How Juventus are building the world's best talent pipeline
Inside the Next Gen model giving a hamstrung club hope.
Juventus have never been associated with academy development. Yes, players have popped up here and there: Claudio Marchisio, Ciro Immobile, Moise Kean and Sebastian Giovinco come to mind. But the club’s academy has never been relied upon to constantly churn out first team products. Promotions have been ad hoc. Giovinco and Immobile barely even broached the first team.
However, reality bites. Football in 2023 isn't football in 2010, or 2000, or 1990. Juventus are owned by a massively wealthy conglomerate called EXOR, controlled by the Agnelli family, but where resources available to the club were once unbridled, they are now constrained by Financial Fair Play. Those constraints have never been felt more strongly than in this very moment. After a decade of unprecedented dominance in Italy throughout the 2010s, Juve are coming back down to reality, transitioning out an old, average, overpaid squad and looking for renewal.
The downward trajectory has been bumpy, with financial and legal problems far too complex and tedious to explain here, but largely stemming from the club’s decision to sign Cristiano Ronaldo in 2018 and eventually culminating in a points deduction last season. This bumped the club out of the Champions League places, before UEFA chimed in to subsequently boot the club out of the Conference League, too.
The sense is that this brings the club back to square one. There are still too many old, average, overpaid players in the squad. Max Allegri’s football could be kindly described as uninspiring. The club is 12 months removed from the entire board of directors resigning en masse. Nothing seemed to be going right at the start of this season.
Except one thing: Juventus Next Gen, the club’s under-23 side founded in 2018, the same year that Ronaldo was signed.
While the era of Andrea Agnelli was filled with trophies and ended in farce, if there is one thing that Juve fans should be grateful for, it should be the massively increased focus on the club’s academy set-up during his tenure.
Speaking just prior to his controversial departure for the club, Agnelli set out his vision for what the Next Gen project could bring to the club.
“With perseverance, dedication and passion, [academy graduates] can make up 50 to 60% of the first team in five to eight years with clear, great benefits, while maintaining competitiveness at national and international levels.”
From a very poor academy set-up, Juventus are on the precipice of boasting one of the best in the world. It’s an academy with a distinct style, and with interesting drawbacks and advantages.
Its advent is key to a future Juventus revival, and I've narrowed down its path to success at first team level through four key points.
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