We are about to go from one extreme of the scale to the other. Why? Because after sitting through the longest in-season international break (that wasn’t much of a break at all for some) that we’ve ever seen in this sport, we are soon to arrive at the sight of a relentless stretch of the schedule for Juventus, beginning with this coming weekend’s trip to Sardinia to face one of Serie A’s biggest surprises this season.
Basically, if you’ve missed calcio over the this “break” for some of Juve’s best
players, there ain’t going to be much of one over the next month.
Or, in this case, 29 days.
I say that because this very simple fact is looking Juventus manager Luciano Spalletti right in the face: The Bianconeri’s return to the field against Cagliari on Sunday night will mark the first fixture of a 29-day span when they will play a whopping nine times. That’s a game pretty much every three days — and it comes at a time in which Juve are both short-handed because of injuries up and down the roster to important players as well as about to hit their first extended run of the Europa League’s Thursday-Sunday grind.
S0 what does all of this look like? A little something like this:
- Sunday, Oct 11: away vs. Cagliari
- Thursday, Oct. 15: away vs. Celta Vigo (Europa League)
- Sunday, Oct. 18: home vs. Lazio
- Thursday, Oct. 22: home vs. Rennes (Europa League)
- Sunday, Oct. 25: away vs. Lecce
- Wednesday, Oct. 28: away vs. Genoa
- Sunday, Nov. 1: home vs. Napoli
- Thursday, Nov. 5: away vs. AZ Alkmaar (Europa League)
- Sunday, Nov. 8: away vs. Fiorentina
Add it all up and that’s nine games in total. Six of those nine are away from home, including two of those fixtures on the road are in the Europa League. And absolutely none of those games look like layups no matter what we think of this current Juventus squad and the injuries that are ever-present over the next few weeks (at minimum).
As things stand now, Juventus will face only two Serie A opponents who are in the bottom half of the table, with Lecce sitting 12th and Fiorentina down in 17th, albeit with four points out of a possible six since replacing Fabio Grosso with Paolo Vanoli after starting the season with three straight losses. Celta Vigo away will be a tough one. Same goes for heading to the Netherlands to face AZ, the team currently atop the Eredivisie standings. But there are two of the bigger opponents domestically over this stretch, Lazio and then Napoli, that will be make their way to the Allianz Stadium — which, in theory, should be something that is a potential boon to a weary squad by the time the Thursday-Sunday grind kicks into gear.
No matter how you spin it, it’s a massive nine-game stretch for Spalletti and Juventus on multiple fronts. And while there’s likely no true Scudetto challengers on the schedule — unless you think that Lazio actually have a chance, of course — there’s a host of tricky fixtures for Spalletti to try and work his way through as he looks to get his team closer to the leaders of the pack by the time the next international break arrives after Juve’s trop to Florence.
And all the while, they will be trying to do this with very little rest, not much time to try and work on things on the training ground between each fixture and to try and weather any other storms on the injury front because those just final unavoidable these days. Considering this is going to be the first truly busy stretch of the 2026-27 season, it’s hard to tell just how Spalletti will handle things when it comes to squad rotation. We know the injuries will hinder some of those thoughts he might have had — especially in midfield when there’s no Manuel Locatelli and Khephren Thuram playing a lot of minutes to begin with.
Either way, Spalletti will have to maneuver through this nine-game stretch rather deftly simply because of how many minutes his team will be playing over the span of 29 days. It’s a lot — and we’re going to find out a lot about this team and how they can handle the Europa League grind on top of it all.
