Juventus went all in with Thiago Motta ... and lost

03/27/2025 06:25 PM

Juventus wanted to contend right away with a new coach and a retooled team. The firing of Thiago Motta and everything that comes with it is the natural result of that bet not paying off.

Juventus wanted to win this season.

Cristiano Giuntoli and Co. stated numerous times during Thiago Motta's tumultuous — and eventually short-lived — stint as Juventus manager that the main goal was finish to finish in the top four. That we had to be patient, that this was a project, a young team, that they were confident in Motta's ability to turn it all around.

Well, after the news of Motta's dismissal this past weekend, something that has to be at the forefront of every discussion is that Juventus, unequivocally and without a shadow of a doubt wanted to win this season. And the failure to achieve that is a big part as of why the Motta era is now suddenly over.

(Also, that you shouldn't trust a damn thing Giuntoli says, apparently.)

Back in the summer of 2024, Giuntoli was celebrating the hiring of his dream coach. Motta was someone who he had openly courted for months to start the new era of Juventus football. On paper, the signing made a lot of sense: Motta had taken an underpowered Bologna team to their first Champions League participation in history. They played an entertaining, offensively-inclined system that had all the makings of a revolutionary new way of playing the game. Bologna was the belle of the ball during the 2023-24 season and Motta was one of the hottest names in coaching.

Once the Motta signing was official, the Juventus brass encountered a big problem to fix, with two distinct paths to follow to try and solve it.

The team inherited from Max Allegri was very far from a team with the qualities to try and replicate Motta's possession-heavy, press-happy type of football. It was also a team that had an eclectic mix of players in terms of age and talent. You had a brigade of youngsters from the Juventus Next Gen setup trying to break into the first team, a number of holdover veterans that were on the tail end of their primes and assorted leftover players from various failed projects that didn't fit in anywhere particularly well.

In short, this wasn't a team built to give Motta the very best chance to succeed right away. So, what were the options for the Juventus board?

The first one was a conservative, cost-conscious plan. Do as much as you can with the team you have and spend as little as possible to try and give you coach a semi adequate squad while giving your smorgasbord of young talent a chance to see if they could stick out. Give the Federico Chiesa experience another go, why not? Ride out the base of players that just won the Coppa Italia, make some minor tweaks on the edges and see what you can do.

Dean Huijsen, Matias Soule, Samuel Iling-Junior, Enzo Barrenechea, Samuel Mbangula, Fabio Miretti, Nicolo Fagioli and Kenan Yildiz would all have been competed for big minutes in this scenario. We could have seen maybe a couple Tomas Rincon/Mario Lemina/Carlos Alcaraz-like moves — the kind of low-ceiling, low-risk transfers to make the squad more adequate to the new system while not breaking the bank.

Would that have been a team that could contend for titles right away? No, of course not. A team filled with so many young guys was bound to have ups and downs. And despite there being some talented players on that squad, it wasn't a team that had shown that could compete at higher levels. However, it was a plan that could have given Motta more runway in terms of results.

After all, it would have been crazy to demand title contention of a team that was playing a bunch of youngsters and players who were very clearly not fit to play Motta's system. Finishing in the top four with disappointing exits in every other cup competition would have been an expected finish and even an encouraging one if you saw legitimate progression from the young players and a new system improving over time.

Giuntoli and Co, however, decided on a different, infinitely more risky plan which was to try a full-on rebuild in one single transfer window with a limited budget. This plan required to sell what felt like almost every single young player with value on the team in order to bring in more established players that could help make you competitive right away. It involved jettisoning off established veterans in positions of no real need — see: Szczesny, Wojciech — to bring in profiles that were perfectly suited to play a Motta style from the jump.

It involved bringing in a lot of talented — but expensive — new players to fill in the holes left by all of the departures and expect them to deliver results as soon as possible because you had five competitions coming your way and, oh yeah, you signed expensive loans with clauses to redeem the next summer. In theory, once this new project had taken off and you had the funds to do so.

You had to bring in one of the best midfielders in Serie A last season at an outrageously high price in Teun Koopmeiners because he was the type of top-end talent the team was lacking and because Motta's system required a player of his skillset in order to make it work. You had to take huge swings on high-ceiling but high-risk players like Nico Gonzalez or agree to terms that maybe you wouldn't have otherwise like an expensive dry loan for Chico Conceicao.

