WHEN you have won five consecutive league titles and are on your way to a sixth, you inevitably realise that you need to come up with something new, otherwise the annual title becomes somewhat humdrum. Celtic drafted in Brendan Rodgers, Juventus retained their manager, Max Allegri, but ramped up the chips on the table and went all-in. Over the next two weeks, starting with Tuesday’s clash with Luis Enrique’s Barcelona in the Champions League quarter-finals, we will find out how wise a strategy it was.

Juventus did this by spending some £78 million last summer to acquire Napoli centre-forward Gonzalo Higuain and committing some £60m in wages over the next five years. They also spent £20m to activate midfielder Miralem Pjanic’s release clause and picked up Dani Alves on a free from Barcelona: both are earning north of £130,000 a week. The flip-side, of course, is that Higuain is 29, Pjanic 27 and Dani Alves 33. Buzzwords such as long-term planning and amortiz-ation did not seem to apply here.

That is because Juve were convinced their window of opportunity to win the Champions League was closing. This is a team with an ageing backbone. Goalkeeper Gigi Buffon is 39, central defenders Leo Bonucci, Giorgio Chiellini and Andrea Barzagli are all 29 or older as are midfielders Claudio Marchisio and Sami Khedira and forward Mario Mandzukic.

They could have opted for younger versions of Pjanic, Higuain and Dani Alves, guys who might one day blossom and be as good as that trio, but that would have meant more years of transition. Instead, they chose to give themselves the best possible chance of winning the Champions League over the next two years. With Bayern and Manchester City coming to grips with new managers, Manchester United and Chelsea out of the picture and Arsenal being Arsenal, it was felt there was no time like the present to roll the dice. Particularly since Inter and Milan, the most likely Italian clubs to compete financially on the domestic market, were unlikely to offer much competition for several years to come.

That is the popular narrative to explain the summer activity. There is a wrinkle to this, which is that Juve did hedge a bit by acquiring or hanging on to a clutch of gifted youngsters. Defender Daniele Rugani, midfielder Rolando Mandragora and forward Paulo Dybala, plus on-loan starlets like centre-back Mattia Caldara and winger Leonardo Spinazzola, are all 22 or younger and waiting in the wings. But fundamentally, the choice was clear: the future is now.

It is the nature of knockout football that the decision will likely be vind-icated or not by 180 minutes of mano-a-mano football against, perhaps, the toughest possible opponents: Lionel Messi’s Barcelona, the team that pummelled them in the Champions League final two seasons back.

The interesting thing from Allegri’s perspective is that not only have Juventus gone all-in by spending big in terms of personnel, they have done it in terms of formation and philosophy as well. Three months ago they began transitioning to what he called the “five-star” attack. On paper, especially by Serie A standards, it looked almost cartoonishly lopsided. Higuain was joined by

Dybala up front, with Mandzukic, usually at centre-forward, deployed on one flank and an attacking winger like Juan Cuadrado on the other and Pjanic in the hole.

“I like balance too, but when we play the best teams in Europe we’ve learned that we can’t just rely on being solid and good at counter-attacking,” Allegri said. “We have to be able to go and take the game to them, force them back and impose ourselves. To me, that’s balance, being able to do both. Because if you set up to counter-attack and they scored first, you’re screwed.”

It is a gamble, but it is consistent with what they have done in the summer in refashioning their squad. We may see it on Tuesday night in Turin in the first leg or we may only see it if necessary. But for Juve, it is a reinvention and an evolution. It may blow up in their collective faces. Yet if it does, at least they will go down swinging.

MANCHESTER United should get some relief today if only by virtue of the fact they are playing David Moyes’ Sunderland, who are bottom in the table, and they are not playing at Old Trafford. It seems absurd that a manager like Jose Mourinho, whose career was built on a terrifyingly good home record, should now be in charge of a team who have won just six of 16 homes games. Not quite the “Theatre of Dreams”.

Mourinho has said they have been unlucky at home, hitting the woodwork, getting bad refereeing decisions, running into goalkeepers who have had outstanding performances. And, for this, he has been derided by the “results-are-all-that-matter” brigade.

Is it purely a matter of opinion that United have been “unlucky”? Maybe not. By one vantage point, they probably have. Expected Goals (xG) is a metric used by football analysts, bookmakers and professional gamblers to assess the “true” performance of a side. The formula varies, but the basic premise is that it looks at the number of shots a team take and concede and assign a value to each based on location, type of finish (whether headed or not) and so on. It may sound like mumbo-jumbo, but it is one of the most predictive metrics in football and does a better job than points or goal difference at assessing future outcomes.

So what does xG tell us? Well, in six of United’s home games this season, they were a full two xG or more better than their opponents. In another four, they were between one and two better. And in another three, they were half a goal to a goal better. Twice, opponents had a higher xG score (against Manchester City, when they lost and, against Liverpool, when they were fortunate to draw).

Analytics folk will tell you that when you are half a goal better than your opponent, you generally win and, if you don’t, it’s probability and luck going against you. But if you consider games when they were a full goal better than the opposition as wins and count the Liverpool game as a defeat, you end up with a record of 10 wins, four draws and two defeats. Which, heading into the weekend, would put United third with a game in hand.

Mourinho won’t get much sympathy because throughout his career he’s banged the “results-are-everything” drum more than anyone. But on this occasion he is right: United deserved more at home. Consider it karma.