The 2025-26 Serie A season is officially upon us, folks. As this goes live, the first fixture of Matchday 1 is about kick off in a few hours, with Lecce facing Genoa at the Marassi, the same place in which Juventus will spend a few hours of Matchday 2 at next weekend.
Before the trip to Genoa, though, Juventus has their season opener to deal with as they welcome Parma to the Allianz Stadium on Sunday night. It’s the first of 38 for Juve and Igor Tudor, who will man the sidelines in Turin with a little more job security compared to the last Serie A fixture he coached in.
Tudor will have, barring any sort of incredibly surprising final week of the summer transfer window, mostly the same roster that he coached in the final nine games of last season and then at the Club World Cup. The number of new players added to a roster that barely got into fourth place on the final day of the 2024-25 campaign is minimal, with most of Juve’s money spent this summer coming on obligations to buy from deals made by the previous management team during last summer’s mercato.
So, a roster that is mostly the same that may or may not be better than last season’s squad is set to begin the proceedings of a new season in which Juventus are far from the favorite to finish as the top team in Serie A.
Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?
OK, so maybe not totally the kind of hype that surrounded the start of last season. I think that’s pretty obvious at this point considering how much talk about a grand Juventus project there has been this summer compared to a year ago. No matter what, though, Juventus’ season is about to begin and the next nine or 10 months will be dominated by what they do well or simply fail to do effectively.
So here’s to the now-annual tradition around here right as Juventus are just a small amount of hours away from playing their first fixture of the new season. Let us predict where Juventus will finish in Serie A — and let it become something that hopefully we won’t revisit with a whole bunch of shame and grumpiness come the late spring.