Sporting director Cristiano Giuntoli has been tasked with overseeing the ongoing revolution in Thiago Motta’s Juventus squad, so how has he performed so far?
The Italian director took over at the Old Lady last year following Napoli’s Scudetto success but was unable to invest particularly heavily due to issues above him. 12 months later, he’s now in a different position, trying to shake things up in Turin for the new era.
With less than a month to go before the end of the summer transfer window, Giuntoli and Juventus have brought in four players and sold seven, with more moves expected on both sides in the coming weeks.
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Has Giuntoli worked well at Juventus?
Juventus have spent almost €80m on four players so far this summer, signing Douglas Luiz from Aston Villa (€51.5m), Khephren Thuram from OGC Nice (€20.6m), Juan Cabal from Hellas Verona (€12.8m) and Michele Di Gregorio from Monza (€4.5m loan fee).
They’ve still not managed to complete a number of seemingly important deals, including Atalanta star Teun Koopmeiners, Nice defender Jean-Clair Todibo and a new winger, like Borussia Dortmund’s Karim Adeyemi.
The Old Lady have already missed out on a number of targets to their rivals, like defender Riccardo Calafiori to Arsenal, forward Mason Greenwood to Olympique Marseille and Manchester United’s Jadon Sancho.
On the other side of the table, Giuntoli’s Juventus have sold Matias Soule to Roma (€25.6m), Dean Huijsen to Bournemouth (€15.2m), Samuel Iling-Junior (€14m) and Enzo Barrenechea (€8m) to Bournemouth, Moise Kean to Fiorentina (€13m), Koni De Winter to Genoa (€8m) and Kaio Jorge to Cruzeiro (€7.2m).
A whole host of players have been rather publicly frozen out and need to be sold before the end of the summer, dividing option amongst supporters, with redundancies including Federico Chiesa, Weston McKennie, Wojciech Szczesny and Mattia Di Sciglio.
The handling of these cases, and the public statements relating to them, has caused some concern amongst fans and has put Giuntoli in the crosshairs, even if Thiago Motta became the public face of the transfer strategy.
Whilst it’s still early days for the sporting director and the Old Lady, it’s clear that things haven’t totally gone to plan this transfer window and serious work will need to be done in the coming weeks to try and set Thiago Motta up for success.