Juventus’ first big test of the 2025 preseason will take place Sunday in Dortmund, as Igor Tudor’s squad will cap their week-long training camp in Germany with a friendly against Bundesliga giants and fellow Club World Cup participants Borussia Dortmund at the Westfalenstadion.
Kickoff is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. locally in Dortmund.
It will be Juve’s second friendly of the summer after they recorded a 2-2 draw against Serie B side Reggiana at Continassa last weekend prior to their departure for Germany. And while it’s easy to point at the simple talent level increase from their first friendly to their second, this won’t be the only serious measuring stick that Tudor’s squad will have before things count for real in two weeks against Parma at the Allianz.
But, as much as that friendly against Atalanta next weekend will (hopefully) be a nice final lead-in to the season opener, the focus now is on what kind of information facing Dortmund may provide Tudor with heading into the final two weeks of preseason preparations.
So what is there to look out for? Let’s discuss a few things.
The continued integration into the squad for Jonathan David
The sample size is all of about 45 minutes, but so far, so good when it comes to how the first Canadian male to ever play for Juventus looked. OK, yeah, I get it. That’s one half of ball against a club from Serie B, but it’s not like we have a ton to work with as we get closer and closer to David’s official Juventus debut later this month.
So let’s just go ahead and just work with what we have since David made his way to Turin.
OK, stop it. I know it’s not much. Stop reminding me!
But hey, it’s probably got you feeling a little more optimistic than Dusan Vlahovic sticking around for another season, right? So yeah, that’s a positive right there. Just take what you got so far, folks.
David, who arrived on a “free” transfer from Lille last month, is now the man to lead the line for the Juventus attack. He got the assist on Juventus’ first goal against Reggiana, setting up Francisco Conceição midway through the first half to momentarily put his new team in front. It’s that combiation — along with the young No. 10 we’re going to discuss shortly — that Juve are hoping can do a lot of good things and provide plenty more goals than the inconsistent attack that we saw from the Bianconeri last season.
But when it comes to the new No. 9 who isn’t going to be wearing No. 9, we know that he’s a different kind of striker than the guy at Juventus who currently wears the No. 9. Vlahovic has never recorded more than four assists domestically during his time in Italy. David has recorded at least four assists in five of the last seven seasons domestically. He can score goals, but he also creates them for his teammates, too.
That, of course, is only part of the reason why Juventus brought him in. But it’s a big component as to why Juventus’ attack could very well prove to be much more of a fluid unit that’s not overly dependent on the guy at the top of Igor Tudor’s 3-4-2-1 formation to score. That’s the hope coming into the season, and that’s also the hope as we see David get these all-important minutes with his new teammates during the preseason.
Kenan Yildiz back on the soil where he was born
Ah yes, it’s about time that we talk about the young man who will be playing in Germany, the country in which he was born in but doesn’t represent at the international level, for the first time since Juventus’ wild and crazy Champions League tie against RB Leipzig last October.
(More about somebody who unfortunately played just a few minutes in that fixture shortly.)
This trip back to Germany just so happens to come at a time in which the Yildiz stock continues to soar. You know, kinda like he’s soaring through the air during one of Juventus’ Club World Cup games earlier this summer.
It’s a friendly, sure, but you know this one will have a little extra juice behind it, too.
Yildiz is the biggest reason to watch Juventus right now. He’s not just the No. 10, but he’s becoming the face of the club as they try and get something going again after some down years both domestically and in Europe. If they are to do that, then Yildiz will surely be one of the driving forces and only continue to become one of the budding young stars in this game.
As we quickly approach the start of a new season, the importance put on his young shoulders can’t be understated.
But before Yildiz can actually start his goal tally in Serie A — he is welcome to score a couple against Parma in two weeks, he officially has my blessings — it’s imperative that he gets some sort of rapport going with David up front. Because of the substitution pattern against Reggiana last weekend, the two centerpieces of Juventus’ attack didn’t actually play alongside one another, with David playing the opening 45 minutes and Yildiz coming on to begin the second half.
One has to think that is going to be a little different against Borussia Dortmund.
There are plenty of areas of this roster that have question marks. But the potential for really good things to happen between David, Yildiz and Conceição up front in attack is there. Now it’s just about this group starting to see what they’re capable of as we get closer and closer to the start of the new Serie A season.
The continued ramp up for Bremer to be ready for the season opener
See? Told you I would mention the guy who got hurt early in that 3-2 comeback win over RB Leipzig back in October. And my goodness will it be nice to see him back on the field once again — even in a friendly.
We’re reaching the point of the preseason where Bremer being back on the field is both such a positive development but also a case of “nothing go wrong” territory. Even when you get a push notification that he didn’t train earlier in the week before you see the “planned rest and load management” part makes your heart skip a beat and your anxiety suddenly spike. Bremer getting hurt was brutal last season, but you just want the final stages of the rehab process to go as smooth as it possibly can.
So far, it seems like it’s going that way.
Bremer played his first minutes since his season-ending ACL injury in the Reggiana friendly last weekend. He played a full 45 minutes and looked fairly good doing it. That’s the big headline when it comes to him right now. He got through his first game action, didn’t report any sort of problems and was back training the next time Juve stepped onto the field together. That’s all we want right now — and that’s what we got … thankfully.
But Dortmund will be a different animal. It will be a different speed. He will be facing better attacking players running at him and a team that will be counterattacking at another level compared to Reggiana.
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At this stage, nobody is probably expecting Bremer to be the lockdown defender he was to begin the 2024-25 season simply because of the kind of injury he’s returning from. This thing takes time on top of the nine or 10 months in which he has been forced to miss as an overall timetable for return. And as we know from the Juve player before him to suffer this kind of injury, Federico Chiesa, not every ACL injury and the recovery process goes like the others — each one is different, and you just have to deal with any potential speed bumps along the way as they come.
Luckily for Juventus, Bremer is back on the field after so many months on the sideline and having to watch his teammates from the stands. It’s about as welcome of a sight as there can be this summer.
The overall level of the squad two weeks before the new season kicks off
Ah, a somewhat important kind of subject, isn’t it?
Yes, Juventus’ Serie A season kicks off two weeks from Sunday. Are Parma better than the team Juve will face in this game? Probably not. But it sure would be nice for the Bianconeri to at least give us something positive to talk about during a summer in which the mercato has been a rather disappointing one when it comes to actually trying to improve a roster that barely finished in fourth place last season.
Whether they can do that is a completely different story, though.
This Juventus roster is still one that is quite incomplete. Players who have been expected to leave for weeks now are still around and part of the squad who made the trip to Germany. The highest-paid player in Serie A is still on the roster and has an extremely limited market, if anything right now. There’s about three weeks to go n the mercato and we still are totally unsure of just how many of these players will be wearing a Juventus jersey come September.
So, good luck to Mister Tudor trying to make it all work, right?
For all of the frenzy that last summer provided, that has not come close to being replicated 12 months later. In a lot of ways, that’s been a good thing considering what Cristiano Giuntoli tried to do last summer didn’t prove to work and has left Damien Comolli with a lot of things to try and clean up in the former’s wake.
Preseason is always hard to judge because different teams are at different stages of preparations. It’s even tougher this summer considering that Juventus had the Club World Cup to deal with and a limited amount of time to actually rest up for the new season because of it.
So with this incredibly compressed summer and a roster that is still under construction — to an amount in which we’re still not completely sure even though we’re almost in the middle of August — it’s hard to say where this team is actually in terms of being ready for the new season. Considering who they’re going to play this weekend, we may as well get a pretty good idea, so at least there’s that.
