Juventus rebuild could get worse before it gets better

On Monday, following a 1-0 away defeat to Lazio at the weekend, Juventus sacked manager Igor Tudor. Apparently no replacement is immediately planned – they are considering both former Italy boss Luciano Spalletti and Raffaele Palladino, who took Fiorentina to sixth place last season. Whoever takes over will become the sixth permanent manager in the last six years.

Juventus represent a case study in what not to do, but also serve as a reminder that poor decisions made in the recent past impact the present and future, reducing the ability of replacements to make optimal choices. Their next managerial decision will determine whether they will descend further in their spiral or whether they will finally begin to rid their system of the poisons accumulated over the years.

Tudor paid the price not only for his own mistakes, but also for those made by the guys who came before him. Not just coaches: everyone from athletic directors to business leaders is, to varying degrees, responsible. Like of course many players.

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Tudor took over as interim manager in March last year, replacing Thiago Motta. (The latter was a horrible choice that stayed too long.) They were one point out of the Champions League places in Serie A and his goal was to put them in the top four, which he did (by one point).

In the meantime, the club was going to figure out what to do for 2025-2026 – except there was no one to do it because Cristiano Giuntoli, the main decision-maker, was already set to leave the club less than two years after signing a five-year contract. His replacement, Damien Comolli, took office on June 1 and, with the Club World Cup approaching, he opted to stay with Tudor for the following season as well.

The thinking in retaining Tudor was that there simply wasn’t enough time — five or six weeks — to identify a long-term coach before the 2025-26 season, and they didn’t want to rush into a commitment. Hindsight is 20/20, but it was obviously a bad decision because now it’s almost Halloween and they have five or six days (not weeks) to find someone.

Comolli and his recruiting team got to work on summer transfers, but there too their hands were somewhat tied. If you look on Transfermarkt, you’ll notice that Juventus spent 137 million euros ($160 million), which seems like a lot until you realize that 105.8 million euros ($123 million) was intended to make permanent transfers for players who were already on loan at the club: Chico Conceicao, Pierre Kalulu, Lloyd Kelly, Nico González (who then immediately loaned to Atletico Madrid) and Michele Di Gregorio. In most cases, Juve had an obligation to make the deals permanent, so in fact there wasn’t much room to operate this summer. A classic case of the present weighed down by the mistakes of the past.

Yet the club signed four recruits and here one wonders how much they considered Tudor’s footballing credo.

Full-backs Eden Zhegrova and João Mário have only made two league starts between them. The other two arrivals were strikers: free agent Jonathan David (who signed a big contract that made him the club’s second highest paid player) and Loïs Openda. Their return? Six cumulative starts in the league and one goal. It quickly became clear that Tudor, a fan of his 3-4-2-1 system, was only going to play one center forward at a time and with Dusan Vlahovic sticking around, there were only a limited number of minutes to distribute. Considering his center forward trio makes up around 20% of Juve’s wage bill, that’s a terrible allocation of resources.

Tudor’s system, of course, also means three centre-backs and there are only five in the team, the bare minimum for a team competing in the Champions League. They represent less than 12% of the payroll, although there are three times more of them on the pitch than center forwards. Again: resource allocation.

Comolli, you imagine, would probably say: “Gab, what do you want me to do? The club has lost more than half a billion euros in the last five seasons. The guys before me made decisions and commitments, and now I have to face the consequences.”

And of course he would be right. The combination of COVID-19 and short-term thinking has led to the accounting games and “buy now, pay later” shenanigans of loan-plus-bond deals that severely limit the club in the here and now. The fact that Filip Kostic, Daniele Rugani and Arek Milik (who last played football in June 2024) are still in the team tells its own story. (Fun fact: Arthur is still a Juve player too, although he’s at least on loan elsewhere, so you’re not reminded of past craziness every time you see him.)

And then there are those who escaped. Clubs make mistakes all the time when it comes to homegrown players – hell, Morgan Rogers and Cole Palmer were at Manchester City, Declan Rice was at Chelsea – but Juve turn it into a futile art form.

In the last 18 months, Juventus have let Matìas Soulè, Dean Huijsen, Koni De Winter, Moise Kean and Nicolo’ Fagioli leave for a combined fee of less than €85m; Today, their transfer values ​​are two and a half times higher. (None of them, except Kean, got a legitimate, sustained chance in the first team.) It feels like they spent a fortune on their B team – Juve Next Gen, who play in the third tier – not as a player development tool, but rather as a piggy bank to be raided in order to plug accounting holes elsewhere.

We can talk all we want about stability and long-term team building, but we must first recognize that, much like pollution, it is always future generations who pay the price for past mistakes. Juve’s recent past is littered with so many mistakes that whoever is in charge today is somewhat constrained.

And it’s this context that makes Juve’s next steps so interesting. They have a legitimate core of young talent tied to long-term contracts that you can build around: Kenan Yildiz (20), David (25), Khephren Thuram (24), Conceicao (22), Andrea Cambiaso (25), Kalulu (25) – maybe also future free agent Vlahovic if you keep him at a reasonable price (i.e. much less than his expiring contract). But it will take time to purge the toxins of past bad decisions from the system and that is why the idea of ​​even considering a 66-year-old like Spalletti (leaving aside his disastrous tenure with the national team) would be foolish.

Take your medicine now, suffer a little, learn from the past and you will have a better future.