Two months into the season, several things at Juventus are deeply wrong, and the club needs to find answers fast. I’ll go through them one at a time. The first is the one everyone already knows about: the injury list.
The injury list
The injury list was already long when the season started. Now it’s a crisis. Eight players are out: Kenan Yıldız, Khéphren Thuram, captain Manuel Locatelli, Francisco Conceição, Nico González, Zeki Çelik, Jeff Ekhator and Kamil Grabara. Arkadiusz Milik has been out so long that he was left off the Serie A squad list altogether.
That leaves Luciano Spalletti with very few options, and it has forced him to change the tactics. In recent games we’ve played with a back three, with Randal Kolo Muani and Nick Woltemade starting together up front. But the midfield is missing two of its most important players, Locatelli and Thuram. On the left we’re missing Yıldız, our most creative player and a real game changer, who isn’t expected back until around December.
The goalkeeping situation is just as bad. Grabara arrived on loan from Wolfsburg as Guglielmo Vicario’s backup, started in the Europa League, and then tore his ACL in training in September. He’s out for the season. His replacement is Neto: 37, very experienced, with spells at Valencia, Barcelona, Bournemouth, Arsenal and Juventus itself. But he hasn’t played a competitive game for us yet, and that’s a risk.
The real problem is depth. We don’t have the squad we started the season with, so we can’t rotate. Europa League games are on Thursdays and Serie A games are at the weekend, which leaves barely three days to recover. Tired legs lead to more injuries, and more injuries mean even more tired legs.
Square pegs on both wings
With so many players out, Spalletti has had to play people in positions they aren’t comfortable in. On the right, Weston McKennie is playing wing-back in a 3-5-2, a role that would normally go to Conceição. McKennie isn’t explosive, and he doesn’t cross much or set up the strikers. I don’t like this choice. It takes away our creativity on the right, and I’d expect it to cost us a good share of our expected goals (xG).
The left is no better. Yıldız and Nico González are both out, and Jérémie Boga is only just coming back and isn’t ready for 90 minutes. So Andrea Cambiaso, normally a full-back, is playing as a wing-back there. The right is broken, the left is broken, and that leaves us leaning heavily on central midfield, where we’re short of options too.
A midfield that won’t take risks
Teun Koopmeiners and Douglas Luiz are our two main central midfielders right now, and neither gives us much creativity. Koopmeiners is the more creative of the two. At Atalanta he was a standout, scoring plenty and driving the team’s attack. But Spalletti gives him a lot of defensive work: he drops back to fill the gaps when the center-backs go up for corners and set pieces, so he never really gets to cut loose. Douglas Luiz takes too long on the ball, rarely runs in behind the defense, and sticks to short, safe passes.
That’s one of the biggest problems at Juventus right now. The players filling in for the injured either aren’t creative or don’t have the confidence to take risks and create chances.
So that’s the first issue. A long injury list, a shallow squad and a packed calendar feed each other, and unless something changes, we risk losing even more players.
