Juventus Next Gen: ‘To be sustainable, Italian football must go down this path’

Fabio Miretti grew up on the doorstep of the Agnelli estate in Villar Perosa.

He is from Pinerolo, a short scenic drive through the valley where the locals drink genepi and the dialect is inflected with French, such is the proximity to the Alps.

Pinerolo, for the uninitiated, is famous for the dungeon that held The Man In The Iron Mask and for the emigres who gave their name to a neighbourhood of Montevideo that, in turn, gave its name to Uruguay’s most famous football team — Penarol — for whom Paolo Montero, the Juventus defender and bodyguard of Zinedine Zidane, used to play.

“I’ve always been a Juventus fan,” Miretti tells The Athletic. The faith was passed down by his father, Livio — but when Miretti went for his first tryouts at the club as an eight-year-old, he didn’t go in their black and white shirt. “You could wear whatever you wanted. They didn’t give you the Juventus kit, so I went in a Barcelona jersey with ‘Xavi’ on the back. It was a gift. My first memories of going on trial are bound up in that jersey.”

Who can blame Miretti? It was 2011 and Barcelona were writing their place in history as one of the best teams of all time with a coach, Pep Guardiola, promoted from their B team and a core of players, including Xavi, from their academy, La Masia. Juventus, by contrast, did not have a reputation for developing youth in-house.

When Miretti entered their academy, however, a couple of local lads were in the first team. One was Paolo De Ceglie, who quit football in his early thirties and became a DJ. The other was the stylish Claudio Marchisio, who established himself alongside Arturo Vidal, Andrea Pirlo and Paul Pogba in an all-time great midfield.

The Piedmontese pair of De Ceglie and Marchisio emerged during Juventus’ relegation to Serie B after the Calciopoli scandal in 2006. “It was an emergency,” Juventus’ former chairman Andrea Agnelli said.

Star players deserted the club. “Marchisio would never have played in the Juventus side that had Patrick Vieira and Emerson,” Agnelli observed.

For Miretti, though, Marchisio showed dreams can come true.

“Let’s say Marchisio was the role model,” Miretti says. “Everyone wanted to emulate him. It had happened for him and De Ceglie and Sebastian Giovinco. But it didn’t happen to many players. You hoped to be one of the few to make it to the first team. You saw it as a dream.”

Miretti turned 20 at the start of this season. He has already been capped for Italy and, this month, made his 50th senior appearance for Juventus, away against Napoli. It has happened for him and yet he isn’t one of a few. Juventus have handed out 31 debuts to players from their academy in the past six seasons.

“This year, a lot of young players are in the first team,” Juventus head coach Massimiliano Allegri tells The Athletic. “A lot of our kids are playing for other teams in Serie A. The club has done a great job. To be sustainable, Italian football has to go down this path.”

The first to break through, in March 2019, was Hans Nicolussi Caviglia, a midfielder with a passion for Stanley Kubrick films and the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Thomas Mann. He started in the ‘Pirlo role’ in the Derby d’Italia in November and performed well. Some of the graduates have come and gone, including Radu Dragusin, who was brought over from Romania as a 16-year-old. Juventus cashed in too early on him as Genoa turned their €9.7million (£8.3m; $10.5m) investment into a big return from Tottenham Hotspur in January.

Others, such as Frosinone’s silky 20-year-old playmaker Matias Soule and Roma’s 18-year-old centre-back Dean Huijsen, are on loan from Juventus. Both figure in the running for Young Player of the Year in Serie A along with Kenan Yildiz, whose performances off striker Dusan Vlahovic were keeping Federico Chiesa out of the Juventus first team in the spring.

Marchisio, a source of inspiration, in action for Juventus against Roma in 2009 (Giuseppe Bellini/Getty Images)

It’s as if the Old Lady of Italian football has undergone anti-ageing therapy, and it raises a question about clubs and their footballing identity.

In playing style, the few coaches who have tried to move Juventus away from a team who like the tension of a 1-0 win haven’t lasted long. The tendency towards ‘sufferball’ and a mean defence has resisted. It can’t be removed from the Juventus DNA. Attempts to make Juventus something they’re not have failed. Luigi Maifredi’s champagne football fell flat and he was sacked after a single season, as was Maurizio Sarri, even though he was the last coach to win the league in black and white.

