How did Juventus become so bad?

So I will shoot straight with you. Signing Ronaldo did not “lead” to Juve’s decline. He did not cause Juventus to go from perennial champions to Champions League mediocrity. Lest we forget, Juve won the league in his first two seasons, and he is the fastest player in Juve’s storied history to 100 goals.

Yet signing Cristiano was indeed a mistake. The reason isn’t because Ronaldo was a flop or made Juve worse. If anything, he delayed a decline that was in the making.

Juventus signed Ronaldo for 100 million euros from Real Madrid, investing heavily in his wages and transfer fee out of a belief that he would lead them “over the hump” in the Champions League. After all, Real and Barcelona had thwarted some excellent Juve sides prior to the summer 2018 transfer window, and the thinking was that if Juve signed one of their superstars and the most popular footballer on the planet, he would take them to the next level on and off the pitch.

Off the pitch that happened. On the pitch? Juventus thought they had a UCL title contender that would win it all with Ronaldo, but the reality is that they vastly underestimated their declining squad.

The saying goes that it is easy to get to the top but harder to stay on top. Real Madrid’s unprecedented three-peat Champions League success, with Ronaldo as its centerpiece player, may have caused people to forget this. Certainly, Juve did. They avoided focusing on the future of their squad and instead made ill-advised signings, jumping into the budget bin for free-agent midfielders nobody else wanted. Juve were forced to sign them to bloated contracts in free agency that, later, nobody else would want, so if their idea was “plusvalenza”, it failed miserably.

Ronaldo would have been the signing Juventus hoped for if they had done their due preparation in the years prior to maintain the health of the squad. Instead, the Bianconeri were a sinking ship. What you do now impacts the team in two or three years, so it would take two years until the decline became evident, just as it will take Juve time to get out of this hole.

Pinning everything on Cristiano is overly simplistic and makes an individual the target, when the reality is that Juve’s management sowed the seeds of their own demise through their own complacency. Ronaldo ended up being a Band-aid to their problems, rather than the Champions League-winner they had in mind.

Juventus made too many blunders on the transfer market

The crux of the issue for Juventus comes down to investment. Juve made all the wrong moves, and even when they made the right moves to sign top young talent, their follow-through and squad development flaws undid those positives.

Let’s start with the obvious. Juventus haphazardly signed well-known free agents without a real plan for them or an understanding of how good they actually were in relation to their wages. Thus, they ended up being stuck with Aaron Ramsey and Adrien Rabiot, who were overpaid, difficult to move, and not remotely near starting-level quality for a club with Juve’s ambitions. Going from Andrea Pirlo, Paul Pogba, and Claudio Marchisio to those guys in midfield is quite the drop-off.

Nothing, however, tops their decision to trade João Cancelo to Manchester City for Danilo and cash. To this day, it is a transfer that infuriates Juventini, even as they have come to appreciated the understated skill-set that the oft-misunderstood Danilo brings to the table. Though Danilo is a good footballer in his own right, he is nowhere near Cancelo in terms of how he can impact the game. The difference in money between the transfer – about 28 million euros – does not come close to making up for the gap in quality. Juventus let go of one of the best fullbacks and wide playmakers in the world.

On the subject of signings, Juve brought in Cristian Romero, Merih Demiral, and Matthijs de Ligt at center back in the 2019 summer transfer window. In total, they invested around 140 million euros on center backs. All three of these players are among the better young central defenders in Europe right now. None of them play for Juventus, whose defense went from being one of the best in Europe to being depleted of depth and very inconsistent. You could argue they made money on the de Ligt and Demiral transfers, but the reality is that the slight profit is meaningless when you compare it to the money they could lose in 2022/23 if they fail to make it to the Champions League due to a sub-optimal defense.

Though Juve failed to make the most of those young center backs, their biggest whiff on young talent has to be Dejan Kulusevski, with Rodrigo Bentancur a close second. Both players are shining at Fabio Paratici’s Tottenham. Kulusevski’s brilliance is especially obvious. Recall that he was named the best young player in Serie A during the 2019/20 season while at Parma.  And what did Juve do with him? Precisely nothing. They bought him for 35 million euros from Atalanta, watched him shine at Parma, gave up on him after 1.5 seasons in Turin, and shipped him off to Spurs for just 30 million euros. Not only did they lose money, but Kulu has very likely doubled his transfer value due to his success in the Premier League.

