Juventus made it official this morning – Frederic Massara is the club’s new Chief Football Officer, and Giorgio Chiellini is shifting into a new role as Chief Club Affairs Officer. Two different moves, two different jobs, but they landed on the same day and they’re both about the same thing: Carnevali building out a front office that actually looks like a front office.
Start with Massara, since that’s the bigger structural change. He’ll report directly to CEO Giovanni Carnevali, and his job is to oversee
the men’s football division – working in close collaboration with sporting director Marco Ottolini. He’s filling a role vacated by Fabio Paratici in 2021 that hasn’t been replaced since. The club called it strengthening the organisational structure of the men’s football division, and given the history here, that’s a pretty accurate way to put it.
Massara joins about a month after leaving Roma. Carnevali’s framing was warm – he talked about welcoming Massara into the club and said his experience “complements perfectly” the skills already in the building. I don’t think that’s just noise as Massara’s resume speaks for itself. Massara’s career runs through several of Serie A’s biggest clubs, and he’s occupied a few different roles along the way.
At Roma, he wasn’t the sporting director for most of his time there – he was part of a technical staff, working underneath others in the building. That staff landed Marquinhos, Kevin Strootman, Radja Nainggolan, Mehdi Benatia, Mohamed Salah, and Alisson. After leaving Roma for a short stint to work at Inter Milan, he was brought back to Roma for a year to work as the General Secretary alongside Monchi where they brought in Bryan Cristante and Nicolo Zaniolo. So even in a supporting role, he was around some genuinely excellent business – the kind of business a lot of clubs would build a whole era around.
When he joined Milan, he finally got the opportunity to run the show as their sporting director. Over a span of four years, he was responsible for bringing in Rafael Leao, Franck Kessie, Sandro Tonali, Mike Maignan, Tijjani Reijnders, and Christian Pulisic. Their technical staff did an excellent job identifying value at multiple positions and multiple price points over several transfer windows, and it’s part of why he picked up Sporting Director of the Year at the 2022 Globe Soccer Awards alongside Paolo Maldini.
No matter where he’s been, Massara’s been on a staff that did an excellent job improving recruitment strategy, identifying affordable talent within that strategy, and executing their plan. Those are all things that he’ll oversee as the Chief Football Officer, and they’re all things Juventus has been lacking over the last several years.
Chiellini’s move is smaller in scope but still notable – he’s spent the last year as Director of Football Strategy, and now he’s taking on this new Chief Club Affairs Officer title, which is about relationships: institutions, stakeholders, sporting bodies, in Italy and internationally. It’s less about the football side and more about Juventus’ standing in the wider football world, and given who Chiellini is to this club, it’s not hard to see why they’d want him in that seat specifically.
Put together, this is Carnevali filling out the org chart he inherited quickly and intentionally. In theory at least, this is the kind of structure that should make recruitment more coherent going forward. Only time will tell if things will work out for the bianconeri, but there’s plenty of reason for hope and optimism given the history and track record of the people stepping into these roles.
