OFFICIALLY OFFICIAL: Juventus sack Thiago Motta after just 10 months in charge

03/23/2025 12:36 PM

For the second season in a row, Juventus will be changing managers before said season is actually over.

When Juventus hired Thiago Motta last summer, the goal was to start something new, exciting and every word in between that would set the Bianconeri on an upward trajectory following the work he'd done at Bologna. Juve director Cristiano Giuntoli had been talking with Motta's camp about the job for months, the kind of pursuit that one doesn't embark on if you're not convinced he's the right man for the job.

The long-awaited hire came on June 12, 2024.

On March 23, 2025, Motta is now officially a former Juventus employee.

Juventus announced Sunday that Motta has been dismissed as manager nine games before his first season came to a close. It comes in the middle of the first international break of 2025 and just seven days after Juve suffered second consecutive blowout loss against one of their main competitors for a European place, Fiorentina. It was the icing on a cake that has seen Motta and Juventus fail to find much of any significant consistency in a season where they have as many draws (13) as wins and were eliminated from both the Champions League and the Coppa Italia within an eight-day span in February. Throw in there being plenty of reported discontent in the locker room when it came to the rapport between Motta and his players and it all added up to Juventus pulling the plug on a project that had only begun 10 months earlier.

Former Juventus defender Igor Tudor, who has been out of a job since parting ways with Lazio last June, is the man who will take over on a caretaker basis for the rest of the 2024-25 season to try and get the Bianconeri into a Champions League place. The 46-year-old Tudor will also reportedly have an option in his contract for next season.

Here is the official announcement, courtesy of the Juventus press office:

Juventus FC announce that Thiago Motta has been relieved of his duties as Men's First Team coach.

The club would like to thank Thiago Motta and all of his staff for their professionalism and for the work they have carried out in recent months with passion and dedication. The club wish them the best of luck for the future.

Juventus FC also announce that the Men's First Team will now be led by Igor Tudor, who will take charge of his first training session tomorrow, Monday, 24 March.

There you have it, folks. Thiago Motta, who was hired to try and bring in a new and much more modern era at Juventus, is now the club's former manager. Even after two very recent public votes of confidence from Giuntoli himself, it was not enough to see Motta see out the rest of the season and try to get Juventus into the Champions League on his own.

Instead, it will almost certainly be Tudor trying to get Juventus back on track in the final two months of the season.

There's no singular reason as to why the Motta era ended this way. You can point to his own decisions both in-game as well as with his lineups and you wouldn't be wrong. You can point to big-name players getting injured for extended spells — namely Gleison Bremer's season-ending ACL injury in early October — and you wouldn't be wrong, either. Same goes for his system never fully taking hold and being consistently effective as well as his man management clearly not sitting right with a good portion of the roster.

It all added up to a season that had plenty of enthusiasm at the start but basically has the opposite kind of feeling as the hammer dropped on Motta's time at Juventus. And it ended up costing Motta his job less than a year after he was hired.