Thirteen months ago, Juventus agreed to a three-player swap deal with Aston Villa that centered around Brazilian midfielder Douglas Luiz. Since that transfer became official, the 27-year-old Brazilian has made all of six starts in a Juventus shirt, with plenty of things preventing him from consistently being a part of the Bianconeri starting lineup.
As of this writing, I feel pretty safe in saying that there will never be a seventh start for Douglas Luiz at Juventus.
That is because on this day, July
24, Juventus players reported to Continassa for their first day of preseason training ahead of the 2025-26 campaign getting underway next month. All of the usual suspects were there. You had Carlo Pinsoglio rolling up in some sort of adidas fit that’s impossible to explain while smiling for the cameras. You had Bremer with a slick haircut to go with his always-chiseled jawline. You even had Dusan Vlahovic, somebody who seems to have absolutely no future at Juventus, training with his teammates, albeit likely short-time ones. Who wasn’t there, though? That would be the aforementioned Douglas Luiz — and not because of an excused absence, either.
That’s right, folks. On the first day of preseason training, one of Juventus’ biggest signings from last summer’s attempted roster makeover was a complete no-show. As Italian media outlets like Sky Italia and La Gazzetta dello Sport have reported, this was not an authorized absence. This was Luiz not reporting for work because he wants to leave. And because of that, Luiz is expected to be disciplined — not that he probably minds at this point — and maybe even sold this summer faster than Damien Comolli and Co. had previously hoped.
At this point, that disciplinary measure is probably a sizable fine that Luiz — who receives a €5 million net salary at Juventus — can certainly afford to pay.
But we also know that this is basically the nail in the coffin for Luiz at Juventus. Even more than before for a player who failed to live up to his €50 million price tag from last summer.
I feel like we can start to refer to his career at Juve in the past tense. He’s leaving this summer — and there’s even more certainty than there was 24 hours ago. You hear about the rumors regarding a return to the Premier League — Everton are interested, same goes for Leeds United and Nottingham Forest with a couple of others potentially lurking, too — and you know that there’s plenty of smoke with this fure. And that was before Thursday’s no-show — which is the clearest sign that he’s trying to force a move as soon as humanly possible.
The Premier League season starts a week before Serie A, and all 20 clubs have already started training, with some even playing their first friendly of the summer within the last few days. Luiz can see the writing on the wall in Turin even though he actually isn’t physically there in all likelihood and wants to get back to a league where he’s excelled.
To try and accelerate that, this is clearly the only option he felt was possible. Even while somebody like Vlahovic, who feels just as likely to leave this summer, was professional enough to show up in Turin and train alongside his teammates on Thursday. (And as we know, it’s not like the reports surrounding Vlahovic have made getting him sold all that easy.)
When it’s all said and done, though, Luiz pulling this as what will prove to be his final act with Juventus just adds to what a flop his signing has already been. For €50 million last summer — yeah, I know there was a couple of players going to Villa in the other way to offset some of that cost — Juventus got three league starts, around 850 minutes played in all competitions and probably more than just a couple of headaches because of all the time he missed due to injury.
I don’t know about you all, but Cristiano Giuntoli sure did leave Juve with some sort of mess to try and clean up in his wake. At least all of the other signings he made last summer showed up to work on Thursday. That’s more than we can say about Douglas Luiz.
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