There is a pattern here. Juventus treated the transfer market like FIFA career mode. They made random free agent signings, bought and sold young players without believing in them, and gave players a sense that there was no direction at the club. Hence why de Ligt himself wanted to leave for the more stable Bayern. His quotes about Juve may seem harsh, but the truth is a bitter pill to swallow. The Old Lady’s standard has slipped, and their transfer misdeeds show that.

Firing Andrea Pirlo and hiring Max Allegri

Andrea Pirlo was an unconventional hire in 2020, and he may have been just as unflattered by the timing of Juve’s inevitable downturn as Cristiano Ronaldo was. The legendary regista had some bright ideas, which helped Federico Chiesa, Weston McKennie, and the veteran Danilo shine. But he also had some flat-out bizarre ideas that negatively impacted some of the other midfielders. Dejan Kulusevski was in a particularly bad spot under Pirlo, playing as an inverted wide right midfielder in a 4-4-2, which is a position that should not exist in any scheme.

Hiring Pirlo was seemingly a move towards the future and an admission of the obvious: Juventus needed to rebuild with a different identity. When Juve qualified for the Champions League on the last day of the season and hoisted the Coppa Italia, it seemed like Pirlo had done enough to continue his new movement and get the grace to grow at the club.

Instead, Juventus got cold feet, panicked, fired him, and went back to Max Allegri, the most known commodity.

Allegri has been a disaster thus far for Juve, and it seems like he is getting worse. While Juve have backed him significantly in each transfer window with signings like Manuel Locatelli, Dušan Vlahović, Denis Zakaria, Ángel Di María, Paul Pogba, Leandro Paredes, Arkadiusz Milik, Gleison Bremer, and Filip Kostić, Juventus are literally worse right now than they were at any point under Pirlo or Maurizio Sarri.

Juve have become an eyesore to watch. They cannot hold onto leads, their attacking football is non-existent, and they, quite frankly, play like cowards. The mighty Juventus – Italy’s most prestigious club that can still “pull” the league’s very best talents like Locatelli and Vlahović – play on the pitch as if they were a team fighting relegation. It is embarrassing and that style of play, combined with the lack of results, makes Allegri’s situation untenable.

He cannot make any excuses about management either. The players Juventus have signed are all excellent. Injuries are hampering some of them, specifically Pogba, but most of them are healthy and available. Allegri is failing to maximize them. On top of that, none of the existing players from previous managers look any better under Allegri than they did before. There is no progress, nor is there improvement due to the new players.

Juventus are none the better for having dumped Pirlo for Allegri, and they are now saddled with a manager who will cost 36 million euros to get rid of. As much as Ronaldo was painted as a burden for his wages, it is much better to have a quality footballer who can be transferred for 15 million euros than a manager who is essentially immovable. Allegri’s contract situation is even worse than Rabiot’s or Ramsey’s, too.

But there is every reason to believe Juventus will improve

It sounds strange to end this piece on a positive note, in view of how poorly Juventus have started the season, their shocking performances on the pitch, and their mediocre results in the previous two seasons. But look at the players Juve have signed. There is a copious amount of talent in the squad, specifically Chiesa and Vlahović. The young talent they have in the ranks is exciting, such as the trio of Fabio Miretti, Nicolò Rovella, and Nicolò Fagioli in midfield.

With a new manager, more of a focus on the young players, and a tactical system that accentuates the strengths of the team’s new signings and biggest stars, there is no reason why Juve cannot ascend again and outmatch their much-improved rivals in the cities of Rome, Milan, and Naples. However, there is much work to be done, even going beyond replacing Allegri with the right manager. Juve declined as a result of years of bad decisions, so it will take years of good decisions for the club to get back on track.

Let’s not forget, though, Juventus is as prestigious as any club in Europe. It is often said, such as by Romelu Lukaku in his infamous Sky Sport interview, that Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Bayern are the three clubs in Europe you have to play for if they come knocking. For many, such as Vlahović and Locatelli, Juventus can be seen as a fourth. After all, Cristiano Ronaldo chose Juventus as his destination after Real Madrid, and it wasn’t just because of the tax-friendly rules in Italian football.