Juventus vs Ajax: Juve learn the hard way that football remains a team game - whether you have Cristiano Ronaldo or not

Ronaldo wasn't to blame for this most humiliating of exits - the Champions League is the very highest level and Juve found their plan hopelessly ill prepared for it

The ‘maledizione’ continues. Juventus believe they are cursed in the Champions League, and after losing the finals in 2015 and 2017 they are not getting any closer to winning it. They are only falling further away.

Last year when the team were knocked out by Cristiano Ronaldo’s Real Madrid in the quarter-finals they briefly lost their minds, Gianluigi Buffon accusing Michael Oliver of having a “rubbish bin for a heart”, and not having the personality to referee the game.

So Juventus’ response last summer was to spend £88m on Ronaldo, the ultimate Champions League trump card, hoping that he could get them over the line. As we all know, Ronaldo is the most decisive player in the competition’s history, a five-time winner and the first man you would turn to if you needed a goal or two in a knock-out tie in the spring.

And when Ronaldo picked off a hat-trick here in Turin in the last 16 against Atletico Madrid - the best defence in the game - it felt like the obvious expected return on a sound investment. You get what you pay for in football, and now that Juventus had bought Ronaldo they could finally beat the biggest opponents.

But in Turin they were humiliated by a team who could barely afford Ronaldo’s shinpads. Ajax outplayed Juventus just as thoroughly as they did Real Madrid in the Bernabeu last month. 2-1 barely tells the story of their second-half dominance and with a bit more luck in front of goal they would have won by another 4-1 scoreline. It should have been even more chastening for Juventus than it was.

The one person you can’t blame for this humiliation is Ronaldo. Not just because he was the man that got them there, with that hat-trick against Atletico when nobody else had any answers. But because over these two legs against Ajax he was the only Juventus player who did anything. He scored both of their goals, a header in each leg, his 125th and 126th goals in this competition.

What was so striking was how little they had to offer apart from that. Juventus created little in the first leg aside from Ronaldo’s goal and even less in the second leg. Tuesday night’s goal was from a corner, and there was genuinely nothing from open play. The midfield had very little skill or imagination, Paulo Dybala was anonymous, and by the end all they could do was put balls into the box for Ronaldo and Moise Kean to attack. At least at Real Madrid Ronaldo could rely on service from Isco, Toni Kroos and Luka Modric, or the distraction threats of Karim Benzema and Gareth Bale, rather than having to feed off scraps like this.

While Ronaldo cannot be blamed for Juventus’ failings, the signing of Ronaldo shows you why they are where they are. Because watching this team was to see a team that does not have an identity anymore. Their only plan is to get the ball to Cristiano, and if that does not, get it to him again. Of course it works most of the time, and it certainly works in Serie A, but the Champions League is a higher level. And Juventus found their plan looking embarrassingly flimsy.

Juventus have often been a team who prides themselves on doing as little as possible and just finding a way to win. When you have Buffon, Leonardo Bonucci and Giorgio Chiellini you do that, but Buffon has left and Chiellini was injured for these two games. Suddenly the old defence is not as reliable as it used to be. Suddenly the rest of the team has to do more.

Ronaldo could do nothing as Juve failed once again (AP)

But while signing Ronaldo was meant to be the solution, in reality he has made the problem worse. Because he only encourages that minimalism of ambition, as everyone else believes that they can coast through while Ronaldo wins them the game in the end. So Juventus started to do less and less and less, thinking it was always enough, until they found themselves needing two goals to stay in the Champions League but with Emre Can and Blaise Matuidi chasing after the ball.

Compare this unbalanced team to the team that lost 3-1 in the Berlin final to Barcelona four years ago. Back then the team that Max Allegri had just taken over from Antonio Conte had threats all over the pitch: Andrea Pirlo, Paul Pogba, Arturo Vidal, Carlos Tevez and Alvaro Morata. But over the four years of Allegri’s tenure they have lost that collective force Conte instilled in them, becoming increasingly individualised. A process that climaxed with spending £88m on the greatest individualist of them all.

Because ultimately the £88m Juventus spent on Ronaldo has made as little difference to the big picture as the £75m they spent on Gonzalo Higuain in 2016. They have decided that the way to win the Champions League is to buy the best available individuals, and to forget about their unity, coherence and development as a team. Because when you are 17 points clear in Serie A it is easy to kid yourself that you have everything sorted.

In that sense they resemble Paris Saint Germain more than anyone else. A club so dominant in their domestic league that they can almost forget about the intangible sides of the game almost every weekend because the games are so easy. A club whose only meaning can come from winning the Champions League, and whose only conception of how to get there comes from signing the best players.

But just as PSG signing Kylian Mbappe and Neymar has ultimately done nothing to win them the biggest prize, nor has Juventus signing Ronaldo. Football can still be a team game, as Ajax showed Juve last night.