It was a bold move, but one that wasn't devoid of logic. If Motta was as good as advertised, he could take this squad — arguably one of the more talented teams for Juventus in the last few years on paper — and deliver results right away, put the club back into its rightful place as a contender in all competitions and improve the financial conditions of the team significantly.

A lot of things had to go well for this plan to work. The squad integration had to go quickly, the new signings had to prove their worth and you had to have injury luck on your side. But, hey, there was a path, and I applauded Giuntoli for pulling that off in the summer at the time — and I stand by that. It was an impressively quick rebuild that made this team more talented and ready to compete in the short term as risky as it was.

Unfortunately, it did not got that way.

Juventus lost their most talented player in Gleison Bremer early in October and many players picked up nagging injuries along the way. In many cases, the new signings failed to make immediate impacts with some of them straight-up flopping in shocking ways like Douglas Luiz and the aforementioned Koopmeiners, looking like shadows of themselves in the Juve colors.

And the system was, well ... completely non existent.

Outside of a couple good games in Serie A and two memorable wins against Manchester City and RB Leipzig in the Champions League, the first half of the season saw Juventus play with little consistency and no identity in terms of playing style. They were far from contenders in Serie A and while they remained alive in the Coppa and Champions League their form was so shaky that they inspired little confidence that they could make any noise in either competition.

Even despite the underwhelming early results, Giuntoli doubled down on his project during the January transfer window. A conservative approach could have seen this team try and plug some holes with opportunistic signings for unheralded players or even promoting the most ready Next Gen prospects to try and tide the storm.

That was not what the club did. Juventus signed four new players, two of them — Renato Veiga and Randal Kolo Muani — with expensive dry loan deals that gave Juventus little to build on for the future but helped patch up holes in the short term. Giuntoli also signed Lloyd Kelly and Alberto Costa on permanent deals that compromised future cash flows as well in moves that were mostly seen as too expensive for unheralded players.

(Who were you competing against to sign Kelly? Who was out there dying to give Newcastle millions of euros to pry him off their hands? Why on earth would you offer so much money for a guy that wasn't even starting for Newcastle?)

If the message wasn't clear enough, Giuntoli backed the sales of Danilo and Nicolo Fagioli — the former captain and gem of the youth system respectively of the club due to alleged falling outs with the Brazilian coach.

Once again, despite the face washing and statements to the press, these are all moves you only make if you believe you have a team that is capable of being competitive immediately. Giuntoli backed his coach and his project, would that double down bet work during the second half? It didn't.

Juventus continued playing inconsistent football throughout and despite notching a good win against title favorites Inter Milan, the team crashed out of every competition they remained in, each ousting more shocking and embarrassing than the last. While the skid happened on the field, turmoil continued to surround the team as multiple reports of unrest in the locker room, coupled with comments from former players and the way they were frozen out and unceremoniously dumped from the Motta led project painted a picture of instability and incompetence at all levels of the organization.

The nail in the coffin for Motta ended up being the back to back losses against direct rivals in the top four in Atalanta and Fiorentina before the international break. A 7-0 combined scoreline in which the team looked was bad as they had ever looked during the entirety of the season and had all the signs of a team looking forward to the summer rather than playing football.

Juventus gambled big on a shiny new coach, a massive investment in new signings, the erasure of most of the veteran players of previous regimes and hoped that it would all result in a quick turnaround. As every gamble, even if it sometimes looks good on paper, it always has a chance of ending up badly and for all intents and purposes it looks like this one did.

Now with caretaker manager Igor Tudor at the helm, the Bianconeri hope to salvage a Champions League spot for next year with nine games remaining and head-to-head matchups against direct competition. Even if they manage to get the fourth place in the table, they stare straight into a summer of uncertainty once again, one in which many of the future commitments for the current squad come due and they will be — most likely — in the hunt for a coach once again.

Motta ended up being the first and easiest domino to fall in Juve's big gamble. Depending on how the season ends, it could end up costing the job of everyone at the table that made the decision to go all in.

So is life at the casino of football.