Since the first day of the season, something felt wrong at Juventus. Cristiano Ronaldo is not a man who enjoys sitting on the bench, and yet, he was nowhere to be found on the starting sheet in the away trip against Udinese.

Now surely he made an appearance in the second half and grabbed a last-minute winner which was later denied by VAR, but during that evening, we all realized that the Portuguese’s departure is a more concrete scenery than initially thought.

At the end of the day, CR7 ended up sealing a return to Manchester United just days before the closure of the transfer market.

That transfer left the club in a less than ideal situation, and Giorgio Chiellini believes that it affected the team’s results on the pitch, as the Bianconeri failed to win their first four Serie A fixtures of the season.

“I sensed that he could go away in the summer, we had reached a point in the relationship where Cristiano needed a new stimuli and a team that played rightly for him, because when he finds such a team, he can be decisive,” said the captain in an interview with DAZN via ilBianconero.

“He is proving it in recent months and it does not surprise me, because he has shown it throughout his career and also during the three years he spent with us.

“At Juventus a rejuvenation plan is in place. If he had stayed, it would have been an added value and we would have gladly exploited it, but perhaps he decided to join a team that focuses more on the present than the future.

“It would have been better if he had left earlier so we could have had time to adjust. This is something we ended up paying for.

“It wasn’t hard to digest it, but his departure gave us a little shock and we paid for it, in my opinion, in terms of points in the first games.

“Had he gone away on the 1st of August, we would have had time to get ready instead of thinking about his farewell,” concluded Chiellini.