For the second consecutive year, this final section of our season ratings has not one but two managers.
That, obviously, is not a good thing.
It is another one of the many damming statements about what has led to the current state of Juventus in 2026. The club started what they thought would be a modernization project around Thiago Motta in the summer of 2024 was over in less than a year and the man who came into replace him, Igor Tudor, didn’t even come close to making it that long during his tenure
as manager.
Enter a much different profile as manager in Luciano Spalletti, a man in his mid-60s who was brought in to try and right the ship after Tudor’s disastrous start to the season while at the same time trying to right the wrongs of his last managerial job with the Italian national team.
As I feel like I’ve said a decent amount in posts in the final couple weeks of the season, this is how it went:
- Juventus were in sixth place when they fired Tudor in late October.
- Juventus, under Spalletti, were in sixth place when the Serie A season came to a close.
Soooooo, in the grand scheme of things, the overall state of things didn’t exactly improve when looking at the table.
Did other things change? Yeah, of course. Juventus’ style under Spalletti changed from that with Tudor. It wasn’t the completely revolutionary vision that Motta was going for at the beginning of last season that ultimately failed him, but it was much more of a possession-based, front-facing one that created much chances in front of goal than that of his predecessor.
The finishing of those chances, something that isn’t necessarily the fault of the manager, is a different story.
But the inconsistent ways of this team was ultimately something even Spalletti couldn’t rein in and it was the downfall of the season. The hole that Tudor created was something they looked like they were going to dig out of — even with a terrible run of form in February — but the way they ended the season comes to down to all parties involved.
You just can’t close the season with six points in your final five games and expect to hold onto your standing in third or fourth place with how tight things were down the stretch. That’s on the players, but it’s also very much on the guy who was coaching them every day in training.
Igor Tudor — 4
In hindsight, he never should have been brought back to coach this team after getting them into the Champions League last season. That’s easy to say now more than six months after he was fired in October. But it’s true! For as much praise as he might have earned because of that top-four finish entering the summer and coaching Juventus at the Club World Cup, that’s certainly not the case for the job he did during the first 2 1/2 months of the 2025-26 season.
Tudor was bad.
Not as bad as at his second job of the 2025-26 season, but still pretty bad.
Which is something that, after a fast start to the season, maybe you didn’t see coming. Or, at the very least, you didn’t see things going as bad as they did as quickly as they actually did.
The catch was that Juventus needed somebody to coach them at the Club World Cup. And after swinging and missing with Antonio Conte and then Gian Piero Gasperini, the very-recently-hired Damien Comolli was faced with a choice — circle back to Tudor as your third choice or scramble to get somebody else before the vastly-rich Club World Cup got underway in the United States. The choice was Tudor after he basically said he wanted to know his future before the tournament preparations began.
That was the wrong choice.
After winning his first three games of the season against Parma, Genoa and then the wild 4-3 win over Inter Milan in the Derby d’Italia, Tudor didn’t win another game again. Following the win over Inter, Tudor collected all of five points in his final eight games in all competitions, with the final three games on the sidelines all being loses. The bright start was gone. The energy after the win over Inter was completely zapped and left the building at Continassa and the team suddenly looked just completely devoid of any idea of what to do.
Those final three losses of the Tudor era — to Como, Real Madrid and then Lazio — certainly had the feel of a manager who was entering his last days as manager. The rumors starting flying about his status. And by the time that Juve returned home from Madrid after failing to get a win in their third straight Champions League league phase fixture, his time as manager in Turin was on life support.
Juventus fired Tudor on Oct. 27, one day after the loss to Lazio, a club that hadn’t added a single player over the summer due to a transfer ban and was going through plenty of other problems with Maurizio Sarri. It was a deserved end result but, as we know, it’s not like he was working with a squad that was deserving of finishing in the top four.
Juventus finished in the same place in the standings as they were when Tudor was sacked.
But hey, at least Tudor’s Juventus run this past season wasn’t as bad as his seven-game spell at Tottenham. So there’s that, I guess?
Luciano Spalletti — 6
This one is a little tougher because of two very obvious factors.
For one, Spalletti had the Tudor-created hole in the standings to try and dig out of when he took over right before Halloween. The team was a mess when he arrived and he had a roster of total mismatches that had a whole lot of problems and ultimately limited options in which the veteran tactician could actually trust with how he wanted to play.
The second, however, is that he had a whole lot more time to try and get Juventus into the top four than Tudor did last season. And because of that, he had a lot more wiggle room when it comes to getting into the top four and then ultimately trying to stay there.
With two games to go, Juventus were in the top four and had to beat two mid-table teams — albeit difficult matchups because they wanted to completely ruin the Bianconeri’s season — to qualify for the Champions League.
They didn’t win either of those games. They fell from third to sixth in the penultimate weekend of the season. And they ultimately failed to qualify for the Champions League. The main thing Spalletti was brought in to try and achieve didn’t happen. So how much of that is on him? This is the ultimate question.
Fact is, the manager is always going to shoulder a huge amount of the blame when things go wrong no matter who is on his roster. That is the nature of the beast — especially when you’re a big name like Spalletti and at a club like Juventus that has to be in the Champions League (and get the financial benefits that come with it) every season to try and be competitive. No matter how much the quality of Juventus’ squad has dropped over the last five or six years, Champions League qualification is a must, and if you don’t that then you will be massively criticized for it.
Spalletti improved some things without a doubt. Players who were struggling under Tudor were better after Spalletti arrived. His man management was consistently a topic of praise from his players, and you could get the sense that he was the right kind of personality that was needed at a moment that they were in after Tudor was first fired.
On the other hand, he got things wrong, too.
The thing that continues to stick out to me is how he basically back himself into a corner with the limited options he trusted on this team. That’s not to say that somebody like Loïs Openda should have started 20-plus games or something like that. But when you see some of the minute totals that a good portion of Juventus’ top players finished with, it speaks to both the lack of depth this roster has (not Spalletti’s fault) but also how he simply didn’t have faith in a good number of players on his team. He wanted to play a certain way, and if players weren’t going to be able to do that then they were essentially glued to the bench for much of the final months of the season.
And as a result, it turned into a situation where five players ended up playing over 3,600 minutes in all competitions, with a sixth player (Andrea Cambiaso) barely under that figure. That’s a lot of minutes for basically what turned out to be half of Spalletti’s regular starting lineup. The effects of that was evident by season’s end.
When it’s all said and done, though, Spalletti’s top priority was to try and get Juventus into the Champions League next season despite all of the issues that were present when he arrived and lingered through the remainder of the season. That UCL qualification didn’t happen and it’s impossible to avoid it when evaluating the job he did.
