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It was an oddly coy way to announce Serie A’s first sacking this season. “Igor Tudor is no longer the manager of Juventus,” read the Turin club’s social media post on Monday – as though this had happened by accident or mutual consent. The Bianconeri had not, in fact, lost him down the back of the sofa, but instead relieved him of his duties after an eight-game winless run.
That was their longest dry stretch since 2009. Claudio Ranieri got the boot back then, and it was no surprise to see Tudor meet the same fate now. Juventus had failed to score a goal in his final four matches, culminating in a 1-0 loss to Lazio on Sunday night. “I’m living in the present,” he insisted afterward. “I don’t give a stuff about the future.” Yet it came for him the next day all the same.
Did he ever stand a chance? Appointed to replace Thiago Motta on a short-term deal last March, Tudor achieved the objective set for him: securing Champions League qualification. Still, Juventus’s decision to extend his contract felt like it was made of expediency more than conviction.
After the season ended, Juve had less than a month to prepare for the Club World Cup. By the time they let go of sporting director Cristiano Giuntoli – who carried the can for appointing Motta and poor choices in the transfer market – then replaced him Damien Comolli, that was down to a couple of weeks.
Tudor was reluctant to continue through the summer tournament without knowing he had a longer-term contract in place. Comolli, who took up his position on 1 June, can hardly have explored every option as thoroughly as he would have liked before extending the manager’s deal on the 13th.
Does he regret that choice now? Comolli has had to scramble on a tighter timeframe to replace Tudor this week. Juventus are expected to confirm the appointment of the former Italy manager Luciano Spalletti imminently. In the meantime, Massimo Brambilla, head coach of their NextGen side, led the first team against Udinese on Wednesday evening.
“I had one training session,” Brambilla told Dazn. “Two days with the team in total. On Monday morning I led a practice for the under-23s, then in the afternoon I came here.”
He must have done something right. Juventus broke their winless streak with a 3-1 victory. They were aided by some generous defending, Udinese giving away penalties early and late on that were converted by Dusan Vlahovic and Kenan Yildiz respectively. Still, this was the most threatening they had looked going forward in weeks.
Brambilla’s main innovation was to allow Vlahovic to start in a front two, a dynamic which has often seemed to suit him better, playing alongside Loïs Openda where typically Tudor had preferred a lone striker. The selection of Filip Kostic and Andrea Cambiaso as wing-backs also set a more attacking intent for a side that has often used Pierre Kalulu – previously a central defender – on the right.
The greater impact may simply have been a different tone. Tudor cut an increasingly agitated figure in recent weeks, his exasperation at every wrong touch made explicit by reactions on the touchline. Allied to the frustrations of supporters – some of whom whistled at the Juventus squad when they came out to warm up on Wednesday – it made a heavy atmosphere for the players.
It was not always thus. Juventus began this Serie A season with three straight wins. The third was a barmy, brilliant 4-3 victory over rivals Inter – believed by many to be the best team in the country. For an encore, Tudor’s side drew 4-4 against Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League.
The impression was of a team imperfect but irresistibly alive. Where Motta had done too much, failing in his attempts to implement the fluid positional interchange that brought him success with Bologna, Tudor was keeping it simple with man-to-man football and direct lines of attack.
As quick as they came, though, the goals dried up. Juventus signed Openda and Jonathan David this summer to add depth to their attack but Tudor’s preferred 3-4-2-1 had them rotating with Vlahovic as the No 9. Nobody had time to catch their rhythm. The most consistent performer in the attack has been the 20-year-old Yildiz but even he has had hot and cold moments swapping between No 10 and the left wing.
Tudor did eventually change to a back four against Como, then a 3-5-2 against Lazio, but results only got worse. In every shape, his team wanted to press high but often allowed itself to become stretched.
The manager was frequently tetchy, accusing the press of exaggerating every negative result. Before the game against Como he sought to frame Juventus almost as an underdog, claiming his opposite number Cesc Fàbregas had been given all the players he wanted in the summer while his own options were far more restricted.
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It was an unacceptable framing, for a club whose whole identity was always “just winning”, though not without a grain of truth. Juventus’s transfer spend this summer went mostly on upgrading existing loans into permanent deals.
Serie A results and fixtures
ShowAtalanta 1-1 Milan, Bologna 0-0 Torino, Como 3-1 Verona, Genoa 0-2 Cremonese, Inter 3-0 Fiorentina, Juventus 3-1 Udinese, Lecce 0-1 Napoli, Roma 2-1 Parma
Thursday Cagliari v Sassuolo (5.30pm GMT), Pisa v Lazio (7.45pm)
They are still paying for mistakes made by Giuntoli, who splashed more than €200m in the previous two transfer windows. Almost a quarter of that went on Douglas Luiz, Nicolás González and Teun Koopmeiners. The first two playing elsewhere and the latter is yet to show anything close to the form that he did for Atalanta.
But Juventus were making poor choices long before they appointed Giuntoli two years ago. Many still point to the €100m signing of a 33-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo as the moment when a club who dominated Italian football through the 2010s lost sight of what had made them successful. But the Portuguese did score more than 100 goals in three seasons. Vlahovic, signed for €80m at the start of 2022, has 63 to date.
It will fall to Spalletti to make sense of a squad whose overall potential still feels hard to assess. There are some gems here – Yildiz most of all, but also Khéphren Thuram and Francisco Conceição as talents to develop. Bremer is one of the best defenders in Serie A, if he can ever stay fit.
Listening to Brambilla speak at full time on Wednesday though, it was hard not to wonder how different things could look had the planning been a little more coherent. He coached Yildiz in the NextGen side and hailed the player’s development. “He’s grown in his physicality and self-awareness,” said the coach. “But he always had quality and personality.”
If only Juventus had shown the same patience with some of their other NextGen talents, where might they be? Instead, they sold many to fund the purchase of players who have flopped. Dean Huijsen now starts for Real Madrid. Matias Soulé is the star of a Roma team joint-first in the league, six clear of Juve.
Spalletti cannot undo these mistakes. He arrives with a point to prove after being sacked by Italy, the chip he has long worn on his shoulder only deepened by a feeling that he was treated unfairly by both the Italian Football Federation and the nation’s press.
His coaching credentials are strong – the man who led Napoli to their first Scudetto in 33 years, who before that won a league title with Zenit in Russia and authored great tactical innovations before all that at Roma. Still, the task before him is significant. Juventus’s problems run deeper than the identity of the man on the bench.
