Red-blue hair and Mourinho hype – seven highlights in Serie A.

1. Milena gets to go to football again

59-year-old Milena Masala is a bit of a local celebrity in Sardinia, as one of Cagliari’s most colorful supporters for several decades. She usually dyes her hair in the club’s red and blue colors.

She suffered from covid-19 this spring and was hospitalized for 88 days. Her hair faded, she missed the end of the season.

– To see if I would react, they told me that Cagliari had gone down in Serie B. I put on an incredible scene, says she to L’Unione Sarda.

Now she’s healthy. And the Serie A arenas will be filled with spectators again, right now to a maximum of 50 percent. Finally, it will be real football, not pandemic football.

– I will dye my hair again, but I long to return to the arena. Cagliari needs my support, says Milena Masala.

2. Cristiano Ronaldo’s magnificent fuzziness

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This spring, Juventus were beaten by Inter after winning the league nine years in a row. The bet on the inexperienced Andrea Pirlo as coach was abandoned, and now it is Massimiliano Allegri who will gather the Turin team and make them start winning again.

Among others, Swedish Dejan Kulusevski is part of that project. How superstar Cristiano Ronaldo thrives in the white-black stripes is unclear.

While big players like Romelu Lukaku, Achraf Hakimi and Gianluigi Donnarumma left Serie A this summer, the Portuguese has remained. But speculation about a move is not lacking. The other day he posted an indignant posts on Instagram about the lack of respect in the writings about his future. However, he did not clarify anything. The text contained a detailed declaration of love for Real Madrid, but Juventus was not mentioned.

3. Eriksen, Kjær and the European Championship feeling

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No one still knows if Christian Eriksen will be able to play in Inter, or play professional football at all, after the cardiac arrest in this summer’s European Championships. But in Milan’s back line, Simon Kjær continues, who was such a wise teammate when Eriksen collapsed.

The Danes are not the only Serie A players reminiscent of the European Championships, where not least Italy played exuberant championship football. 20 players from Italian clubs were behind 37 goals in the championship, no other league beats it.

If, for example, more Danes have been discovered, such as Mikkel Damsgaard and Joakim Mæhle, they will be found in Sampdoria and Atalanta. The latter team is crowded with European Championship players, among them the German shooting star Robin Gosens. Juventus have veteran full-backs Giorgio Chiellini and Leonardo Bonucci, Federico Chiesa rushes to the edge and the club has just recruited European Championship successful player Manuel Locatelli.

4. Mourinho in the middle of the coaching carousel

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José Mourinho is perhaps on his way to becoming a forerunner in the rest of the world – in Italy he is still super special. It is not possible to exaggerate how big the hype is in Rome around the star coach since Roma recruited him. It can be a success, or a crash from a very high altitude.

The Portuguese is hardly the only one who will make his mark on a new team in Italy this autumn. Only Milan and Atalanta have their coaches left since last season.

In Naples, for example, Luciano Spalletti has taken over from Gennaro Gattuso, who first moved to Fiorentina but resigned after 23 days. At Inter, Antonio Conte has left and Simone Inzaghi has arrived from Lazio. The light blue Roma club has instead recruited former Napoli, Chelsea and Juve coach Maurizio Sarri.

5. Zlatan turns 40

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The biggest Swedish anticlimax of the 2020s must be that Zlatan Ibrahimovic returned to the national team this spring and then disappeared again. In Serie A we will now see him play, and it will probably be worth taking advantage of those opportunities. For how many more will they be?

There is not much information about his knee injury, but he underwent surgery last summer and it seems that it will take a couple of matches into the season before he is ready.

Maybe he will have time to get started before his 40th birthday on October 3. It should be the last chapter for Zlatan Ibrahimovic as a football player, the greatest Sweden has had, which begins then.

6. Attackmaskinen Atalanta

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It’s blowing around Atalanta. The team’s former key player and team captain Alejandro “Papu” Gómez has in a series of interviews in recent days talked about why he was frozen out and then sold to Sevilla last winter.

According to the Argentine, coach Gian Piero Gasperini tried to attack him physically, Gasperini says it was the opposite. However, both the club and the player seem to agree that he had to leave because he did not obey the coach’s tactical instructions.

The point for Atalanta is perhaps that the team seems to function just as well oiled regardless of which players leave or what happens in the world off the field. One cog is replaced by another and they drive on with their catchy attacking football. This year, some talk about the success team of recent years as an outsider candidate for the league title.

7. An arena on water and the shirt everyone wants

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Can you get a place with a football pitch among Venice’s canals? Yes indeed. Venice’s Stadio Pierluigi Penzo in the middle of the unique city center is the second oldest arena in this year’s Serie A, built in 1913, and can only be reached by boat or on foot.

Since then-president Maurizio Zamparini sold the club 19 years ago and brought the coach and twelve players to Palermo, Venezia has gone through three bankruptcies. But in recent years, the club has moved up, and this summer went up in the top series again.

Venezia has invested heavily in fashion, and when the season’s jersey with the unusual orange, green and black colors was released, it sold out in hours.

Venezia FC’s renaissance has given a new pride to a city that risks fading under the pressure of tourism and climate crisis, and one of the football world’s perhaps most beautiful match experiences a new scene.

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