Sergio’s Summer Scoop: No Rest Until Orlando

The cursed 2024-25 season has finally come to an end.

Through trials and tribulations,
Juventus
managed to salvage a top-four finish in Serie A to guarantee themselves Champions League football for next season and the sweet, sweet revenue that all of that entails.

And while you’d be completely entitled to tune out anything and all Juventus-related things for a couple of months, our beloved club continued to make news even after the season was over. In what has felt like a blink — because it was! — the

Bianconeri

are now
playing in the Club World Cup
and
have confirmed Igor Tudor to be their manager
for next season and — in theory — beyond.

We still have a lot to discuss with our beloved Bianconeri, my friends.

Let’s cook.

Plan C: Igor Tudor

It’s always comforting when your interim head coach has to come out after the last game of the season and
make a thinly veiled threat about his future
, huh?

Tudor did a fine job as coach after the firing of Thiago Motta in March, but even the most ardent Tudor supporter would struggle to say that the team performed significantly better under the former Juve defender than before. The most charitable read is that Juventus went back to a relatively decent level and looked more locked in than they did under Motta. Granted, that is a low bar considering how discombobulated the team looked in the latter days of the Motta era, but it doesn’t make it any less true.

That being said, in a lot of ways, the team exhibited a lot of the same problems they had before and consistently looked like less than the sum of its parts.

Juventus brass clearly agreed, as the club was linked to pretty much any coach with some pedigree and a chance to leave their current situation. You know they wanted Antonio Conte, they surely asked about Gian Piero Gasperini, and only after being turned down by both they ended up re-signing Tudor because the Club World Cup was coming up fast and they didn’t want to go into the tournament without an answer at the manager position.

You can like Tudor as a former Juve player, and to his credit he does legitimately seem to identify with the club and seems like he really cares. But, make no mistake, this is an underwhelming hire. Tudor has, at no point in his career been a consistently successful football coach. In the 12 years Tudor has managed at the senior level, he has one trophy to his name — the Croatian Cup in 2012, in his first year as manager of Hadjuk Split. Coincidentally, that is also the one and only time Tudor has managed a team for more than one season.

Since that spell, he has bounced around from club to club, either taking over in a firefighter fashion — not unlike with Juventus — or starting the season but either failing to make it through the year or not getting renewed.

His best showing managing at least a full year was the 1.83 points he averaged during his lone season at Marseille. He has never averaged over 2 points during his coaching career when managing for more than 15 games in a season.

(If you feel so inclined to think that 1.83 points per match is a pretty good number all things considered, do keep in mind that in the first Max Allegri era his points per match average was 2.27 and in his second, wholly disappointing return he averaged … 1.84)

So, in essence, Juventus are betting that a coach who has no track record of previous success or history of building any sort of long-term project manages to do at least one of those things in the most high-profile situation of his career.

Stranger things have happened in football, but that is one long-odds bet if I have ever seen one.

Make the whole league out of Al Ain

Juventus started things on the right foot at the Club World Cup this Wednesday night by beating the breaks off of Al Ain in a dominant 5-0 win.

And look, that was fun, I enjoyed sitting around and watching my favorite team score a bunch of goals and look like a juggernaut for a couple of hours. But, if you want to make any sort of larger read from this game other than even at its worst, Juventus are better than a team that finished in fifth place in the UAE Pro League this past season … well, I don’t know what to tell you.

That’s kind of the feel I get from this whole Club World Cup shebang. I just don’t care one single iota about what happens. If Juventus had scored 10 more goals or lost the match altogether, it wouldn’t change a thing about how I feel about this team in the short or long term.

In a way, I care about this matches even less than friendlies.

In friendlies, you get to at least see new signings get integrated or analyze how the team is shaping up for the next season. Because the Club World Cup is taking place just a couple of weeks after the end of the Serie A season, this is essentially the same team, playing the same way, with the same players that we just saw against Venezia in last month’s finale. Hell, even because of the damn uniform gimmick of wearing their new kits in the previous season, you don’t even get that novelty.

I will give credit to whoever is running the graphics and presentation department in the tournament. They sure are trying very hard to make this feel like an event — different intros for the players, neat and cool graphics and a whole bunch of bells and whistles. But it really doesn’t matter how pretty you try to dress it up because the Club World Cup is what it is. It’s a glorified summer friendly invitational and another in a long list of money grabs on U.S. soil aimed to get as much money as possible in as little time as you can.

(If you want more arguments for this whole thing being Mickey Mouse, consider that Napoli,


Liverpool


and Barcelona — the current Italian, English and Spanish champions, respectively — are not included because of the tournaments weird, made up rules about which clubs make it in and almost all of the 32-team field basically being locked in for the past 12 months.)

And considering the tournament is already experiencing
low attendance
in the first week and had to
dramatically slash ticket prices
in the run-up to the competition, the future of the retooled Club World Cup is already looking murky at best.

(Who could have foreseen that a game between the Mamelodi Sundowns and Ulsan FC in Orlando would be sparsely attended?)

Treat these upcoming matches the same way you would treat any other friendly summer game — on the TV if there is literally nothing else to watch, otherwise, following on your phone on social media is more than enough.

See you next week.