A recent Slack exchange between yours truly and a couple of the other BWRAO regulars around here took a turn into a short discussion of Como’s ownership and their impressive form this season. They are a club that has gone from Serie B to competing for a spot in the Champions League within a couple of years, and all the while had an ownership group that has some of the deepest and wealthiest pockets in both Serie A and Europe as a whole. They have the resources available to them, spend their money
smartly and the proof is in how they’ve gone from newly-promoted side to competing for a spot in the Champions League all within a couple of years.
I bring this up because we can’t say the same “they’ve spent their money well” statement about Juventus.
As we head toward the end of a fifth straight season in which Juventus haven’t won a Serie A title — which, after dominating the league for a decade in the 2010s, is quite a long time to win your next one — it’s pretty obvious to see that the roster that has been constructed over the last half-decade hasn’t gotten the job done. Or anything xlose to it. No matter how much money the club has spent, it hasn’t resulted in a 39th Scudetto arriving in Turin or much of a title push at all. Sporting directors have come and gone. Same goes for the managers in which they and the rest of the front office at the time have hired. The revolving door of managers the last three seasons has been impossible to ignore.
Same goes for the amount of money Juve has spent — and not spent well.
As the aforementioned Como has acquired very good pieces throughout its rise up to their current standing in fourth place, the team directly behind them in the Serie A table has spent a whoooooooooole lot more money. And the end result? A whole lot of that cash basically being burnt in the same fashion that a degenerate gambler would when they’re chasing a loss. The deeper the hole is, the harder it is to turn things around.
But to what extent? Well, thankfully we’ve got some numbers. (Even though said numbers are not good.)
Over the last five years, Juventus have spent a whopping €875 million. Over that span, the roster has failed to look like a complete unit despite all of that money poured in by those who are supposed to know what they’re doing. The problem has been, few of those investments have been ones in which you’re sitting there praising Juventus’ front office that signed them. For every Kenan Yildiz, there has been a Douglas Luiz, Nico Gonzalez, Loïs Openda and Jonathan David that have not lived up their lofty transfer fee, salary or usually both. It comes at a time when the club’s finances have never been more under the microscope by both fans, Serie A and the FIGC as well as UEFA regulators alike due to Financial Fair Play regulations and everything else the club has dealt with ever since the COVID-19 lockdown in Italy came to an end.
Here is, courtesy of VecchiaSignora,com and Juventus fan channel 2TALKS on YouTube, the numbers:
- 2020-21: €204 million spent — fourth place in Serie A, Coppa Italia winners, Supercoppa winners, Champions League Round of 16
- 2021-22: €183 million spent — fourth place in Serie A, Champions League Round of 16
- 2022-23: €96 million spent — seventh place in Serie A (with points penalty), eliminated in Champions League group stage
- 2023-24: €17 million spent — third in Serie A, Coppa Italia winners
- 2024-25: €250 million spent — fourth in Serie A, eliminated in Champions League play-off round
- 2025-26: €125 million spent — eliminated in Champions League play-off round, currently in fifth place and at risk of missing out on Champions League qualification
The thing is, this is not just one sporting director or one front office team blowing through hundreds of millions of Euros in a summer or two. There has been multiple sporting directors brought in, been given the green light to spend a ton of money and the end result has essentially been the same both domestically and in Europe. It doesn’t matter if it’s been Fabio Paratici before he left. It doesn’t matter if it’s been Cristiano Giuntoli in the two years before he was fired. It doesn’t matter if it’s now Damien Comolli and (to a lesser extent) Marco Ottolini now. Over the last four years (and even going back to the couple of seasons following Beppe Marotta’s departure) Juventus’ most recent front office has had to clean up the mess left by the guys they just replaced.
And, a lot of the time, it hasn’t gotten all that much better — if at all.
Comolli and Ottolini enter a summer transfer window this year that could very well be heavily impacted by what happens with Champions League qualification. Meaning, the amount of funds available could very well be limited no matter what Luciano Spalletti may or may not be asking for. Either way, there’s still the mess to try and clean up when it comes to the moves that Comolli made in the summer of 2025 and the players who still remain from Giuntoli’s summer spending spree of 2024 and the massive roster churn that clearly didn’t pay off — at all.
Juventus’ slide from title challenger to now trying to scratch and claw their way into fourth place and Champions League qualification is the by-product of multiple transfer windows going completely bust. It’s not just one or two windows that have set them back. For the better part of the last five years, the majority of their moves haven’t worked out, haven’t generated a ton of value in players that allowed them to sell them for a big profit and then re-invest in the squad like we saw when Marotta was around.
On a recent episode of the Libero podcast, Italian football journalist James Horncastle said that it’s pretty common for clubs to fall behind the rest of the pack if they get one or two summer transfer windows wrong. So what do we say about the last five years — or four considering Juve couldn’t spend any money in the summer of 2023 for very obvious reasons — of bad business and roster construction decisions?
Not much good, I can tell you that.
Further proof of just how unimpressive Juventus’ spending has been despite that total being so damn high: The current squad’s best player is Yildiz, a product of the youth academy who was brought in for virtually nothing and will give the club a massive profit whenever the day arrives that he heads elsewhere.
Hopefully that day isn’t soon, of course. But if Juventus continue to spend a ton of money and continue to look as incomplete of a squad despite all of that as they have over the past half-decade, then it’s only a matter of times before something like that does happen. Como continue to make extremely smart and quality decisions on the transfer market on top of all the resources they have. You can’t say the same about Juventus despite whatever money Exor continues to pump into the club with every capital injection that is needed.
