By full time, the joke going around the Stadio Olimpico Grande Torino was that nobody should let the home team’s owner know how good his new striker was. Ché Adams had marked his full debut for the Granata with a goal and an assist, helping turn a 1-0 deficit against Atalanta into a 2-1 win. So, naturally, Torino’s supporters were starting to worry how long it would be until their club tried to cash in.

It has been a painful summer of bidding farewell to their favourites. The centre-back Alessandro Buongiorno, whose breakout season earned him a place in Italy’s Euro 2024 squad, was sold to Napoli. Raoul Bellanova, who served up seven assists from right wing-back, completed a transfer to Atalanta just days before Torino were due to face them.

For three years under Ivan Juric, Torino had built an identity out of the tenacity of their defending. What began as ruthless cynicism – they committed 16.7 fouls per game during his first season as manager, almost two more than the next closest Serie A team – evolved into something more impressive, a cohesive group who pressed judiciously to create turnovers without leaving spaces behind.

Torino kept 18 clean sheets in the league last season, second only to the champions Inter. But then Juric was gone and so was most of his first-choice defence. Besides Buongiorno and Bellanova, the Swiss international Ricardo Rodríguez also left to join Betis after the expiry of his contract. He started 34 games in the most recent campaign, swapping between wing-back and the back three.

Only a fraction of this summer’s transfer revenue has so far been reinvested into the team. Buongiorno and Bellanova were sold for a combined sum of more than €55m. Torino have a reported outlay of just over €18m in transfer fees this summer, with almost half of that used to convert Duván Zapata’s loan from last season into a permanent deal.

Urbano Cairo has owned Torino since 2005, and it can feel as though a section of the team’s support has been at war with him for most of the time since. Dark intimidation tactics have been deployed. In 2010, a severed pig’s head was left outside the club’s headquarters in Turin, together with the message “vattene porco” (“get lost, swine”) written on the pavement in red paint. That grim story repeated in 2020, when another pig’s head was left outside the entrance of the newspaper La Stampa, with Cairo’s name written in red next to it. This time an accompanying banner commanded him to sell up.

Before kick-off on Sunday, a group of several thousand fans gathered to march from the team’s former home at the Stadio Filadelfia (now a training facility) to the Stadio Olimpico. Some held up banners with the image of a smiling cartoon pig.

Those images made for a jarring contrast with Torino’s positive performance on the pitch. Perhaps Buongiorno would have done a better job than his replacement, Saúl Coco, of marking Mateo Retegui in the 26th minute, when the Atalanta striker met Davide Zappacosta’s cross with a header into the top corner of the net. Yet it is hard to imagine last season’s team responding so well to an early setback.

For all their defensive solidity under Juric, Torino often struggled to create opportunities of their own, relying on turnovers to catch opponents out of position. They only conceded 36 goals in 2023-24, but scored the same amount. There is a reason why Juric, who inherited a team that narrowly avoided relegation in 2021 and did well to consolidate them in mid-table, could not quite take that next step of qualifying them for European competition.

Torino’s equaliser against Atalanta, just five minutes after falling behind, resulted not from transitions but deliberate attacking combinations. Advancing from midfield against a set defence, Ivan Ilic flicked the ball between two opponents toward Zapata, who used his body to wall off a third defender and let it run to Adams. He played a first time pass back into the space the Colombian’s marker had just vacated. Ilic had continued his run and arrived to chip a finish beyond the goalkeeper Marco Carnesecchi.

The second goal was more familiar in its directness, even if some players involved were not. Atalanta had been attacking just after the interval when Coco relieved the pressure with a long ball out to the left flank. Ilic ran it down and squared for Zapata, whose shot across goal was saved before Adams sidefooted home the rebound.

That was hardly game over. Atalanta hit the woodwork twice in the remaining minutes before winning a penalty in injury time, which Vanja Milinkovic-Savic saved. On another day, the result might have been different, but a difficult game was always expected against the Europa League winners. Coming on the heels of a 2-2 draw away to Milan, in which Torino led until the 94th minute, this has certainly been a positive start for Paolo Vanoli, the new manager.

Juric’s replacement is an experienced coach yet still something of an unknown quantity. After starting his managerial career with Domegliara in Serie D, he spent the next 12 years working with Italy’s national youth teams, then as an assistant to Gian Piero Ventura with the senior side and Antonio Conte at Chelsea and Inter.

Vanoli had a 16-game stint in charge of Spartak Moscow, where he won the Russian Cup, interrupted by war, before taking over a Venezia side who were second-last in Serie B when he arrived in November 2022. He led them to promotion via the playoffs the following season. Venezia were Serie B’s most prolific team, scoring 69 times in 38 games.

On Sunday, Adams described the manager’s style as suiting him to a tee. “He asks us to play the ball in behind and to create a dialogue between the forwards,” said the striker. “I’m enjoying myself and I think you could see that this evening.”

It is easy to understand why Torino, with all their goalscoring struggles, were interested in Adams, available on a free transfer after netting 16 times for Southampton in the Championship last season. What will be fascinating to hear, when he has more time to speak, are his reasons for deciding on this move.

He is following in the footsteps of one of Scotland’s all-time greats, Denis Law, who played one season for Torino back in 1961-62, scoring 10 in 28 games. But it is tempting to wonder whether more recent examples are also creating a snowball effect. Adams’s fellow Scots Lewis Ferguson, Liam Henderson and Josh Doig have all settled in Italy in recent years, while both Scott McTominay and Billy Gilmour are understood to be close to joining Napoli.

In any case, Torino are happy to have Adams, described by Vanoli on Sunday as “an important player”. He begun on the bench for the opener against Milan and may yet have to rotate with Antonio Sanabria as the partner to Zapata up front, but this was an encouraging start.