Stop me if you\u2019ve heard this before: Juventus is a club in free fall. For years now, they\u2019ve had the second highest wage bill in Serie A \u2014 and that\u2019s still true even if you cut Dusan Vlahovic\u2019s wages by 75%. The results over the last several years as a big spender in the league are: fourth, fourth, seventh, third, fourth and sixth. What\u2019s worse is that, as far as I can tell, the club has had no consistent identity for most of those seasons.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
And I think those two facts together tell you something important about what\u2019s actually gone wrong.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
From the outside, it seems like the process goes something like: identify talented players, acquire them, and hope it works out. Regardless of whether those players actually fit each other, or fit the coach who was supposedly going to use them, we just expect expensive players who we pay a lot of money to figure things out on the field.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
I don\u2019t think this is a particularly hot take. Look at the pieces.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Teun Koopmeiners came from a high-press, fluid-movement Atalanta system built around creating space through motion. He was paired with Thiago Motta, a manager whose whole identity was methodical build-up and positional discipline. Those are not compatible traits. Lo\u00efs Openda thrived almost exclusively in counter-attacking systems \u2014 and he arrived into a team without a counter-attacking manager (first Igor Tudor, then Luciano Spalletti), and without the kind of ball progression skills in the midfield that a counter-attacking approach actually needs to succeed. Jonathan David seems to prefer playing in space, but nothing about the managerial hires suggests the club wanted their striker to play that way. And then there\u2019s Arthur \u2014 a midfielder whose strengths supposedly centered around ball retention and progression dropped into a team that didn\u2019t prioritize possession at all. Arthur\u2019s also a case of the club misjudging a player\u2019s actual level, which is a separate problem, but even if he\u2019d been the player they thought he was, the fit still wouldn\u2019t have made sense.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Zoom out further and the pattern gets worse.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
In the team\u2019s various free-fall over the last few years, the club has hired possession-based attacking managers, defense-first pragmatic managers, and some managers with no clearly stated philosophy at all. There\u2019s no thread connecting the recruitment to the coaching to a style of play. And honestly, I don\u2019t think there ever was one. It seems like the plan was \u201cget good players,\u201d full stop, and the fitting-together part got sorted out later.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
But we know that\u2019s not how this sport works. We can look to England for an obvious example, where Manchester United have run something close to the same experiment with an even bigger budget and gotten a similar result \u2014 a roster full of players who look talented individually and incoherent together, cycling through managers with different footballing philosophies, none of whom ever got a roster built for their approach. Spending a lot and building well are different things, and you can do the first while being genuinely bad at the second.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
So instead of writing another \u201cJuve need a plan\u201d piece \u2014 which, fair, this kind of is \u2014 I want to talk about what building that plan actually looks like from the inside. Not because I\u2019ve done it at Juve\u2019s level. I haven\u2019t. But I spent a few years as a performance analyst for a sporting organization that went through something close to a full retool, and the process we used to get through it is, I think, the closest thing I have to real evidence for how this should work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Here\u2019s the situation we were in: after my second year, most of our starters left. Five or six of our eight key players were off our roster in one offseason. We had almost no established identity left on the roster, and the couple of players who were sticking around were going to have to move into completely different roles just because the pieces around them had changed. We weren\u2019t rebuilding from nothing, exactly (after all, we\u2019d just won our league the year before), but we were close enough that we had to make real decisions about who we wanted to be as a program, not just who we wanted to add.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
And this is the part that I think matters most, and it\u2019s a little counterintuitive: the process doesn\u2019t start with identifying good players. It starts with deciding how you want to play. Do you want to be a ball-control team? Do you want to be more physical? Within your physicality, would you rather be strong or fast? How fast or slow do you want to play? Do you prioritize defense or offense? Those questions come first, and everything downstream depends on getting an honest answer to them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Once we had that, the sequence went something like this: first we settled on a style of play, then we identified the traits that style actually required, then we figured out which systems would let us maximize those traits, then we built out player profiles that fit inside those systems, and only at the very end did we start looking at actual players who fit those profiles and who we could realistically get. A good player, in isolation, doesn\u2019t mean anything in this framework. A good player for this identity is the only question that matters.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
