Hold everything, there’s a mistake: Juventus shouldn’t sack Motta, but Giuntoli: CIES tells us he’s managing Juventus without a vision for the future, like a club fighting to avoid relegation
A study by the Swiss Research Center nails Giuntoli to his responsibilities: for instance, Juventus has given a quarter of its total playing minutes to players on loan. Humiliating data for a top club
(Translated into english by Grok)
It may well be true that Thiago Motta has made an endless series of mistakes, has failed to connect with the players, and has missed one target after another (some in truly dismal fashion); but if the result is that today only he is on trial while the man who brought him to Juventus and built his squad—namely Giuntoli—tries to slink away from the crime scene with the complicity of adoring media, then something is seriously wrong. My subscribers and readers know this: on multiple occasions over the past month, I’ve spoken about Giuntoli’s evident co-responsibility in the failure of Juventus’ New Course project; I’ve even openly stated that, in my opinion, the director’s responsibilities far outweigh those of the coach.
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Well, just in these days, the CIES (Centre International d'Étude du Sport, based in Neuchâtel, Switzerland) published the results of a highly interesting study conducted across the 37 most important leagues, not just in Europe. The study aimed to identify which clubs have the best planning for the future and the best management of their squads. To do so, it calculated the minutes played by each club (up to March 12, 2025) by players on loan, players with contracts expiring on June 30, 2025, players expiring on June 30, 2026, and players with longer-term contract expirations. In short: CIES wanted to see which clubs are best securing their future (i.e., those employing players with long-term contracts and avoiding or minimally using loans) and which are doing the worst (relying on loan players or those with short-term contracts that make them difficult to monetize on the transfer market). And the result, as far as Giuntoli’s Juventus is concerned, is disheartening, if not catastrophic.
Among Europe’s top clubs—assuming Juventus can still be considered one after this study—Juventus is hands down the worst-managed club with the poorest planning. In the rankings, it sits in 110th place, and to give you an immediate point of comparison, Napoli under De Laurentiis is 11th, Inter is 54th, and Milan is 56th. But it’s the item-by-item data analysis that’s truly chilling. Because Juventus, among hundreds and hundreds of clubs, is near the very top of the most degrading list for a director (and humiliating for one from a supposedly high-level club): the minutes given to players on loan, those who, in terms of financial and sporting investment in the future, count for zero. Unbelievably, in the current season, Juventus has given players on loan a quarter of the total minutes played by the entire squad: 24.9% of the total time. To put this in perspective with the top European clubs that dominate the scene: Real Madrid, Liverpool, Barcelona, PSG, Bayern, Manchester United, and Newcastle have given no minutes to loan players (they’ve opted not to have any in their squads), all with 0.0%. Inter has 0.2%, Napoli 0.4%, Arsenal 1.1%, and I’ll stop there out of patriotism.
But the most disturbing thing is realizing how Juventus’ management closely resembles that of small clubs fighting each year to avoid relegation—clubs with tiny budgets, often forced to rely on loans, typically from bigger teams. Well, even when narrowing the analysis to lower-tier clubs, and further still to just Serie A, CIES shows how Juventus manages to perform worse than almost everyone, starting with Lecce under Corvino, who deserves a medal of valor for giving loan players just 0.9% of the squad’s total minutes. In the overall ranking of all European leagues, Lecce is even 10th, ahead of Napoli in 11th—the two best Italian clubs for planning and management.
I mentioned Juventus’ 24.9% of minutes outsourced to players it holds on loan: it’s managed to do worse than Como (11.2%), Genoa (19.5%), Monza (20.0%), Cagliari (20.6%), and Verona (23.1%), while only Venezia (27.4%) and Empoli (40.6%) have relied more on players who will inevitably leave at season’s end because they belong to other clubs. It’s worth noting here that Giuntoli has brought in Conceição (owned by Porto), Kolo Muani (PSG), Veiga (Chelsea), and Kalulu (Milan) on loan deals, and even Di Gregorio is, for now, formally on loan from Monza.
For the sake of completeness, it’s fair to say that the top 10 clubs in Europe for managing their present and planning their future are Chelsea, Monaco, AZ Alkmaar, Real Sociedad, PSG, Manchester United, Zenit, Coventry, Arsenal, and Lecce, with Napoli in 11th, Parma 16th, Udinese 33rd, Inter 54th, Milan 56th, Lazio 86th, and Torino 87th, limiting the analysis to the top 100 clubs. To find a club worse than Juventus in terms of using loan players, you have to drop to 193rd place, where Standard Liège sits, having given these non-owned players 30.6% of its squad’s total minutes.
In summary, then, CIES tells us, data in hand, that the policy, strategy, and vision guiding Juventus’ New Course are a losing proposition: Giuntoli is acting not like the director of a top club, but like one from a team fighting relegation, with no ability to invest in the future. And that’s why it’s troubling how easily the Italian media have pinned the blame for Juventus’ failure on Motta, sparing the real primary culprit: Cristiano Giuntoli.
Remember the story of Jesus and Barabbas? Well, with all due respect, that’s more or less where we stand.
P.S. Want to bet you won’t read a single line about this in the sports newspapers or the sports pages of general news dailies?
