The Juventus Official Fan Club that I’m a part of (and helped found), JOFC Empire State, has a big club WhatsApp chat, where members can chat about life, football, and Juventus.
Well, when it comes to the latter two, “chat” often turns into “argue.” Our club members have a lot of different ideas and opinions about the sport, and those differences can spawn some pretty intense debates. Thankfully, it’s rare that any of these leave any lasting animosity among the group.
It was one of those debates that sparked this little train-of-thought article.
It was prompted by Wednesday’s reports of Juventus sending a revised offer to Paris Saint-Germain to extend the stay of Randal Kolo Muani in Turin. For those who hadn’t read it, the terms of the offer included a €10 million fee to extend the Frenchman’s loan for a year, plus a €40 million buy option next summer. PSG are reportedly listening to the offer, although they’d prefer an obligation to buy as opposed to an option.
Here is where the debate started. My friend Weston Pagano, whose name you may remember from his occasional guest columns here on BWRAO, considered the numbers on that proposal excessive. With Jonathan David now in the fold, why would you pay a total of €55 million (once you factored in his loan fee for the past six months) for a guy who projects to be a backup? Given our issues with resources right now, he contended, it wouldn’t be responsible to spend that amount of money on a player unless he was an undisputed starter.
It was the last two words of that sentence that started the gears turning in my head: “undisputed starter.” At the highest levels of the modern game, at least when it comes to outfield players, is there such a thing anymore?
Depth has always been an important part of squad building. But over the last decade or so, as those in places of power in the sport continue to add games to the schedule for the sake of money with little regard for the players, the importance of depth has increased by an order of magnitude. With so many games to play, load management will become an ever larger part of the game, lest players break down so much that teams will be scraping the bottom of their squad lists on a regular basis.
The ideal, then, seems to me to go beyond the traditional ideas of a depth chart. Rather than having undisputed starters and then substitutes below them, what a team should really aspire to at the highest level is a group of players that can rotate in and out of the lineup with little to no drop-off in quality.
Obviously, deep-pocketed clubs like Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, and PSG can all realize that aspiration relatively easily. But clubs farther down the financial pecking order can manage it. Indeed, during the latter portion of The Streak, Juve had built a squad that achieved that very thing. The 2017-18 team, in particular, had that look to it. Gonzalo Higuain need a break? Mario Mandzukic had it covered. Douglas Costa tweak something? Juan Cuadrado time. You would often hear people crack about Juve having one team for Serie A and one for the Champions League in those last few years, but it was only half a joke.
At the time, it was considered a luxury. Now, eight years later, there are two extra games in the group stage (or league phase, now) of the Champions League, plus an extra two-legged fixture for those who don’t get the bye straight into the round of 16. The Club World Cup is no longer half a dozen games at Christmastime, and there’s no sign that Gianni Infantino is going to suddenly abandon his brainchild. The Conference League was created from nothing, adding fixtures for teams even farther down the table. And that’s just at the club level. Internationally, the UEFA Nations League has added (supposedly) competitive fixtures to the calendar and spread the idea to other confederations. The expansion of the Euros to 24 teams is solidly entrenched, and the World Cup will expand from its perfect 32-team format to an unwieldy 48, adding an extra round to the knockout stage in the process.
That workload is simply unsustainable, and has turned a roster-building luxury into a necessity. Without regular rotation, players will be ground into dust. In order to not be vulnerable at the highest level, the players a manager rotates in will need to be as close to equal in quality as possible. Rather than a 1 and a 2, every spot on the field is going to need a 1 and a 1A. If there is too much of a drop-off in quality, a better-built team can target that weakness, and you’ll see yourself swiftly shown the exit door of whatever competition you’re playing in.
The case of David and Kolo Muani is a case in point. The Canadian has proven himself to be one of the most productive forwards in Europe for the last five years and more. Kolo Muani hasn’t had the same kind of success since his move to PSG — it isn’t uncommon for players to stall out after arriving at the Parc des Princes — but he’s still talented enough for Didier Dechamps to regularly call him up to a stacked France team. Carrying both on the roster will give Juve the kind of 1 and 1A dynamic at an important position.
It will take a while for Juve to get back to having that at every position. In their financial bracket, getting there is a process — as it was back in the end of the Streak era. Those stacked rosters were the product of six or seven years of careful building by Beppe Marotta — a process that requires a level patience that his successors in the front office have not been capable of.
But as Damien Comolli begins his attempt to bring Juve back to where he wants to be, that level is the target, not a luxury. With the exception of goalkeepers, the “undisputed starter” is obsolete. Juve will have to build toward making sure their roster meets that modern requirement.