Juve, young debutants in the season? Zero. And the Next Gen…

Not even a single young player from the Juventus academy launched in the whole of 2025-2026, despite the homegrown talents, despite the thriving Next Gen project, despite the decline in the average quality of the squad in recent years. But how did the club that first launched the second team project end the season without making anyone’s debut? That’s right. And it’s not a detail: at Juventus this zero in youth debuts has been seen very few times in the last three decades and never in the last dozen years, with the natural risk that the beneficial flow of talent that starts from the youth sector and passes through the Next Gen up to Serie A could be interrupted. And to think that in recent years, thanks to young people, the Lady has raised tens of millions of euros to finance the first team’s signing campaigns…

bench only

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In ascending order of age: Raffaele Huli, Niccolò Rizzo, Riccardo Radu, Simone Scaglia, Stefano Mangiapoco and Pedro Felipe. There are six players still without first team appearances who have been called up by Igor Tudor or Luciano Spalletti this season, but none of them have experienced the thrill of entering the pitch with tens of thousands of curious eyes scrutinizing them. They spent some time in the locker room and several of them trained sporadically with the Serie A players, but the leap remained only theoretical, never official. It may be a coincidence, but it still remains a fact to think about at the gates of a transfer session in which, for example, Sassuolo’s Tarik Muharemovic remains appreciated, liquidated by the Bianconeri in 2024 without even a minute on the pitch and now perhaps regretted. Fabio Miretti himself is on the way out – Como also likes him – but he wouldn’t have been a mid-high Serie A footballer if he hadn’t tasted “big” football for the first time in 2022-2023 as a fundamental step in his growth process. Without a field, young people do not grow nor are they exposed to the general public, whether the aim is the training of a potential champion or the understandable player trading.

in the window

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Be careful, the point is not that Next Gen lacks talent, far from it. Massimo Brambilla’s team finished in fifth place in group B of Serie C, overcame Vis Pesaro in the first round of the playoffs and stopped in second place against Alessandro Birindelli’s Pianese. The clearest talent is the left winger David Puczka – 10 goals and five assists in the season – who is spoken of so highly that he probably could have already attempted the leap to Serie A, but it didn’t happen. And then there is Giacomo Faticanti, Augusto Owusu, the talent of Adin Licina, the central Javier Gil. There would be material to draw on the second team, but it didn’t happen with either Tudor or Spalletti. And the virtuous circle was interrupted, without any benefit for Juventus itself. Obviously in this specific case it is understandable that the coaches focused on the few certainties in the squad in the pursuit of fourth place – which then failed -, but at the same time the club is interested in the young players emerging or at least appearing in Serie A. This year, after 12 consecutive years, it has not happened.

in bursts

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The last time it happened was in 2013-2014, when the only player who could be considered a rookie, Ouasim Bouy, had actually already made 17 appearances in Serie B with Brescia. And the following years? From Moise Kean to Fabrizio Caligara, from Kenan Yildiz to Nicolò Savona and Miretti, from Samuel Mbangula to Nicolò Fagioli and Matias Soulé, up to Radu Dragusin, in every season the coach on duty had bet on some product from the academy or at least had rewarded a couple of them with an end-of-season catwalk, as symbolic as it was necessary on multiple levels. The hope at Juventus is to provide Spalletti with the serenity to reopen the flow soon, because Next Gen remains a flagship of the club and not valorizing it would be a significant economic damage. Already from the gathering next July some new faces will be seen, hoping that they are not an appearance, a midsummer night’s dream.