On the face of it, Juventus have always been the opposite of Barcelona and Ajax — not only in their approach to the game but in another distinguishing feature: the tradition of looking to their academy. What if they have spent the last six years reconnecting with their own origin story? Doesn’t youth go to the core of their mythology?

School was out. Luigi Forlano and the Canfari brothers left the Massimo d’Azeglio sixth-form college and proceeded down Corso Re Umberto. Sitting on a wooden bench, the friends decided to found a football club. It was November 1, 1897, and, as students at a classical lyceum, they chose a Latin name for it: ‘iuventus’ — the word for youth, and Italianised it to Juventus.

Over more than a century, Juventus’ identity has evolved. The club’s original colours have changed from pink to Notts County’s black and white. That nickname ‘La Vecchia Signora’, or Old Lady, overshadowed Juventus’ association with youth, as did the win-now mentality that made the Turin club by far the most successful in Serie A, with 36 ‘scudetti’ to the 19 of their nearest rivals, AC Milan.

The motto of Giampiero Boniperti, a legendary goalscorer made president by patron Gianni Agnelli — “Winning isn’t important, it’s the only thing that counts” — became Juventus’ motto.

Patience has rarely been a virtue of teams that start every year with the great expectations of a title contender. Juventus still invested in youth. Gaetano Scirea, Marco Tardelli, Antonio Conte, Alessandro Del Piero and Pogba were all signed young — but rarely did a player come through the academy. Roberto Bettega and Marchisio were exceptions. If Juventus couldn’t buy the next big thing, the born-ready, they acquired the finished article, the already established; the proven and in their prime.

In recent years, a subtle shift has occurred.

Gianni Agnelli’s nephew, Andrea, spent much of his chairmanship from 2010 to 2023 preoccupied with the next generation.

This motivated the club’s logo change to something “more pop”. It drove Agnelli’s decision to advocate for a new competition, the European Super League — an attempt to retain the interest of fans aged 16 to 24 who were being lost to Fortnite and Call Of Duty. He did not want the Allianz Stadium to become like the tree-sheltered bocce (similar to bowls) courts found in Turin squares; abandoned, having been left behind by new sports.

“Society has changed,” Allegri tells The Athletic. “The years go by and we don’t realise it, but generations change too. I was reading an article in (daily newspaper) La Repubblica the other day and they were saying that, by 2035, obesity in Italy will increase to 31 per cent and 27 per cent of those affected will be the young. What does that tell us? It tells us there’s less passion for sport.

“There’s a wider debate to be had here but it should start with the government getting kids back into sport.”

Allegri is nearly three years into his second spell as Juventus manager (sportinfoto/DeFodi Images via Getty Images)

Italy’s demographics are the elephant in the room whenever there’s a debate to be had about the competitiveness of the national football team.

This is a country with enough centenarians to sell out Atalanta’s Gewiss Stadium, where census numbers report that the old (age 65 and over) outnumber the young (newborns to 15) by more than five to one and the birth rate is at an all-time low. A population that is forecast to shrink has been slow to integrate migrants with restricted ‘ius soli’ or birthright citizenship rules.

When Italy failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup finals, missing the tournament for the first time in 60 years, the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI), the country’s supreme governing body in sport, staged an intervention of the Italian Football Federation (FIGC). It lasted six months, at the end of which a series of reforms were proposed to ensure it never happened again. But it did, for the next World Cup in 2022.

One change was the opportunity for Serie A clubs to field a B team in Serie C, Italy’s third tier. They would have to pay an annual entrance fee (€1.2million) and could not vote at the assembly of Lega Pro, which operates that division. Juventus were the only club to take the plunge.

Theirs was no small undertaking. Juventus were not a multi-club operation, but they undertook to run a club within a club. The idea of the scheme was to bridge the gap between the youth team and the first team. Juventus had conducted a study of the class of 1999 in Italy. It comprised 443 players and only two per cent of them had gone on to make more than 10 appearances in Serie A or Serie B, including Nicolo Zaniolo, Alessandro Bastoni and Andrea Pinamonti.

Juventus interrogated why and leaned on their own experience.

