There’s a popular saying that says that growth is not always linear.
If you want any proof that the saying is true, just google any stock that you want and go to the five-year zoom-out and no matter how good or bad the company actually is you are going to find some highs and some lows. Want to do the same thing if you just take really small sample size? Amazon, one of the biggest companies in the world, is actually down for the last five days.
Does that mean Amazon is a bad company? Financially, of course not, it’s a five-day sample only.
_(In a more holistic, morally, environmental way is Amazon a bad company? Debatable, but probably yes!)_
If you want to look at [Juventus](https://www.blackwhitereadallover.com)’ 2024-25 season as a stock, it’s very easy to sell yourself on the highs like beating the mighty Manchester City at home. This is the one-day graph movement read of it. But if you zoom out a bit? This team still has significantly more lows than highs.
When we zoom out for the 12-month graph, how will it look like? That’s the one that Cristiano Giuntoli and co. will ultimately be judged upon after all, but this was another week of peaks and valleys.
I’ve said early and often that this team should be judged not by what they look like right now, but more about how they look like in the stretch run of the season come March.
This is a new project, led by a new manager with a ton of new additions. To expect them to look like the finished product so early into the tenure is probably too much to ask. Then again, in today’s fast-paced football landscape where success is measured in immediate results, there is little room for prolonged periods of underperformance.
Sure, we should give Juventus time, but the team is nine points behind first-place Atalanta in the Serie A table already and they completely wasted a very soft part of their schedule to try and catch up. Is this team already out of Scudetto contention in the middle of December?
That leads to another question: Is that OK? This is after all Juventus, the winningest club in Italy, so should we be OK with the team not really seriously challenging for the domestic title in five years?
This might be a haughty, pretentious take that I’m sure every fan of every other Italian team will hate and point to as evidence one of why Juve fans are obnoxious. But the fact that we are just OK with not challenging for the title yet again so early in the season because of a “project” being early is against what this team supposedly stands for.
Who knows, it’s a long season and if this team starts to gain some health back in their squad, they start to gain some consistency and mount a challenge this will all be a deserved freezing cold take in a few months time. Let’s all hope that it is.
### **Wildin Out**
They say necessity is the mother of innovation, and against Cagliari in the Coppa Italia it sure felt that way.
Manuel Locatelli as a center back? Sure! Weston McKennie as a fullback? Absolutely! The lineup had so many changes that Teun Koopmeiners playing in the double pivot barely registered as an odd thing.
The funky lineup worked, as Juventus beat Cagliari 4-0 and moved forward into the Coppa quarterfinals, but was anything in the lineup here to stay or was it more of a break in case of emergency situation?
Locatelli as a center back was fun, and from an aesthetic perspective I’ve always been a huge fan of the defender who can play from the back and make long dangerous passes in the mold of peak Leo Bonucci. While he grew into the game, I still always felt he was a bit shaky as an out and out defender. Early in the game, the makeshift backline got turned around very easily and I shudder to think how that would look like against a team with top strikers and not relegation-battling Cagliari.
Same goes for McKennie. He wasn’t terrible, but he never really looked at home in that position and a lot of what he does best went wasted as a fullback.
Weirdly, the position change that I think has the most potential moving forward for this team was Koopmeiners playing in the double pivot instead of behind the striker as he had been doing for most of the year. First of, that move allows Kenan Yildiz to play as the attacking midfielder behind Dusan Vlahovic, which is the spot where he has looked the best all year.
Yildiz is not a bad player on the wing, but it does feel like he can give Juventus so much more when he plays more centrally.
The second reason I like Koopmeiners in that space is that something that has ailed Juventus this season is a sort of stagnancy when in possession against a team that is defending deep. Maybe having a guy with the vision and offensive capacity of Koopmeiners starting the offense from further behind the ball instead of having defenders draped all over him and with his back against the goal can help unlock something for this team.
Sure, switching Koopmeiners to that position full time will result in a bit of a logjam in the midfield but considering injuries and the schedule being the way they are, extra depth has never hurt anybody.
### **Parting Shot of the Week**
A few months ago, the wife and myself adopted another puppy.
We had always wanted to have two dogs and due to changes in our work schedule our first pup was spending more time by herself than we would have liked. Adopting another dog so they could keep themselves company felt like a slam dunk of an idea.
We called the new pup “Pingu,” which is an abbreviation of the Spanish word for Penguin because she’s black with a white chest.
For the most part, things have been going great. Pingu is really affectionate and playful. They run each other ragged most days which has meant that we can sleep a lot better with no dogs wanting to take walks at 7 a.m. on weekends.
The only thing that has been challenging has been the walks. Cane, our first pup, is very curious and gets excited to go on walks. She loves to go from plant to plant and explore stains and smells and whatever else we find on our path. Pingu on the other hand is much more cautious and shy. This has resulted in Cane sprinting to the next thing that sparks her fancy while Pingu is barely deciding if approaching a pole is a good idea and me in the middle trying to make it all work.
They also have all of the composure of a minnow holding on for dear life against a heavily favored side with 10 minutes to go on the match. The walk can be going great, everyone is having a great time but suddenly something — a car passing by, another dog, a stray treat on the sidewalk — breaks their rhythm and all hell breaks loose.
Cane starts spinning on her own axis like a pinwheel while barking at everything and no one. Pingu will follow suite but have no idea why she’s doing it, catch herself barking, stop and then run in the opposite direction of whatever startled Cane in the first place. After that, there’s no going back to our peaceful walk, composure is completely gone. Whatever is left of the walk is full chaos as they continue to go crazy and play with each other in the middle of the sidewalk to my despair as I struggle to calm them down and/or bring them back to the apartment so they can chase each other there and burn off energy like that.
We have hired a trainer for January. Sometimes you just have to turn the reins to the experts.