At points of the second half on Saturday evening, there was an emerging feeling that Juventus might not even come away with a single point during their annual visit to the Stadio Marcantonio Bentegodi.
For all the possession, for all of the time on the ball and for all of the advantage in passing that Juve had over the host Hellas Verona, it wasn’t the team in bianconero looked the more likely to actually win. It didn’t matter how many attacking players Igor Tudor threw on as the second half went on, things were simply off and certainly nowhere close to replicating what they’ve done in their first two games out of the September international break.
Juventus have officially recorded their first frustrating result of the 2025-26 season, a 1-1 draw with Hellas Verona in which it could have easily been all three points dropped and a first loss on the record of Igor Tudor’s squad. It was the kind of performance befitting of a team that has expended so much energy over those previous two games in which wild late-game comebacks were needed to get the win over Inter Milan and a draw with Borussia Dortmund, respectively. But ultimately, Juventus’ ineffectiveness and sub-par performance for much of Saturday’s trip to Verona doomed them as they dropped points for the first time domestically.
And in some ways, you feel like Juventus got lucky to get a point in this one because of how they played.
It wasn’t a good showing. There weren’t the kind of highs that we saw in the win over Inter and the high-scoring draw with Dortmund. Juventus may have had 72% of the possession and more than doubled up Hellas Verona in terms of passes completed, but the Bianconeri ended up getting out-shot by the home side, 14-10. For the second consecutive game in which he started against a domestic opponent, Dusan Vlahovic was extremely isolated and a virtual non-factor outside of a couple of brief moments. The midfield misplaced so many passes you probably lost count even before halftime. The defense, playing their first game of the season without the resting Gleison Bremer, looked far from the strong unit that Juve was against their first two provincial opponents this season.
With all of that possession Juve had, they finished with a grand total of 0.38 xG. That’s not good — at all.
Of course, in their previous two games during the past week, they were scoring goals that seemed near-impossible when they were about to hit the back of the net. Even Francisco Conceição’s opener in the 19th was far from an xG monster. But in those two games, they were also creating scoring chances to enable themselves to actually get more than just the first goal.
They barely did that against Hellas Verona.
Sure, Hellas played well and proved to be a better performer than what their table position entering the weekend was. But it’s impossible to escape just how much Juventus struggled to do enough to win in a matchup that they shouldn’t usually be dropping points in no matter how tricky a visit to the Bentegodi can be.
Because of it, Tudor can’t stake claim to what other Juventus managers like Giovanni Trapattoni, Marcello Lippi, Antonio Conte and Max Allegri have all done in their first (full) seasons as manager — win their first four games of a new season. Juve may still be unbeaten this season, but this one feels like a pretty decently sized letdown no matter how predictable it was a few hours before kickoff.