In 2014, they signed Alvaro Morata, a 21-year-old Spaniard, from Real Madrid. He had been the top scorer at the European Under-21 Championship the previous year when Spain beat Italy in the final, but what stood out was Morata’s experience. He already had more than 100 professional appearances under his belt for Real Madrid — 83 with Castilla, their B team, and 52 with the full side.

Juventus contrasted his development with Leonardo Spinazzola, who was signed from Siena at 19 but was still too raw for their first team. So off he went on loan.

Spinazzola was farmed out on loan five times in three seasons. He started just 16 games and, while obviously talented — he eventually became the difference maker for Italy’s European Championship-winning side three years ago before rupturing his Achilles tendon in the quarter-finals — was not ready for Juventus until he turned 25.

This gave the club pause for thought.

Spinazzola playing for Atalanta against his parent club, Juventus, in 2016 (Valerio Pennicino/Getty Images)

More analysis showed that 50 per cent of players on loan play less than 50 per cent of the games. Away from the stable environment of the parent club and out of their control, loaning players out was often a waste of time and a curb on development. This was a problem for Italy and, by the same token, its national team.

In 2022, UEFA’s annual report on The European Football Landscape showed that the average Serie A club sent out 25 players in 29 separate loans the previous season, the most of any league on the continent. Atalanta alone loaned out 60 players that year, a number Juventus had approximated in the past. UEFA got its act together and phased in limits of eight in and eight out in 2022-23, seven each way this season and six for 2024-25. But Juventus were already ahead of the curve with the introduction of their under-23s team, soon to be rebranded Juventus Next Gen.

Suddenly, the kids who were too good for the Primavera — the end of the line in youth-team football — had somewhere to challenge them and further their development in preparation for first-team football.

“In Primavera (nominally the under-19s) there’s no need to get results, no fans, no pressure,” Allegri says. “Kids should play at that level when they’re 16 or 17. Then at 18, they should play in Serie C.”

It’s why Juventus re-named the team as the Next Gen. While the reforms of 2018 specified clubs could enlist under-23s in Serie C, Juventus have consciously kept the average age down. This season, for instance, it has averaged 19.53 and has featured stars of Italy’s Under-19 Euros-winning team from last summer, including midfielder Luis Hasa.

“In Italy, people think you’ve got a good academy if you’re winning titles at under-16, under-17 or Primavera level, but it’s not like that,” Miretti says. “Juventus have come to understand that it’s not about how much you win at academy level — it’s about how ready your players are to play in the big leagues and how soon they can graduate.”

The Next Gen, who play their games at the Giuseppe Moccagatta stadium in Alessandria, an hour east of Turin, compete against Cesena, Vicenza and Piacenza — teams famous for bringing through Paolo Rossi, Roberto Baggio and the Inzaghi brothers and with fanbases who have tasted Serie A. Games are played in places with real football heritage against seasoned pros. Serie C has produced top players, too — players Juventus have bought. World Cup winners Luca Toni, Andrea Barzagli, Vincenzo Iaquinta and Fabio Grosso all learned the ropes in the third division.

Hasa playing for Juventus Next Gen against Carrarese (Gabriele Maltinti – Juventus FC/Juventus FC via Getty Images)

“In the year I was with the Primavera, I was already making a few appearances for the Next Gen,” Miretti says. “My first impression of Serie C was that it was more physical. There’s less intensity in Primavera, so there’s room for more skill as you have more time to think and try things.

“In Serie C, everything’s quicker. I was 17 or 18 at the time and you’re playing against guys who are much older and stronger. In Primavera, almost everyone’s the same height and size. You can hold them off easier.”

Four managers have taken charge of Next Gen since its inception and, just as Guardiola began his coaching career with Barcelona B, Xabi Alonso at Real Sociedad B and Thomas Tuchel leading Augsburg II, Juventus thought the second team would be the right place for Pirlo to cut his teeth — until his sudden elevation to the first-team job in summer 2020.

Fabio Pecchia won the Serie C Coppa Italia and left to guide Cremonese to Serie A, a task he is set to repeat with current club Parma next season. Massimo Brambilla, the team’s current coach, joined from Atalanta where he oversaw a golden generation, bringing through Dejan Kulusevski and Amad Diallo as well as four members of Luciano Spalletti’s latest Italy squad (Marco Carnesecchi, Raoul Bellanova, Giorgio Scalvini and Bastoni). He led the Next Gen to another cup final last season, which they lost to Vicenza in front of 10,000 fans.

