The week after winning the Scudetto was less a celebration and more a collective, blissful exhalation.
Lautaro Martínez, as captain, had made an executive decision: the entire team, and their families, were coming with him to his private villa on the Amalfi Coast.
The villa was a paradise, a slice of heaven carved into a cliffside, with a private beach where the turquoise Mediterranean lapped gently against the shore.
For one glorious week, they were not footballers. They were just a loud, happy, slightly dysfunctional family on vacation.
The scene on the beach was one of beautiful, glorious chaos.
"It needs more towers!" Julián Álvarez declared, his face a mask of intense architectural focus.
He was in the middle of constructing a sandcastle of such ambitious, questionable design that it looked less like a castle and more like a pile of sand that had survived an earthquake.
