In much of Eurasia, Italian soccer was the first external brand seen on local TV. This was in the 1990s, when Europe’s other big leagues were still pretty much off the air. Certainly overseas.

Italy, then, filled a programming void, and soccer fans all over the Middle and Far East of Asia, for instance, regularly watched matches involving AC Milan and Inter Milan and Roma and Lazio and Napoli — and especially Juventus of Turin, serial Italian champions.

Now, Juventus is back in global view again, having reached the Uefa Champions League final, against Barcelona, to be played in Berlin on Saturday.

Juventus had some high times in the 1990s. Twice named the best club in the world, winners of the European championship in 1996 (as well as 1985, at Heysel). They were one of the world’s most popular teams, in no small part because of their ubiquity on global TV.

Always near the top of the league — right on into the 21st century.

Then came the calciopoli scandal, and Juventus was hammered. It was stripped of the 2005 and 2006 league championships and was demoted to the second division for the 2006-07 season.

That put the team behind the curve, for several seasons, also a period when Italian soccer sagged, especially in comparison to Spanish and English football. German, too.

Now Juventus is back. Having moved within a step of a rise-and-fall-and-rise-again journey.

In part because it’s a good story, in part because fans in the UAE still has a soft spot in their hearts for Italian teams, The National commissioned one of our European soccer correspondents to write a fairly thorough review of that Juventus history.

And here is that story.

If you had lost track of Juventus or Italian football, as La Liga and the Premier League left them in the dust, as business models, this is a chance to catch up.

I would like to see Juventus win, on Saturday. In part, because of “Barcelona fatigue”. In part because they are underdogs. In part, because they represent a fine tradition of excellence much of the world has overlooked these past few years.