“Our primary objective doesn’t change much from the Primavera to Serie C,” Brambilla says. “It is to improve and develop players. What does change, though, is the standard.

“We’re in Serie C, it’s a tough league and the lads tend to struggle at the start with the physicality and the approach that’s needed because, at the Next Gen level, they have to realise the result becomes a priority. There are relegation play-offs, the league is tight, every point matters.

“But the two things go hand in hand. It’s hard to get results in this league with a young team unless the players develop and improve, so results have to come through performance. If they don’t, you won’t get results.”

Brambilla oversees Juventus Next Gen (Gabriele Maltinti – Juventus FC/Juventus FC via Getty Images)

The squad, whose recruitment is coordinated by Giorgio Chiellini’s brother Claudio, is 70 per cent Italian. But some of its big successes, such as England Under-21 international Samuel Iling-Junior, are from abroad and were scouted by Matteo Tognozzi, now the sporting director of Granada in the Spanish top flight. The Next Gen’s vice-captain, Tarik Muharemovic, is a proud Bosnian who left Austria convinced there was a pathway for him to the Juventus first team. Other centre-backs Dragusin, Koni De Winter (now on loan at Genoa) and Huijsen blazed a trail before him.

“It’s my goal,” Muharemovic says. “When I see them, I get the motivation to get there. Huijsen is doing very good and you want to be like them.”

The Next Gen train at Vinovo, Juventus’ old training ground half an hour down the road from Turin but Muharemovic is one of a number who work with the first team, too. “My first time coming into the gym, it was empty at first,” he says. “I was biking and felt a little bit nervous. Then I saw all the players coming inside. Paulo Dybala! I was shocked. Normally you see them on TV or social media. Then other players. Chiellini! It was crazy. I can’t even describe it.”

It was Jose Mourinho who said Juventus is like Harvard for centre-backs and Muharemovic, like Dragusin before him, has leaned on former defenders Chiellini (now retired) and Leonardo Bonucci (now at Fenerbahce in Turkey) for experience. He celebrates blocks and goal-line clearances as passionately as they did — as if they were goals.

“That’s one thing I took from Chiellini,” Muharemovic says, smiling. “I love it. In our head, when you get into a one-v-one, you want to get it and hear people shout, ‘Bravo’. You get more motivation to get the ball and win the duel.”

Muharemovic is hopeful that his time with the first team will come.

Muharemovic and Dikeni Salifou of Juventus Next Gen (Chris Ricco – Juventus FC/Juventus FC via Getty Images)

Allegri has given four Next Gen players their senior debuts this season.

“When I came back (for his second spell as head coach, in summer 2021) I was asked to rejuvenate the team,” Allegri says. “The objective was to bring through three Next Gen players every year, lower the wage bill and make the team sustainable while remaining competitive.”

Covid-19, the cost of signing Cristiano Ronaldo and Juventus’ one-year ban from Europe in the aftermath of the Prisma investigation led to a change of approach. Other than buying USMNT international Tim Weah from French club Lille, rolling Adrien Rabiot’s contract on another year and making Arkadiusz Milik’s loan from Marseille in France permanent, Juventus did not sign anyone last summer. Even over the winter, with the team firmly in the title race, they limited themselves to the loan of Southampton’s Carlos Alcaraz and the acquisition of another Lille player, Tiago Djalo, for a small fee six months from the end of his deal.

A conscious decision was made to lean on the Next Gen team, as they had done when Pogba was provisionally banned for doping and Nicolo Fagioli, a Next Gen graduate and reigning Young Player of the Year in Serie A, was suspended in a betting scandal. Yildiz, 18, has shone and looks set to star at this summer’s European Championship after scoring in a 3-2 win for Turkey over Germany last November.

“He’s the guy who has given me the most difficulties (in training),” Muharemovic says, “because he is a special dribbler. He goes low with his knees. You have to be calm, watch the ball. I think now I could challenge him!”

Yildiz has excelled for Juventus’ first team (Nicolo Campo/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Social media’s rush to anoint players as the next big thing and Serie A’s desperation for a ‘campione‘ means Allegri has to manage the player and the hype around him.

