A black cat slinks unannounced into Vinovo.
Antonio Conte used to be superstitious about seeing it before his Juventus squad set off from here for a game. This sprawling training ground, on the outskirts of Turin, now belongs to Juventus femminile and the clubs youth teams, though, with the men having moved to a new facility across town in 2018.
The future of Juventus football walks past, while the cat nicknamed, with great originality, Juve brushes against ankles.
Barbara Bonansea, Cecilia Salvai and Cristiana Girelli are also here, back from the summers European Championship, where they were a minute away from reaching the final.
That minute does not define us, Girelli said in an address in front of Italys president Sergio Mattarella, who had invited the womens national team to the Quirinale in Rome Italys equivalent of the White House or 10 Downing Street on their return from Switzerland after being eliminated following extra time by defending champions and eventual winners England. We are defined by our journey, our shared struggles, our sincere tears, and our fierce desire to prove that we deserve respect, visibility, and a future.
As was the case after the 2019 World Cup in France when this sides predecessors qualified for the tournament after an absence of two decades, topped a Group of Death including Australia and Brazil and unexpectedly reached the last eight the spotlight is back on the womens game in Italy.
Stefano Braghin, the sporting director for Juventus femminile, calls Girelli, Bonansea, Salvai and their club and country team-mate Martina Rosucci keepers of the flame.
They have kept it alive first through the pandemic, then a loss of interest by senior figures of the Italian Football Federation, who didnt fly out to watch the team compete at the World Cup in Australia and New Zealand two years ago. They stayed strong when Juventus lost their Serie A crown in 2022 and, in April, managed to wrestle it back from Roma, after their back-to-back titles. And they have begun this season impressively, defeating Roma 3-2 last month to win the inaugural Serie A Womens Cup final. On Tuesday, they beat Benfica 2-1 in their opening league-phase match in the Champions League, with Salvai scoring both goals.
They never let the flame go out, Braghin says in admiration. It can never be allowed to go out. Half the team has been here for some time. On the pitch, theyre great players. Off it, the values they share are important. Off it, you have to understand the brand, the tradition of Juventus. You have to feel it. Weve still got that.
If Juventus core identity has remained more or less the same in the eight years since Andrea Agnelli entrusted Braghin with the launch of a womens team, the landscape of the womens game has changed.
Juventus already came relatively late to it. Teams from the Womens Super League in England, not to mention continental powerhouses such as Lyon, Wolfsburg and Barcelona got started earlier. Its like running a marathon with someone who started three hours earlier, Braghin says. They will finish first. This is not an excuse, it is a fact.
Added to which, when Juventus turned a corner in Europe and made a dash to the Champions League quarter-finals in the 2021-22 season, the road didnt suddenly flatten for them. They were confronted instead by an ever-steepening incline as the womens game went professional. But as Braghin explains, costs doubled without growth in revenue. Revenues are still small.
The Italian league has played around with its format, adding a play-off round to the end of the regular season in 2022 albeit one that serves as a further mini-league involving half of the divisions 10 clubs rather than a straight knockout competition. It is hoped that in the long run, more games and greater jeopardy attract bigger audiences and lead to a rise in TV money. For now, however, Braghins focus is more about grassroots than cable.
In Girellis address to the nation, she said that when the players pulled on their jerseys at the Euros, they carried more than just the responsibility of representing Italy they represented the right of every girl up and down the country to dream: One day, Ill get to do that, too.
Bringing more youngsters into the womens game is a priority. More girls are playing, Braghin says, and thats already a nice trend, but the road is long. Were hopeful, because all the youth teams at national-team level are doing well for the first time, theyve all qualified for the World Cup in their respective age categories.
This is the challenge, in my opinion. Im always inviting our institutions to work on the bottom of the pyramid, not the tip. If you have 50,000 players registered, you have less political clout and fewer options than if you have 300,000 or 400,000, like in England. The ones who dont make it either stay fans or remain in the system. They become coaches and do other roles. If I have more players, I can go to the FIGC (Italys football association) and say I represent 200,000 people. In that case, the federation and government would listen to you.
At the moment, the womens game is still struggling in Italy to make its voice heard outside of major tournament success.
Perhaps that would change if Juventus were to become a Champions League force under second-year coach Max Canzi. But realism is needed. Juventus are ninth in the UEFA co-efficient. NWSL teams Washington Spirit and Houston Dash put money down this summer to sign away Sofia Cantore and Lisa Boattin.
Its a source of pride, Braghin says, both for the club and for Italy, that the Americans are shopping in Turin.
On the one hand, Cantore is illustrative of how Juventus operate in talent identification and development. She was scouted and brought to Turin at age 17, along with a clutch of other recruits. She arrived as the underdog in a group with (fellow future Italy internationals) Arianna Caruso and Benedetta Glionna, Braghin recalls. It was like she was in their backpack.
