Will Inter Milan’s dominance continue? Or will Juventus push them for the title after hiring Thiago Motta? How do AC Milan fit into the picture with a new coach? Can Roma get back to the Champions League after a summer of investment? Will Antonio Conte turn things around for Napoli? And where does Bologna stand after losing three key figures?
Let’s break down some of the biggest storylines in Serie A and preview what could be next for arguably world football’s most exciting league as the 2024/25 season begins this coming Saturday, Aug. 17.
Who will win Serie A?
Why don’t we just tackle the most important question first? For the past two seasons, the Serie A title race hasn’t been so much of a battle as it has been a demolition, with one team rising out of nowhere to obliterate the rest of the competition.
In 2022/23, it was a well-designed Napoli squad that lambasted the rest of Italian football, winning the league with plenty of time to spare and an eventual 16-point advantage over Lazio, finishing in a surprising second.
Last season, the Serie A title race was even more clear-cut, as Inter Milan eventually eviscerated pretenders Juventus, who didn’t even finish in second. AC Milan, Inter’s actual biggest rivals, placed second to the Nerazzurri…by a whopping 19 points.
Simone Inzaghi had Italian football in a chokehold with the league’s best goalkeepers, the league’s best striker duo, by far the league’s best midfield, and quite obviously the league’s best defense (sorry, Bremer and Danilo, but two against four isn’t much of a fight).
Inter reloaded this summer, too, adding an intriguing talent at striker in Iranian international Mehdi Taremi, who already has a sick Champions League bicycle kick against Chelsea to his name, as well as two 20-goal seasons with Porto.
Their embarrassment of riches at all levels makes them the class of Serie A, and, at this point, it would be almost foolish to pick against them. In fact, it’s hard to find a logical reason to pick against a team that won the league by nearly 20 points and got better in the transfer window.
Can Juventus recover?
Juventus finally fired Max Allegri after another dismal season, because finishing third place and returning to the Champions League isn’t worth celebrating when A) You finished 20 points behind your biggest rivals and B) You played some of the worst football in the entire league.
Beyond just hiring the most in-demand manager in Italian football in Thiago Motta after he nearly led Bologna – of all teams – to the Champions League, Juve have a new goalkeeper, Michele Di Gregorio, and two midfield upgrades in Khephren Thuram and Douglas Luiz.
At the same time, though, Juventus lost out on two vital transfer battles, failing to sign center backs Jean-Clair Todibo and Riccardo Calafiori, both of whom left to Premier League clubs and proved two things 1) Juventus don’t have the clout they used to and 2) Juventus don’t show enough urgency for top targets.
And the worse part is, Juventus did nothing to give Dusan Vlahovic any kind of assistance in the attack, even selling Matias Soule, who could have easily been convinced to stay after the club fired Allegri.
Now, Thiago Motta has done the same as Allegri and decided to discard Juve’s most talented player Federico Chiesa, even though the main reason why Juve hired him in the first place was so that he could get more out of attacking stars like Chiesa, Soule, Vlahovic, and Kenan Yildiz.
Motta had great ideas for Bologna, but he could easily end up being a one-season wonder, and it is a massive red flag that he isn’t even willing to give a top talent like Chiesa a chance.
Juventus are the same club they have been for the last five years. Aging, out of ideas, incompetent on the transfer market, and nothing more than a fallen giant destined to remain in the purgatory of mediocrity they created for themselves. If Serie A’s other big clubs weren’t so disappointing, you wonder if their starting XI would be good enough for even the Europa League.
Is AC Milan improving?
AC Milan have replaced Olivier Giroud with Alvaro Morata, who is, in theory, an upgrade, albeit probably a modest one and not at all the most important upgrade Milan could have made this summer.
The Rossoneri parted ways with Stefano Pioli in trade for Lille’s Paulo Fonseca, who relates well to players and has had some past coaching success but actually has a worse resume than Pioli, who literally won the Scudetto for Milan a few years ago.
At best, Fonseca for Pioli is a lateral move, and that pretty much sums up what Milan have done this summer window. They knew they needed to make serious upgrades in the midfield and defense to bridge a wide gap between themselves and Inter Milan at the top of the table.
And what did they do this summer? Absolutely nothing. Milan have been just as problematic as Juventus on the transfer market, signing no true star talents, failing to upgrade important positions, and missing out on clear priority targets at their biggest positions of need.
At this rate, it feels like Milan and Juventus aren’t serious about sustaining success as elite clubs anymore and are just looking to inflate their transfer profit totals. Inter Milan look like the only serious club in Italian football right now, and fans of both Juve and Milan absolutely must demand better from their woeful management structures.
Roma’s attack
At least Roma showed some ambition this summer, and they have put together the best summer window of any club in Calcio – and it honestly isn’t even close. That’s because Roma landed two very big fish in the attack, beating Atletico Madrid to Girona’s Pichichi-winning striker Artem Dovbyk while they landed 2022/23 Ligue 1 Player of the Season contender Enzo Le Fee, and, best of all, signed breakout star Matias Soule from Juventus.
That gives Roma an attacking quartet of Dovbyk, Soule, Lorenzo Pellegrini, and Paulo Dybala, who was one of the best players in Serie A in the 2022/23 season – the same season Roma nearly won the Europa League under Jose Mourinho,
Funnily enough, Roma are stronger now without Mourinho, as club icon Daniele De Rossi looks like the perfect manager for the Giallorossi. He understands the ideals of the club and does prioritize defense like Mourinho, except he has the attacking quality on his side that the Special One did not.