“You try to make the most of the good moments,” Allegri says. “Then you know that, after a little while, the hard part comes. All young players go through it. Miretti and Fagioli have experienced it. Yildiz will get through it too. Youngsters have ups and downs. They don’t reach maturity until 25, 26. Whoever has the most mental strength gets there first.

“A player’s peak hasn’t changed. They say that between 26 and 30 is the best age because, by then, you’ve got some experience, you’ve matured and you improve. It was like that 40 years ago, too.”

Juventus need patience — but history and tradition bring expectations. The fans are used to winning. The press is unsparing. Their rivals don’t believe they deserve a grace period. “Juventus have spent €200million on Bremer, Chiesa and Vlahovic,” Inter Milan defender Francesco Acerbi said before February’s Derby d’Italia, a prematurely-billed title decider. “We’ve signed players on free transfers.”

Since then, when Juventus were only two points off the top, results have deteriorated. They have won only one of their last eight games and the gap to fifth has shrunk from 17 points to eight. For all Allegri has insisted that qualifying for the Champions League must be Juventus’ principal objective this season, his players’ decision to talk up the title challenge over a 17-game unbeaten run has made the team’s present position, third, look disappointing.

Allegri has tried to sensitise the ‘ambiente’ around Juventus — the peculiar environment the club inhabits, with all its atmospheric pressures, by insisting this is a different era and a different project from his first stint as head coach from 2014-19. It’s a different project even from 2021-22, the first year of this second spell.

“We need to adapt and understand that the nine scudetti in a row was an extraordinary thing. It won’t happen again in Serie A. There have been only two times like it in Juventus’ history — the five years in a row under Carlo Carcano and Carlo Bigatto in the 1930s and the nine in a row from 2012 to 2020. Other than that, Juventus have at most won two in a row, then one after three years, like other clubs have done. The nine in a row sent perceptions out of whack because the reality is different.”

Juventus have come back down to earth.

Now the domestic TV deal has gone backwards and the tax break included in the Decreto Crescita has been repealed, their decision to turn to youth four years ago is, in Allegri’s view, far-sighted. According to Juventus, in the 2018-19 season, the percentage of minutes played by players over 30 at the club was 36.7 per cent. It is now down to 23.6 per cent while minutes played by players aged 21 to 25 is up from 30.1 per cent to 42.8 per cent.

Allegri cites Manchester United’s record of having an academy player in their matchday squad every year for 85 years. “United have eight or nine players from their academy in the first team. Let’s say you have five players from the Next Gen in the first team for eight years. It means, for eight years, you have a cost that’s significantly lower than if you sign five players.”

The flaw in profit and sustainability and financial fair play rules means it is often these players who get sacrificed early as their sales go down on the balance sheet as pure profit. But Juventus must get the balance right between cashing in — as they did on Dragusin in January — and building a young nucleus.

Juventus Next Gen line up for their Serie C game against Pontedera (Filippo Alfero – Juventus FC/Juventus FC via Getty Images)

“By now, it’s impossible to close the (financial) gap between the Premier League and Serie A,” Allegri continues. “So we need to keep going in this direction: working on youth development, on the Next Gen.”

The best teams of all time, the ones who changed football history when winning the European Cup, have always had a homegrown core: Rinus Michels’ Ajax with Johan Cruyff, Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan with Paolo Maldini and Franco Baresi, and Guardiola’s Barcelona with Xavi, Andres Iniesta and Sergio Busquets. Juventus hope the Next Gen can help deliver something similar.

“It’s normal that with the reform of the Champions League — which will be tough to win… almost impossible because the new format is like tennis — it’ll be between the top eight and it’ll be hard for one of them not to get to the final,” Allegri adds. “They’re doing it (the ‘Swiss model’) to ensure the top eight get to the final, I think, because they want it to be a show.

“This gives you the chance to work even more on youth development, on being sustainable and competitive in your own league, and making sure you qualify for the Champions League every year, to then have a good year in the competition and try to go as far as possible.”

Other teams in Italy, notably Atalanta, are belatedly beginning to enter under-23 teams in Serie C from next season. Milan are expected to follow suit.

One of the affirmations Agnelli introduced during his chairmanship of Juventus was ‘Live ahead’.

The Next Gen is arguably its best expression.

(Top photo: Gabriele Maltinti – Juventus FC/Juventus FC via Getty Images)