Coaches come and coaches go. Entire boards resign in disgrace, get fired and new names are brought on board. Millions of Euros change hands over the course of the summer transfer window. A multitude of spanking fresh adidas kits hit the clearance racks, season after season.
And, after all of that, Juventus still do not have a functioning midfield.
As we continue with our season rankings for the 2025-26 campaign, it falls onto me the questionable honor to grade one of the more dysfunctional units for the club.
As always, the rankings will go from most appearances to least and stats will reflect all competitions.
Let’s cook.
Weston McKennie — 7
2025-26 Stats: 48 appearances, 9 goals, 8 assists, 6 yellow cards.
Every team in the world could use a guy like Weston McKennie.
What’s not to love about a versatile guy that can play almost any midfield position in a pinch, reliable, good locker room guy and all around as dependable as they come?
After (once again) looking like he might be a guy on the outs earlier in the summer, McKennie ended up being a fundamental piece of Igor Tudor and later Luciano Spalletti’s squad. He found arguably the best offensive streak of his career, adding an attacking midfield position to his ever-expanding assortment of roles in which he can play within a day’s notice.
Indeed, McKennie was part of more goal involvements for Juventus this past season than all the strikers on this team. Sure, that speaks to the futility of the strikers on this squad, but credit where credit is due: McKennie was an asset in every stretch of the imagination this year.
That being said … when McKennie is the best midfielder on the squad, that means you have a midfield problem. McKennie is the perfect jack-of-all-trades, an immensely useful player and Juventus should count their blessings that he will still be on the payroll beyond this season after he signed a contract extension earlier this year, but he is not elite at any role he plays. A midfield with McKennie as your best, most consistent performer is a midfield that has a very clear ceiling, and the way the season went is proof of that ceiling.
Manuel Locatelli — 6.5
2025-26 Stats: 47 appearances, 3 goals, 2 assists, 11 yellow cards.
The captain of the sinking ship that was SS Juventus this season merits some consideration for the season he had. He was very reliable, as he was one of the most consistent performers in terms of appearances — especially since he started 95% of the games he played in domestically. At times, he looked like a mature, poised central midfielder with the chops to dictate a match at will. Maybe even a worthy successor of Juve’s past great midfield generals.
His main issue is that those instances came few and far between.
To be fair, Locatelli was rarely catastrophic, either. He was a dependable operator, but there were way too many games this season in which he was just there. Similarly to McKennie, though, if this is the guy who is the captain of your team and someone who plays almost 50 games for you, how good is your team? How far can a team led by Manuel Locatelli go? If this season is any indication, not very.
At this point, Locatelli is who he ism, and very few players make a massive leap in quality at 28 years old. He is a dependable if rarely spectacular player who — as the captain of the team — hasn’t really shown a huge ability to rally the troops around him as this team continues to look bad in big games and has shown a penchant for inconsistency and lack of signature moments.
(Also, since taking over main captain duties for Juventus, two coaches have gotten fired under his captaincy in Thiago Motta and Tudor. IS LOCATELLI A COACH KILLER? NEXT ON FIRST TAKE.)
I’m not advocating for Locatelli to get the boot, but if Juventus are serious about getting back to contending for titles, perhaps it’s time to transition away from Locatelli as a bedrock, foundationally important player for this team and more to what his level really is. Good, not great.
Khephren Thuram — 6
2025-26 Stats: 45 appearances, 4 goals, 5 assists, 3 yellow cards.
When Khephren Thuram plays well, he can look like a top midfielder in the world. Unfortunately — and not unlike Locatelli — those occasions became rarer and rarer this past season.
Thuram, also, did not necessarily avoid catastrophic games, as more than once this year he was a net negative for a squad that couldn’t allow themselves too many bad performances. He was one of the many players who self-destructed in Turkiye against Galatasaray in the Champions League and his carelessness was a common denominator in his bad performances.
It’s this seesaw in form that probably was the reason he lost out on a World Cup spot on an – admittedly loaded – French national team that has legit chances to win the whole thing this summer.
