How would you grade Juventus' summer transfer window?
The summer transfer window is over and done.
And you know what that means? OPINIONS. LOTS OF OPINIONS.
Under the restrictions of a financial mess largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic and fans not being in the Allianz Stadium for the last year and a half, Juventus’ summer mercato was something that was never going to be as free-spending and wild and crazy as some of the other big clubs in Europe. Matching the financial prowess of the big English clubs or Paris Saint-Germain was never going to happen, and therefore Juve — a lot like last summer — was forced to get creative in the way they did things on the market.
And that was even before Cristiano Ronaldo informed the club that he wanted out.
So with no Ronaldo and a club that is coming off two very disappointing results to begin the 2021-22 season sits here in the early days of the September international break, here is what Juventus’ final summer transfer market looked like:
As you can see, not a whole lot of money spent outside of the deal for Locatelli. And, as you can also probably notice, not one of Juventus’ highly-paid but underperforming players was shipped off to another team over the last month or two. (Unless you want to throw Douglas Costa in there, but that happened months ago.)
As much as the end of last week was wild with everything involving Ronaldo going down, it still was very much a quiet transfer window for Juventus. Just look at the list above — much of Juve’s outgoing players were either youngsters coming up from the Under-23 side that went out on season-long loans or senior team players who were never going to stick around to begin with.
At most, Juve will only have three summer signings contribute this season, which could very well be just Manuel Locatelli and Moise Kean is Kaio Jorge is slowly worked into the squad over the course of the year.
So, the ultimate question: How would you grade Juventus’ summer transfer window? Drop a comment or two, all of that good stuff. There will be plenty to talk about in the days to come because Juventus, even with all of the relative inactivity, still has a squad that isn’t exactly looking as complete as we hoped it would be.