For us, that meant landing on a ball-control offense built around speed and quick athleticism \u2014 which in practice often meant preferring undersized kids at certain positions and roles because they were faster and could play at the tempo we wanted. Part of that decision was our head coach\u2019s own history and preferred style. But part of it was the data, and this is the piece I think is genuinely useful for Juve: at our current level, the numbers didn\u2019t show a clear benefit to playing that way \u2014 but they didn\u2019t show a drawback, either. But at the level we actually wanted to compete at, the benefits were real and tangible. So we weren\u2019t optimizing for the highest floor right now. We were building for the ceiling we were trying to reach, even though it meant no real short-term edge for the choice we made.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Getting to that identity wasn\u2019t some clean, unanimous moment, either \u2014 and I don\u2019t want to pretend it was. Everyone in the room had their own opinion about how we should proceed. Our head coach, our assistants, and I all had different ideas and reasons to support them. We looked at what the numbers said about which styles tended to win, talked about what we could and couldn\u2019t replicate at our level, argued a little, and then our head coach made the final call. And once that call was made, everyone else\u2019s job \u2014 mine included \u2014 was to get behind it and pursue it as hard as we could, even the people who\u2019d argued for something different in the room.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
It\u2019s worth being precise about the order things happened in, too, because I think it\u2019s the part that maps onto Juve\u2019s actual problem most directly. Our head coach wasn\u2019t hired into this process \u2014 he was already entering his third year with us when the retool happened. Most of the players who left had been recruited by the staff he\u2019d replaced. So he\u2019d spent his first two years meshing his preferred style with a roster he\u2019d inherited rather than built. The retool is what finally gave him a cleaner slate to do it his way. In other words: identity came first for him too, it just took two years to actually get there. Juve, from what I can tell, has largely skipped that step and gone straight to acquiring pieces without ever settling the question those pieces were supposed to answer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The parallel isn\u2019t exact, obviously \u2014 I was in a college program where the head coach was the top decision-maker, which isn\u2019t how Juve\u2019s org chart works at all. But the closest approximation I can draw is this: the decision about identity and process should be owned by the people at the top of the footballing chart. In Juve\u2019s case that\u2019s Giovanni Carnevali first, then down through Frederic Massara and his staff, then down to the manager and his staff.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
There\u2019s a real wrinkle in applying this to Juve right now, though, and I don\u2019t want to skip past it: Juve already has a manager, and he\u2019s entering his first full season. That\u2019s not a clean slate. I think the answer is that the technical staff should still decide how they want to play first, in the long term, regardless of who the manager is. What I don\u2019t think they should do is choose a long-term style specifically because it meshes with the manager they already have. Maybe Spalletti is a long-term fit for how they want this team to look, if his approach lines up with where they want to go \u2014 and that\u2019s great if it happens. But it\u2019s also fine if he isn\u2019t, and I\u2019d rather see the club commit to the right identity and find out the manager doesn\u2019t fit it than shape the identity around him just because he\u2019s already in the building.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
None of us will ever truly know what their process looks like from the outside. But I think there\u2019s a specific thing worth watching for \u2014 not which names get linked, but whether the names that get linked start looking like they came from an identity instead of an opportunity. If we\u2019re actually building toward something, I\u2019d expect to start seeing similar profiles show up across the rumor mill \u2014 defenders who do similar things well, even if to varying degrees, and attackers who share real traits with each other. They don\u2019t need to be carbon copies. But if none of the players we\u2019re linked with look alike at all, that\u2019s a sign there\u2019s no profile being targeted in the first place. Randal Kolo Muani and Tarik Muharemovi\u0107 \u2014 to me \u2014 read as pieces that continue the status quo. That might change. It might just be that the vision exists and the rumor mill hasn\u2019t caught up to it yet \u2014 that happens all the time, in theory at least.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
But if the summer ends and the additions still look like a grab bag instead of a build, that\u2019s the signal, to me, that the identity question never actually got answered before the recruitment started.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
My biggest fear here isn\u2019t that this staff tries something new and it doesn\u2019t work. Honestly, I\u2019d take that. Failing in a new way is a sign of progress even when it\u2019s not the outcome anyone wanted \u2014 it means the people making decisions actually learned something from the last several years and tried to be different because of it. What worries me is the other outcome: that the process looks the same as it always has, just with new names attached to it. New sporting director, new chief executive, same underlying habit of chasing talent first and figuring out the fit later. That\u2019s the version of this that would tell me nothing\u2019s actually changed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n