The Andrea Pirlo era at Juventus has officially begun

Juventus’ understandably short summer vacation is now a thing of the past.

With the start of the new work week starts a brand news season for the nine-time defending Italian champions. And with the arrival of a new seasons means that Juventus’ new manager, Andrea Pirlo, and his new coaching staff is now officially on the job. Like, actually on the job in the fact that he will begin training the team he is now in charge of rather than posing for pictures in front of the Italian media that has assembled outside of J Medical.

It also meant Juventus’ players, maybe with a new haircut and a nice tan after a few weeks on the beach somewhere, were back in Turin and ready to go for their first training session with their new manager. (And, for a small group of Juve’s group, to see an old friend and former teammate now calling the shots.)

As reported by Juventus’ official website, Matthijs de Ligt was not in attendance seeing as he had shoulder surgery on his 21st birthday earlier this month. Same goes for Paulo Dybala, who continues to rehab after reaggrivating the thigh injury that was clearly still bothering him when Juventus was dumped out of the Champions League Round of 16 by Lyon.

Everybody else you expected to be there was there.

A few takeaways from the above video:

• Of course Carlo Pinsoglio is wearing super-tight white jeans when he shows up to Continassa.
• The look on Dejan Kulusevski’s face when Andrea Pirlo shakes his hand might have been all of our faces if we had the chance to shake Pirlo’s hand for the first time.
• I’m going to pretend that Pirlo walked over to Adrien Rabiot and told him that he no longer has the best-looking hair at the club.
• It must be kinda weird for Mattia Perin to be back at Juventus (again) knowing full well that he has no future at the club and will certainly be playing football elsewhere in a couple of weeks.
• This very much had the first day of school kind of vibe — you meet the new teachers, see some buddies you haven’t talked to or seen in a few weeks and did some work, but not exactly any kind of heavy lifting. Knowing that Juve’s had just a couple of weeks off following the end of the Serie A season, it will be pretty interesting to see just how hard Pirlo pushes them before the season starts next month.