Juventus

Juventus are the most successful club in Italian football and, not unrelatedly, the most resented. To their own they are La Vecchia Signora, the Old Lady, and the closest thing Italy has to a national institution: owned by the Agnelli family, the dynasty behind Fiat, for over a hundred years, followed all down the peninsula, especially in the south, by people who never lived near Turin. To everyone else they are the establishment club, the team that always seems to win and always seems to have the referees' ear. Both readings are earned, and a matchday sits inside that tension.

The winning is the easy half. Somewhere around thirty-six league titles, a conveyor belt of great sides, and a shirt, "Fino alla fine," to the end, that they now wear on the collar. The harder half is Calciopoli, and it's worth getting right because casual accounts get it wrong. In 2006 wiretaps revealed Juventus's general manager in regular contact with the officials who assigned referees. The club was relegated to Serie B, docked points, and stripped of two league titles. But, and this is the part usually lost, no actual match-fixing was ever established; the offence was influence over who refereed, not proof of rigged results, and the season itself was later ruled legitimate. Juventus were also punished far more harshly than the other clubs caught up in it, which is why, twenty years on, a lot of Juventus fans still treat the whole thing as a set-up rather than fair punishment. They won Serie B comfortably and came straight back. You do not need to take a side, but you should know the argument is live, because it colours how the rest of Italy sees this club.

The ground reflects the modern, corporate Juventus. In 2011 they opened the Allianz Stadium, the first ground in Italy built and owned by a major club, on the site of the vast old Stadio delle Alpi they'd shared and hated. It's small by giant-club standards, about forty-one thousand, but steep, close to the pitch and genuinely loud when it wants to be, closer in feel to an English ground than the running-track bowls most Italian clubs still play in. Building it, and owning it, was a statement about being a modern European business, not just a football club.

Getting there

Be clear on this before you plan the day: the stadium is not in the middle of Turin. It's out in the Continassa district, roughly six kilometres northwest of the historic centre, and it is not a walk from your hotel. The city's transport authority runs a reinforced matchday service, a bus route marked "9/" that starts a couple of hours before kickoff and runs to about forty-five minutes after the final whistle, linking the ground back to the main Porta Nuova station and connecting with the metro at Bernini. Otherwise it's the metro to Massaua and a bus, one of the direct bus lines, or a taxi that'll run you around twenty euros from the centre in normal traffic. Budget real time each way, and expect the return leg to bottleneck at the metro interchange.

Making a day of it

Reset your expectations: an Italian matchday is not a pub crawl, and the fact that the ground is six kilometres out kills any idea of a dense cluster of pre-match bars around it. There is essentially one spot worth knowing right by the stadium, Linopassamilvino, directly opposite, which does grilled arrosticini skewers and beer and works as a meeting point. Beyond that, the ground is ringed by car parks and the Area12 shopping complex, not a bar scene.

The real pre-match and post-match life is in the centre, disconnected in time and place from the walk to the turnstiles, which is normal for Italy. Turin invented the aperitivo as a commercial ritual and takes it seriously: a vermouth, both Martini and Cinzano were born here, or a bicerin, the city's own layered chocolate-coffee-cream drink, at a historic café like Caffè San Carlo on the grand Piazza San Carlo, then dinner, then out to the game. For a more football-flavoured pre-match pint, Murphy's on Piazza Carlo Felice is the Irish pub that fills up on Champions League nights. Inside the ground, Italian rules mean any beer is served in plastic cups only, and for higher-risk fixtures the city can ban strong-alcohol sales in a zone around the stadium entirely.

Inside, and where the noise is

The honest word on the atmosphere is that it's a fraction of what the legend promises, and for a specific, documented reason rather than vague decline.

The Curva Sud is the ultras end, and for decades it was a serious, organised, intimidating operation. Then two things gutted it. In 2018 the club's own president was found to have bulk-sold tickets to supporter groups connected to the Calabrian mafia, and Juventus were punished with a match played in front of an empty Curva Sud. Then in 2019, in an operation the police called "Last Banner," the leaders of the ultras groups were arrested for effectively extorting the club, using boycotts and threats to squeeze free tickets and Champions League allocations out of the management. Between the prosecutors and the club's own security clampdown, the organised support that generated the wall of noise was broken up, and it has never really recovered. Fans will tell you plainly that the atmosphere is a shadow of what it was; a first-time visitor buying a midweek league ticket should go in expecting an intimate, modern, watchable stadium rather than a cauldron.

The songs

The one to know is the anthem, "Juve (Storia di un grande amore)," Juve, story of a great love. It came out of a fan competition in the mid-2000s, is performed in the version by the singer Paolo Belli, and is played before every home game; the title tells you the register, unashamedly sentimental, and the ground sings it. The other phrase you'll see everywhere, on the shirt collar and the banners, is "Fino alla fine," to the very end, which started as a terrace chant and became the official club motto. This is the anthem inside the ground:

Watch on YouTube ↗

Merch

The main Juventus Store in the centre is on Via Garibaldi, the long pedestrian shopping street, with another store out at the stadium inside the Area12 complex. The stadium is also home to the J-Museum and the stadium tour, which is a genuinely good visit on a non-matchday and, given how far out the ground is, worth pairing with the game or doing as its own trip rather than a rushed add-on. Book the tour in advance; it's guided and capacity-limited.

Getting a ticket

For a normal Juventus game this is refreshingly simple by Italian standards, with a couple of catches. Anyone can buy single-match tickets online, directly from the club, with no membership required for general seating; you don't need the old fan-card for an ordinary seat. The two things to know: it's online-only, the club has scrapped physical box-office sales, and every ticket is named to a specific person, so travel with matching ID for each seat in your booking. The name can be checked against your ID at the gate, strictly in the away end and for the big fixtures, even if a routine league game is often just a barcode scan.

One nuance if you're chasing the singing ends: the curva sections, and any seat you take over from a season-ticket holder, generally still require a Juventus Card, the cheap fan-ID card that replaced the old tessera del tifoso and that the ticket gets loaded onto to let you through the turnstile. A plain seat for an ordinary league game generally does not need it. Champions League tickets run their own way: Juventus Card holders get an early sale window and the curva sections stay tied to the card, so don't count on it being waived for the European nights. If the curva is the point, buy the card from the club well in advance.

The big games are a step up. The curva ends and the Derby della Mole against Torino sell out faster and cost more, and demand for the marquee European nights compresses the window. If you want a guaranteed seat for one of those, the clean route is the club's own authorised tourist-package agents, who bundle a verified ticket with the trip, rather than the open market. That matters here because reselling above face value is illegal in Italy, and because the named-ticket system means a ticket bought off a stranger can simply fail the ID check at the turnstile. Treat any third-party resale site as both a legal and a practical risk, not a shortcut.

One last thing

Plan the day around the distance, not the drama. This is a club whose ground is a real trek from the beautiful city it belongs to, so give yourself the time, use the matchday bus, and build in the aperitivo and the museum rather than trying to sprint the whole thing around ninety minutes. Go knowing what Juventus are, the winning machine half of Italy loves and half of Italy loves to hate, and the matchday makes a lot more sense.

Ticket rules, the matchday transport service and the pre-match scene all shift season to season. Check anything time-sensitive the week you travel, and buy every ticket through the club or its named official agents.