If Thuram can recapture the form of his debut season in black and white, he still has a lot of the tools to become an upper-tier midfielder and a very important piece for Juventus moving forward. He feels like another guy who is at a crossroads in a squad filled with them.
Teun Koopmeiners — 4
2025-26 Stats: 45 appearances, 2 goals, 1 assist, 5 yellow cards.
It’s a beautiful irony that the best game Teun Koopmeiners played for Juventus was also the day the team got annihilated in Turkiye in the Champions League.
It is also a testimony to what has proven to be the shear uselessness of the Dutch international — who was called up to the Netherlands’ World Cup squad somehow! — that the only two goals he had on the season happened on that fateful day.
At this point, I think it’s fair to call it: Koopmeiners has been an absolute disaster as a Juventus player, and when it’s all said and done will probably go down in history as one of the worst signings in the history of the club.
Koopmeiners played in almost every single midfield position this year and was equally ineffective wherever he was fielded. Under Motta, Tudor and Spalletti he failed to make an impact, and by season’s end he looked completely shook every time he got on the field. At times, it felt like coaches were just figuring out the place where he at least wasn’t a liability.
I know Transfermarkt is not the most reliable destination for player valuations, but they estimate his current market value at € 14 million, a slight drop from the € 58 million transfer fee Juventus paid Atalanta two years ago for the privilege of making him a Juventus player. And even that seems a bit too high for the player that we saw all season.
It seems very unlikely Koopmeiners sticks around for another year. Who knows if it was the carousel of coaches during his time with the club or just bad talent evaluation from the Juventus brass, but not many people will be sad to see him leave.
Fabio Miretti — 5
2025-26 Stats: 31 appearances, 1 goal, 3 assists, 2 yellow cards.
Man, time really flies, huh?
Not too long ago, Fabio Miretti was one of the crown jewels of the Juventus Next Gen system. A silky-smooth, baby-faced midfielder who showed poise and vision beyond his years. Many people — myself included — jumped the gun and pegged him as the next great Juventus midfield stud.
The reality has been a bit of a disappointment.
Miretti is still pretty young — he will turn 23 years old in August — but he has failed to develop the way many people expected him to and was largely an afterthought this season. While he is far from a lost cause, there’s definitely a sense that he might have hit a wall in his development as a lot of the things he struggled with when he first broke into the first team are still very present in his game today.
As a depth piece, you can still probably do worse than Miretti, but betting on him to be much more than that at this point in time is built more on leftover goodwill and hope than anything tangible we have seen on the pitch.
Filip Kostic — 5
2025-26 Stats: 23 appearances, 3 goals, 1 assist, 1 yellow card.
Pretty insane that Filip Kostic was still on the squad in the year of our Lord 2026. Alas, here we are.
After being loaned out to Fenerbahce and failing to stick around in the Turkish league, Kostic came back to play out the last year of his contract in black and white. Even at his best, Kostic was decidedly a one-trick pony in terms of his game.
A wingback’s wingback, he remained the traditional mold of a player who bombs up and down the wing, peppers crosses and lives with the results whatever those may be. Now 33 years old, a lot of his physical prime is gone, and you could definitely tell in his limited appearances for Juventus.
Kostic played sporadically in the first half of the season but was pretty much glued to the bench in the second half with only seven appearances in league play and all of them coming from the bench in limited minutes. Even so, he still managed to be more impactful than Koopmeiners! It’s a low bar to clear, but by God he cleared it.
I will not necessarily miss watching Kostic play, but gotta give it to the guy, he was just the player that was advertised — no more, no less.
Vasilije Adžić — ¯\(ツ)/¯
2025-26 Stats: 17 appearances, 1 goal, assists, 1 yellow card.
It was one goal, but what a goal!
Another player who got some early run this season and then faded to obscurity, Adzic flashed some talent — with the above goal being the most obvious — but failed to make much of an impact besides that one moment. The 20-year-old Montenegro international is definitely a candidate to do a loan spell somewhere else and I wouldn’t be surprised if he continues to develop with more consistent playing time.
Still, despite the early flashes, Adzic wasn’t really a big contributor for Juventus this season and I wouldn’t bet on him to do so next year, either. He’s a guy to keep an eye out for, though.
