On Monday, following a 1-0 away defeat to Lazio this weekend, Juventus sacked manager Igor Tudor. Reportedly, there’s no replacement immediately lined up — they’re 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 past six years.
Juventus represent a case study in what not to do, but also serve as a reminder that poor decisions in the recent past impact the present and the future, narrowing the ability of replacements to make optimal choices. Their next managerial move will determine if they descend further down their spiral, or if they finally start to rid their system of the poisons built up over the years.
Tudor paid the price not just for his own mistakes, but also those made by the guys who came before him. Not just coaches either, everyone from sporting directors to chief executives is, to varying degrees, responsible. As, of course, are many of the players.
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Tudor took over as an interim boss in March of last year, replacing Thiago Motta. (The latter was a horrendous choice who stuck around too long.) They were one point out of the Champions League places in Serie A and his brief was to steer them into the top four, which he did (by a point).
In the meantime, the club were going to figure out what to do for 2025-26 — except there was nobody to do the “figuring out” because Cristiano Giuntoli, the chief decision-maker, was already on his way out of the club less than two years into a five-year contract. His replacement, Damien Comolli, took over on June 1, and with the Club World Cup around the corner, he opted to stick with Tudor for the following season as well.
The thinking in retaining Tudor was that there just wasn’t enough time — five or six weeks — to identify a long-term coach ahead of the 2025-26 season, and they didn’t want to rush into a commitment. Hindsight is 20/20, but obviously that was the wrong decision because now it’s nearly Halloween and they have five or six days (not weeks) to find somebody.
Comolli and his recruitment team got to work on the summer transfers, but here too their hands were somewhat tied. If you look on Transfermarkt, you’ll note that Juventus spent €137 million ($160m), which sounds like a lot until you realize that €105.8m ($123m) was to make permanent moves for players who were already at the club on loans: Chico Conceicao, Pierre Kalulu, Lloyd Kelly, Nico González (who then immediately loaned out 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 in the summer. A classic case of the present burdened by the mistakes of the past.
Still, the club made four signings and here, you wonder how much they considered Tudor’s football credo.
Wide players Eden Zhegrova and João Mário made just two league starts between them. The other two arrivals were forwards: free agent Jonathan David (who signed a hefty contract that made him the club’s second-highest paid player) and Loïs Openda. Their return? Six combined league starts and one goal. It soon became obvious that Tudor, a stickler for 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 so many minutes to dole out. Considering his trio of center forwards make up roughly 20% of Juve’s wage bill, that’s terrible resource allocation.
Tudor’s system, of course, also means three central defenders and there are only five in the squad, the bare minimum for a side competing in the Champions League. They make up less than 12% of the wage bill despite the fact there are three times as many of them on the pitch as there are center forwards. Again: resource allocation.
Comolli, you imagine, would probably say: “Gab, what do you want me to do? The club made more than half a billion Euros in losses in the past five seasons. Guys who came before me made decisions and commitments, and now I have to deal with the consequences of that.”
And, of course, he’d be right. The combination of COVID-19 and short-term thinking led to the accounting games and “buy now, pay later” shenanigans of the loan-plus-obligation deals that are severely limiting the club here and now. The fact that Filip Kostic, Daniele Rugani and Arek Milik (who last played football of any kind in June 2024) are still in the squad tells its own story. (Fun fact: Arthur is still a Juve player too although at least he’s on loan elsewhere, so you’re not reminded of past follies every time you see him.)
Then there are the ones who got away. Clubs make mistakes all the time when it comes to homegrown players — heck, Morgan Rogers and Cole Palmer were at Manchester City, Declan Rice was at Chelsea — but Juve raise it to an art form of futility.
In the past 18 months, Juventus let Matìas Soulè, Dean Huijsen, Koni De Winter, Moise Kean and Nicolo’ Fagioli leave for combined fees of less than €85m; now their transfer valuations are two-and-a-half times that. (None of them, other than Kean, got a legitimate sustained shot at 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 raid in order to fill accounting holes elsewhere.
We can talk about stability and long-term squad-building all we like, but first we need to recognize that, a bit like pollution, it always future generations who pay the price for past mistakes. Juve’s recent past is littered with so many blunders that whoever is in charge today is somewhat strait-jacketed.
And this context is what makes Juve’s next steps so interesting. They have a legitimate core of young(ish) talent locked up 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 free agent-to-be Vlahovic too if you get him to stick around at a reasonable price (i.e., a heck of a lot less than his expiring deal). But it will take time to cycle the toxins of past bad decisions out of the system and that’s 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 bit, learn from the past and you’ll have a brighter future.