Juventus had just won their ninth consecutive Serie A title, but their manager was nowhere to be seen. As the final whistle sounded at the end of a 2-0 win over Sampdoria, Maurizio Sarri headed immediately down into the tunnel, leaving his players to celebrate on the pitch at an empty Allianz Stadium.

They would catch up with him soon enough. Wojciech Szczęsny barged in on Sarri’s post-game interview to hand him a lit cigarette, telling him “you earned it”. Back in the changing room, Juan Cuadrado maintained his Scudetto tradition of smothering his boss in shaving foam.

Sarri joked that he had fled the pitch in the hope of avoiding this sort of drenching. Perhaps, in truth, he simply had not known what to do with himself. He had just claimed his first Serie A title at the age of 61, becoming the oldest manager ever to win the competition.

This is not a future he envisaged back when he was still trading currency in his day job for the Banca Toscana at the start of his 40s. Nor even when he quit. “I stopped [working for the bank] because I was bored and I had this other great passion,” said Sarri last week. “My objective was to make a life in this profession. It was not a decision to arrive at the highest national or European levels.”

And yet, here he is. Sarri was in self-effacing mode as he joked with Juventus’s players: “If you’ve won with me, you really must be good.” He allowed himself a little more credit during his TV interviews, as he reminded viewers that this triumph came on the heels of a Europa League win at Chelsea last term.

Winning Serie A, it must be acknowledged, is a minimum expectation for Juventus. They have not exactly crossed the finish line in style. They blew a first opportunity to seal the deal when they allowed relegation-threatened Udinese to come from a goal down to beat them on Thursday. Juventus had won only one of their previous four games before that.

This was supposed to be the most compelling title race in years, but the coronavirus lockdown threw all the runners off their stride. Lazio, one point behind at the restart, lost five of their first eight games back – an injury-depleted squad collapsing under the demands of an abbreviated schedule. Inter chucked away leads against Bologna, Verona and Sassuolo.

Juventus were left to prevail almost by default. Or, at least, that’s how it seemed from the outside. The notion that winning football games is ever easy at the highest level is rarely shared by people who have actually done it.

Even on Sunday, a Sampdoria team with no obvious objectives left to fight did an admirable job of holding the champions at arm’s length. Juventus required a wonderfully-worked free-kick to break the deadlock in the sixth minute of first-half injury time, before going on to win 2-0. Miralem Pjanic shaped to shoot but altered his motion at the last moment to square for Cristiano Ronaldo, who drilled home from the edge of the box.

It was a goal that offered a glimpse of Sarri’s best work at Juventus. This was Ronaldo’s 31st goal of the Serie A season – matching a club record set by Felice Borel all the way back in 1933-34. It was also a reminder that the manager made his reputation in Italy’s lower leagues, in part, on the back of his repertoire of set pieces.

The question of whether this is yet Sarri’s team, rather than simply a talented group of players working from memory, has been a favourite topic for TV analysts and radio phone-in hosts all season. There is no straightforward answer.

He has certainly brought the best out of some players. Ronaldo is up 10 on last year’s goal tally, and matched a Serie A record by scoring in 11 consecutive games. Matthijs De Ligt has improved vastly after a torrid start when he was thrust prematurely into the starting lineup following Giorgio Chiellini’s cruciate ligament tear.

Most thrilling has been the restoration of Paulo Dybala, a player Juventus tried to offload last summer but who has once more looked a transcendent talent after Sarri encouraged him to play closer to Ronaldo. Together, they have scored almost 60% of Juventus’s goals.

That statistic hints also at Sarri’s failings. Juventus’s midfield has been a mess, a constantly rotating cast with few standout performers. Sarri’s successes at Napoli were built on furiously fast interchanges. Juventus’s ball movement has often been agonisingly slow.

The club’s directors ought to share the blame for a transfer policy that has seemed to focus more on opportunities for a bargain than addressing specific needs. Then again, Sarri himself has insisted it is up to a manager to adapt to the players at his disposal, and not the other way around.

What matters most, in the end, is not whether this team plays according to some trademark style but whether they play effectively. Sarri has stated more than once that the goal is “vincere e convincere” – to win and convince.

On that measure, he still has a way to go. Juventus have thrown away 18 points from winning positions – more than in any other season during this unbroken run of Serie A titles (last term, under Massimiliano Allegri, it was six). The 38 goals they have conceded are the most by an Italian champion since 1960-61. Meanwhile, Atalanta, a club with a fraction of Juventus’s budget, have outscored them by 21 goals.

And yet, on the most important measure, Sarri has succeeded – in Serie A, at least. Juventus are a club who continue to live by the mantra of their former president Giampiero Boniperti that “winning is not an important thing, it’s the only thing that counts”.

They have been champions of Italy now for 3,005 consecutive days. That achievement speaks first and foremost to structural successes: a thorough modernisation of the club whose first major landmark was the opening of a new stadium in 2011 and which has continued through logo changes and new commercial deals. Enhanced revenue streams have allowed Juventus to invest in their playing squad at a rate that their rivals cannot match.

Still, titles are won on the pitch. There were plenty of people willing to bet against Sarri in August, when he was forced to miss the start of the season recovering from pneumonia, and Antonio Conte – the manager who began Juventus’s winning cycle – was launching a fresh revolution at Inter.

In this most particular of football seasons all across Europe, Sarri was able to keep his team on track. Missing out on the Coppa Italia and the Supercoppa were disappointments, but Juventus are pleased enough with his work for the chief football officer, Fabio Paratici, to confirm that he will be back again next year.

With both the Scudetto and his personal future assured, Sarri can turn his attention to preparing for the resumption of the Champions League in August. You will have to excuse him, two decades on from that decision to end his career in banking, if he does not share outsiders’ perceptions of Juventus’s latest triumph as ‘boring’.