Then, probably today, she became the best of them all.
Cantore rose through the ranks quickly.
We have a good academy with 158 girls. We work hard at it and invest a lot, Braghin explains. But, as is the case in Italian football as a whole, bridging the gap to the first team is tough.
In the mens game, Juventus introduced the Next Gen, an under-23s team who play in third-tier Serie C to give those kids experience at a professional level. Several prospects most notably Kenan Yildiz, Matias Soule and Dean Huijsen have made the step up to the senior team, where they have either established themselves or been sold for pure profit.
Parma have tried the same on the womens side of things but Juventus instead implemented a loan system. We have 23 girls out on loan, Braghin says. Some of them are abroad. Theres one at (Belgiums) Anderlecht, another at Servette (in Switzerland). They go out for a year or two, come back and form a virtual second team. We have a loan manager, Matilde Malatesta, whose sole focus is their development.
Cantore had loan spells at Verona, Florentia and Sassuolo before coming back and making an impact with Juventus. She isnt the only one. I have to say Chiara Beccari, Eva Schatzer, Martina Lenzini and Ginevra Moretti all went on similar journeys, Braghin says. It works because I now have five or six players we have developed in-house this way.
I can use it as a nice bit of storytelling. I can talk to another youngster on our books, point to them and say: Look, the talented ones are back.
Cantore had a combined 17 goal involvements last season, scoring 11 times, as Juventus won their sixth Scudetto.
Washington then paid her buy-out clause, believed to be worth 350,000 (£303,000/$407,000), and Braghin proudly and powerlessly bade her farewell.
This is the other side of the Cantore story.
Thats a big cheque Spirit made out, Braghin observes. No one else in Europe was prepared to do it. Im not putting clauses in contracts anymore because, well, with the transfer market getting this crazy, what might seem like a lot today might not seem so much in a couple of months time.
The womens game could have been set up to be radically different from the mens version. Instead, it is mirroring it. There are not five top leagues in Europe. There is one, the WSL, plus some top clubs.
Reddits founder Alexis Ohanian paid £20million ($26.8m at the current rate) in May for an 8%10% stake in Chelsea Women, a deal that values the WSL champions at £200m. The Spirit are owned by another American billionaire, Michele Kang, who has a multi-club platform also including eight-time Womens Champions League winners OL Lyonnes and London City Lionesses, who last season became the first fully independent team to be promoted to the WSL.
Braghin welcomes their investment in womens football and hopes others follow. But its transfer market has been inflated and multi-club ownership (MCO) can, at this stage in the development of the womens game, have a far greater impact on competitive balance than in the mens version.
No sooner did London City come up than they broke the womens world transfer record for Paris Saint-Germains Grace Geyoro (though they deny paying that much for the France midfielder). They also signed two players, Danielle van de Donk and loanee Wassa Sangare, from Kang-owned Lyon, whose new head coach this season, Jonatan Giraldez, was hired away from the same job at the Spirit.
UEFA has not, for now, imposed financial fair play rules on the womens game or regulated MCOs. In my opinion, UEFA currently needs big investors in womens football, Braghin says. So it is doing everything it can to attract them. I dont think it is putting any barriers in the way of them yet, and maybe thats the right thing to do.
The thing is, one day well need rules. What will we do if London City play Lyon in the Champions League final one day?
The prospect of that happening in the relatively near future feels far likelier than MCO clubs meeting in the same fixture of the mens Champions League.
Juventus have a billionaire owner of their own, of course, but Exor, the Agnelli familys holding company, has always expected the club to be run like the other businesses in its portfolio. That means sustainability, and so Braghin continues to build on his three pillars: scouting for young talent such as Cantore, Julia Grosso (now with the NWSLs Chicago Stars) and Jennifer Echegini (who signed for PSG in summer 2024); developing academy graduates; and signing prestige players who have become peripheral elsewhere but still have a lot to give.
Take Pauline (Peyraud-Magnin, Juventus first-choice goalkeeper, who they signed in 2021), he says. She was on the bench at Atletico Madrid and forgotten by the French national team. She was always talented. We got to work on it, and now she is one of the best goalkeepers in the world.
It was a pitch Juventus successfully made to Switzerland captain and Arsenal institution Lia Walti late this summer.
Its clear that we need to do things a little differently. The biggest mistake a club of our standing can make is to challenge the big teams by going about things their way and spending a lot of money, Braghin concludes. You have to take another route.
That means a lot of academy work: we have three or four girls from the academy in the first team, reviving players who are going through difficult times and scouting talents such as Danielle de Jong (FC Twentes 22-year-old goalkeeper, who also joined Juventus this year), all free agents. In my opinion, with good work like this, you can be competitive.
A bit like the cat silently prowling around their training ground, Juventus hope to sneak up and surprise their Champions League opponents this season.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Juventus, Serie A, Women’s Soccer
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