Pellegrini can create and put in the dirty work, Soule is a spitting image of Dybala as an inverted left-footed playmaker, and Dovbyk is a big No. 9 who can play as a target man and score potentially 30 in Serie A if he can bag 24 against LaLiga low blocks.
Roma’s attack, on paper, looks significantly better than Juve’s and can rival Milan’s. It will be a fight to finish ahead of Atalanta in the Champions League battle and Napoli will surely rebound, but if Juventus drop off further after arguably getting worse offensively, the Giallorossi have more than a fighting chance at the elusive top-four finish.
Antonio Conte doomed
Napoli went from first to tenth and were one of the most disappointing teams in Serie A last season, running through managers after the ill-advised hiring of Rudi Garcia to replace Luciano Spalletti, who left Naples despite being the best coach in Italy because you-know-who is literally impossible to work with.
Their management were their undoing again, and Napoli were also hurt by Victor Osimhen’s injuries and Kim Min-jae’s departure to Bayern Munich, with no center back there to adequately replace the actual best defender in Serie A.
Napoli were poor in all phases, as everyone declined except for Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, though even he wasn’t absolved from going from an MVP player to a merely “great winger” because of the incompetence around him.
Boldly hiring Antonio Conte probably won’t solve anything and may just hasten the inevitable clash between strong manager and strong-willed CEO, because, as we all know, Conte doesn’t take kindly to a lack of investment – and Napoli are the masters at pulling the rug from underneath a great manager.
Already, Napoli have done very little to support Conte. Alessandro Buongiorno was a great – if not, necessary – signing as the best performing center back in Serie A last season for Torino, but there only other signings were veteran attacking fullback Leonardo Spinazzola for free and the unproven U23 center back Rafa Marin from Real Madrid at a fee of less than 15 million euros.
Nothing against those solid signings for the back line, but Napoli still haven’t answered the Osimhen question – and after how poorly Romelu Lukaku played in Serie A for Roma last season, it’s fair to wonder where Napoli’s attacking strength would lie with that striker swap. And the midfield needs more help around Stanislav Lobotka, who showed his true quality at the Euros.
Conte’s tenure at Napoli appears to already be going in the same direction as his ill-fated spell in North London. Napoli aren’t serious about building one of the best projects in Europe, because the second they had finally achieved it, they literally went into the mid-table. Buongiorno alone isn’t going to get them back into Italy’s top four.
The Bologna fairytale
Bologna finished fifth last season and were agonizingly close to qualifying for the Champions League, becoming the story of the season in European football under Thiago Motta with top young talents Joshua Zirkzee and Riccardo Calafiori fulfilling their potential as stars.
But Motta is now coaching Juve, while Calafiori and Zirkzee moved to two of the most expensive clubs in the world this past summer. That leaves Bologna without their three biggest figures, but it’s easy to forget that the Rossoblu still have talent within their ranks.
Riccardo Orsolini is one of the best goal-scoring wingers in Serie A on his day, new striker Thijs Dallinga might not be much of a downgrade on Zirkzee, and center back Jhon Lucumi wasn’t far off from Calafiori last season either.
Bologna have enough quality to finish in the top half of the Serie A table, because they did finish 9th in the 2022/23 campaign. Before last season’s 5th-placed finish, Bologna had never finished higher than 7th and the last occurrence was in 2001/02 when a certain Julio Cruz scored 10 goals for them.
It will be a fight to finish in the top half of the table and a fight too great to return to European football next season, but even without Calafiori and Zirkzee, don’t expect Bologna to drop too far in 2024/25.
The new kids on the block
Como are headed for Serie A and have invested heavily this summer in order to stay. Cesc Fabregas is highly intelligent, based on his commentary as a pundit and his play on the pitch for years, and he has some iconic veterans helping him out like former Real Madrid center back Raphael Varane and former Liverpool goalkeeper Pepe Reina.
Also in the mix are Serie A veteran Simone Verdi (likely the star man), former Lecce star right winger Gabriel Strefezza, Patrick Cutrone, former Torino star Andrea Belotti, and their actual best signing, ex-Cagliari breakout center back Alberto Dossena.
Como probably won’t finish in the top half of the table in their first season in Serie A, but it would be even more shocking if they were to head straight back down to Serie B.
Meanwhile, the best dressed club in Italian football are back in Serie A, but Venezia will be hard-pressed to avoid the drop after making minimal investment. They were 20th in their last, lone spell in Serie A, and a similar finish is likely in order.
Finally, Parma are back in Serie A, having last given us some Gervinho delight and a Young Player of the Season award for current Tottenham right winger Dejan Kulusevski.
Parma are a historic Italian club, but, like Venezia, they don’t really have the talent to avoid the drop. They can at least make it interesting, but Parma’s squad is a mere mis-match of unknown veterans tagging along for a ride in the top flight.
The managing editor of The Trivela Effect, Kevin has 15 years of experience in digital media. He covered Real Madrid from 2019-2022 for The Real Champs as a site manager. You can contact him at the site’s official Twitter handle @TrivelaEffect or via the site’s official email thetrivelaeffect@gmail.com.