changed the scope of the final two-plus months of the 2025-26 season for Luciano Spalletti and his players.
But Juventus’ winless run in Serie A will end at 37 days.
Thank goodness, right? And it just so happened to come to an end on a day in which Spalletti officially turned another year older.
Juventus rang in Spalletti’s 67th birthday with about as good of a second-half response that we could have asked for after an opening 45 minutes in which the Bianconeri weren’t overly convincing. Spalletti was the trigger man of it all, making two very good substitutions and shifting Kenan Yildiz into the false 9 position in which we’ve seen him appear in to varying degrees of success so far this season. But on this night, not only did Spalletti’s tactical switch change things for the better, it allowed Juventus to absolutely curb stomp a Pisa side that is bound for relegation, score four second-half goals and roll to a 4-0 win at the Allianz Stadium on Saturday night that the Bianconeri their first Serie A win in over a month.
In the first half, Spalletti looked like a man who was not having a very enjoyable birthday.
But the second half, that tenor definitely changed, and it just so happened that his players were the ones who were coming over to him after almost every goal that they scored there to celebrate right alongside the well-dressed birthday boy.
The best part of the second half besides the obvious fact that it allowed Juventus to win? You see the changes Spalletti made, you see them put them into action, you saw Andrea Cambiaso score the opening goal on a brilliant assist from Yildiz and then you just saw the team continue to push forward and barely let Pisa do anything of note as the Juve lead only grew larger and larger over the course of the subsequent 20 or so minutes.
That’s a good sign from a club who desperately needed three points in front of their home crowd. There was no scrambling to get points against one of the worst team in the league. There was no extreme number of shots taken and no goals happening despite all of the chances. Did Juve smoke a couple of big chances in the first half? Yeah, probably. But the second half was a completely different story. Juventus created plenty, finished a good number of those chances, barely allowed anything in the defensive third of the field and completely ran away with it.
How little?
Pisa had one shot total in the second half. One! They had an xG of 0.06. It was a 14-1 advantage on shots in the second half. Juventus made the most of all the possession they had — which wasn’t something we could say in the first half as they had plenty of the ball but were clearly lacking the killer punch to actually put their chances away.
But Spalletti’s reaction right out of the half clearly worked. Yildiz as a false 9 hasn’t always been the key to unlock Juventus’ attacking struggles. So on this night, against a Pisa team that hasn’t won in months, the switch did turn things for the better — and then some.
It’s been a while since Juventus lost won a Serie A game. Maybe not as long as Pisa — and that is a really long time for that club to have last claimed three points — but for a club like Juventus to go over a month without a win in Serie A is nothing short of a major development that brings expected doom.
Thankfully, it’s now a thing of the past. And with Como winning earlier in the day on Saturday, we knew that the best Juventus could do is be in the same place in the standings in which they started. That’s the problem with being one of the chasers — you can only move up if you get the help. Juve may or may not get help this weekend, but at least they did what they can control, and that’s to get the win and the three points.
Now they get to rest up and go again next weekend because getting into fourth place is the only thing this team has left to play for this season.
RANDOM THOUGHTS AND OBSERVATIONS
- Winning, and winning rather comfortably? What is this nonsense?
- Oh, right. This is what you need to do against relegation battlers. Or, in this case, a team that is likely to get relegated. The sooner you can put them away and choke out any sense of hope, the better. Sure, it took until early in the second half for that to happen, but Juve did exactly as we hoped — get the three points and do it with some room to sare.
- Juventus are now 1-0 when Mario Mandzukic stops by the Allianz this season. Miss you, buddy.
- After that first-half performance from Jonathan David, it had me wondering “You think Mario’s got 20 or 30 minutes in his legs today?”
- I want it to work with David so much. I really, really do. And not just because he’s a CONCACAF guy and I sit here in a CONCACAF country as I type this. But just because he’s shown to be a good player. He hasn’t been a good player at Juventus, though, and you’re starting to wonder if it will fully click for him in Turin now that we’re at the point in the season where there’s 10 games to go. That early 2026 groove he looked to be finding just isn’t there anymore and it looks like he’s back to the same striker who was running low on confidence in the first half of the season. That’s not what you want when you’re trying to get back to fourth place and a Champions League spot.
- Cambiaso has more goals since the start of February than David does. That’s not good!
- Although, it was a good sight to see Cambiaso scoring in the correct goal once again. Is there some sass attached to that? Yes, but it remains true considering the season he has had.
- Low bar, sure, but that really was one of Cambiaso’s best games in a long time. That’s good because Juve really do need him to be a positive influence on games again knowing their other options at fullback.
- So is Mattia Perin Juventus’ new starting goalkeeper? They do say that three of something in a consecutive order is a trend, and Perin has now started three games in a row. Spalletti hasn’t really given many clues as to this, so the only real signal we have is who he actually chooses to start when the lineups are announced. Lately, that has been Perin — and seems like there’s no changing that for the time being.
- Pisa outshooting Juventus by a 4-1 margin in the opening 10 minutes. Just as we all expected.
- Francesco Coppola, a former Juventus youth product, was starting on the left side of Pisa’s defense. That young man has a wonderful head of hair on him.
- The thing I loved most about Yildiz’s goal was just how cool he was about it all. He shakes his defender out of his boots to clear some shooting space, the shot is about as perfectly placed as you can get and his reaction to it is that he knows it’s a goal the moment it leaves his foot. It had been a decent amount of time since Yildiz’s last goal, too — which made it all the better to see him get that off his list of things to do since signing his big new contract.
- Plus, like I said, that assist to Cambiaso on Juventus’ first goal of the night was just so good, too.
- Jérémie Boga with two goals in two games. He’s shaking off the rust after not playing for two months for very unfortunate reasons he was caught up in. If he continues to shake off that rust and be a solid option off the bench for Spalletti the rest of the season, the option to make his move to Turin a permanent one feels like an easy pick up for Juve’s front office. Like really, really easy. You just aren’t going to find solid depth for that kind of price in 2026.
- By the way, that pass from Manuel Locatelli on Boga’s goal was a thing of beauty. Good to see the old Sassuolo teammates reconnect for a pretty sweet cherry on top of a great second half.
- Not that it’s breaking news, but this game was another reminder that as much as we love Gleison Bremer, he does not have the passing range of a certain Leonardo Bonucci. Respect for attempting some very progressive passes but they just weren’t working. That’s not Bremer’s game.
- Am I surprised that Khephren Thuram was the likely ring leader of Juve players going over to Spalletti to celebrate with him after the second goal? No, not at all. He just seems like the kind of menace in that good kind of way — and it’s no wonder his teammates love him for it.
- Chico Conceição was rather lively — and that’s a good thing. Juve need consistency from him now more than ever as they look for some creativity and production opposite of Yildiz in attack.
- Thank God this team won. I don’t know how I would have dealt with writing this if they had dropped poitns against one of the worst teams in the league and one that is destined to be playing in Serie B next season.
