One of the more interesting talking points in Serie A during the first three weeks of the 2026-27 season is how some of the top teams in the league have had very few — if any — Italian players in some of their starting lineups. The most notable culprit of this is everybody’s favorite Cinderella story with billionaire ownership Como, which has not fielded an Italian in their starting lineup on multiple occasions already this season.
Juventus might not reach that level this weekend, but it will be close.
Thanks in large part to the current injury blitz going on throughout the roster available to Luciano Spalletti, the Tuscan manager is expected to start just one Italian when Juventus take the field against Sassuolo on Sunday night at the Mapei Stadium. That single Italian in the lineup will be goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario — unless Spalletti gets us with a surprise, of course. But thanks to injuries to the likes of Manuel Locatelli and Andrea Cambiaso and the likelihood of Federico Gatti still coming off the bench despite his late-game heroics last weekend against AC Milan, it’s pretty much Vicario carrying the Italian flag in Juventus’ starting lineup.
If this proves to be the (likely) case, then it will be the first time since February 2023 that Juventus has fielded just one Italian player in the starting lineup.
Of course, it’s not like there’s been a ton of Italians in the starting lineup in the previous three games of the new season. With Gatti second (or maybe third?) choice to Gleison Bremer and Jhon Lucumí in defense, he has been on the bench from the get-go. Cambiaso has been injured ever since the first game of the season and Zeki Çelik has started all three of the first three games at left back. Jeff Ekhator, one of the better young Italian striker prospects, has been injured for much of the preseason and won’t be back for a couple of months.
And now, as we know, the only other Italian to start the first three games like Vicario has, Locatelli, is out until 2027 because he just had surgery to repair his meniscus.
But to see Juventus, Italy’s most successful club regardless of what its current state is right now, with only one Italian player in the starting lineup just doesn’t feel right. And it will be an Italian who wasn’t even a Juve player as of a couple of months ago. Sure, he seems like a massive Juventino and knows what it means to be both Italian and represent this club, he is still just 270 minutes or so into his career in Turin. That’s not much.
So let’s hope that other nations being represented in the starting lineup — Brazil, France, Portugal, etc. — can play a role in keeping this team unbeaten to begin the new season just as the one single Italian starter will be.
