BERLIN // When Juventus coach Massimiliano Allegri was greeted with a hail of eggs and spat at on his first day at work, he could not have imagined he would lead them to the brink of an unprecedented treble of titles in his first season.
Yet that is what the phlegmatic 47-year-old Italian has achieved since succeeding Antonio Conte in July last year, with Juve already crowned Serie A champions and Italian Cup winners and facing Barcelona in Saturday’s Uefa Champions League final.
A former coach of Juventus’s detested rivals AC Milan, Allegri initially refrained from tinkering too much with Conte’s side, which had won three straight scudettos but failed to make much of an impact in Europe’s elite club competition.
However, as the season wore on he stamped his mark on the team and Juve are now in a position to win the treble for the first time in their history, matching Jose Mourinho’s Inter Milan in 2009/10, the only Italian side to achieve the feat.
Conte favoured a more attacking approach, with a three-man defence and five in midfield.
Allegri mainly stuck with that system before switching to a more defensive 4-4-2 formation and instructing his players to sit back and hit opponents on the counter attack.
It is a strategy that has clearly worked for Juve this term and they ended the Serie A campaign 17 points clear of closest challengers Roma.
Whether it works against a Barca attack featuring Lionel Messi, Neymar and Luis Suarez remains to be seen but the way Juve’s defence dealt with Real Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale and Karim Benzema in the semi-finals was impressive.
Allegri earned praise this week from his captain and goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon, who is returning to the Olympic Stadium in Berlin where he can reflect on happy memories of Italy’s triumph against France in the 2006 World Cup final.
“What has impressed me most is (Allegri’s) great intelligence in terms of settling in with the squad and trying to find out not just our technical qualities but also the mentality and morale of the whole team and each individual player,” Buffon told Uefa.com on Monday.
“Plus, his tactical knowledge is outstanding – after years of playing a certain system, he managed to get us to try alternatives and to perform even better,” he added.
“Even so, he has not tried to completely change how we’ve played because in some situations or matches we have returned to how we played before.
“So I think this is his biggest achievement. He didn’t try to enter the club and change everything, but to make changes step by step based on our needs and the situations encountered.”
When Allegri arrived some 300 Juve fans turned up to protest his appointment at their Vinovo training ground and he was pelted with eggs and spat on.
He had been sacked by Milan, with whom he won the Serie A title in 2011, six months earlier and his reputation was tarnished by the seven-times European champions’ woes.
However, the former Cagliari and Napoli midfielder has quickly put that phase of his coaching career behind him.
At Milan he suffered Champions League elimination at Barca’s hands in two successive seasons, losing in the quarter-finals in 2011/12 and the round of 16 a year later.
Saturday’s match will be a chance to exact revenge and achieve something no Juventus coach, or indeed any Italian coach, has before.
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
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