Don’t bother Federico Bernardeschi with your dumb Juventus scarf

Federico Bernardeschi has had a trying week. According to the press, Juventus and Inter Milan are preparing to raid Fiorentina for him this summer, despite his repeated statements that he’s happy in Florence and wants to stay at his boyhood club. Then Paulo Sousa yanked him from the Cagliari match despite a reasonably good performance and brought on holding midfielder Milan Badelj when the team was desperately in need of a goal.

So Berna probably wasn’t expecting any foolishness when he swung by Tuscan coastal town Viareggio to take some pictures with a bunch of school kids for a charity project. Having done that, though, he stopped and chatted with Viareggio mayor Giorgio Del Ghingaro, who also asked for a picture. Berna, being the nice dude he is, obliged. As they posed, Del Ghingaro went for his pocket and produced a Juve scarf, at which point Berna immediately noped on out of there.

(h/t to ViolaNews for the article and video.)

This leaves so many questions. Who planned this maneuver? Was it Fede’s ever-so-polite way of telling Juve to go, in the immortal words of Gregg Popovich, "piss in a bucket"? Or was it Del Ghingaro hoping for some extra press? When did Johnny Cash become Fede’s fashion guide? All in all, this is a reasonably pleasant, albeit entirely confusing, little vignette, and I doubt we’ll ever obtain satisfactory answers.