Habemus calendarium! After a long wait, seasoned with the inevitable controversies, Italian football has finally drawn up the roadmap which, Covid permitting, will award the Scudetto, places in Europe and relegations. As expected it will be there Coppa Italia to open the dances, with semifinals (Juventus-Milan on 12 June, Napoli-Inter on the 13th) and final (June 17) in less than a week: a way to get off to a great start, but also, if not above all, to award the trophy and thus get rid of the first headache.
In fact, the risk of suspension will hover until the end, unless the Technical-Scientific Committee decides to soften on the quarantine issue, so much so that the FIGC is already working on the plans B (playoffs/playouts) e C (a strange algorithm that finds no consensus anywhere).
Better think positive and focus on this crazy calendar, well done 124 games in 44 days: a real tour de force, made inevitable by UEFA's desire to requisition August for the cups. It starts with the recoveries of the 25th day (Turin-Parma, Verona-Cagliari, Atalanta-Sassuolo and Inter-Sampdoria), after which, with all the teams finally equal, off to the dance with the 28th. It will be played every day, because Sky and DAZN, in an attempt to recover part of the television industry, have asked for (and obtained) the widest possible spread. Most of the matches will take place in the evening between 19.30pm and 21.45pm, while only a small part will be staged at 17.15, however never during the week.
We come to the big matches, the ones that will inevitably captivate the majority of viewers. The first is Atalanta-Lazio on 24 June (21.45), followed by Milan-Roma (June 28, 17.15 pm), Lazio v AC Milan (July 4, 21.45), Napoli-Roma (July 6, 21.45), Milan-Juventus (July 7, 21.45), Napoli-Milan (July 12, 21.45), Roma-Inter (July 19, 21.45) and, above all, Juventus-Lazio, possible championship final (Inter permitting, of course) on Monday 20 July (21.45).
We will only know the rest of the film in some time, given that the League has rightly decided to postpone the advances and postponements of the last 3 days until late summer, when the criterion of contemporaneity will be the master. Difficult to predict how things will go, even why the forced stop of over 3 months (longest since WWII) completely shuffled the cards. The teams that were better in terms of physical condition (Lazio and Atalanta above all) may no longer have the same polish, as well as find themselves benefiting from a sprint that is as short as it is intense.
It is clear that long squads will make the difference, especially in a championship which, barring second thoughts from the government, will not have the home factor, debased by the inevitable closed doors. In short, the feeling is that Juventus are the favourites, if only because of the depth of his schedule, decidedly longer than that of its competitors, but it's better not to shout it too loud: football is already unpredictable in itself, let alone this unprecedented novelty that we are about to experience...
