​Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Juventus is a club in free fall. For years now, they’ve had the second highest wage bill in Serie A — and that’s still true even if you cut Dusan Vlahovic’s wages by 75%. The results over the last several years as a big spender in the league are: fourth, fourth, seventh, third, fourth and sixth. What’s worse is that, as far as I can tell, the club has had no consistent identity for most of those seasons.And I think those two facts together tell you something important about what’s actually gone wrong.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementFrom the outside, it seems like the process goes something like: identify talented players, acquire them, and hope it works out. Regardless of whether those players actually fit each other, or fit the coach who was supposedly going to use them, we just expect expensive players who we pay a lot of money to figure things out on the field.I don’t think this is a particularly hot take. Look at the pieces.Teun Koopmeiners came from a high-press, fluid-movement Atalanta system built around creating space through motion. He was paired with Thiago Motta, a manager whose whole identity was methodical build-up and positional discipline. Those are not compatible traits. Loïs Openda thrived almost exclusively in counter-attacking systems — and he arrived into a team without a counter-attacking manager (first Igor Tudor, then Luciano Spalletti), and without the kind of ball progression skills in the midfield that a counter-attacking approach actually needs to succeed. Jonathan David seems to prefer playing in space, but nothing about the managerial hires suggests the club wanted their striker to play that way. And then there’s Arthur — a midfielder whose strengths supposedly centered around ball retention and progression dropped into a team that didn’t prioritize possession at all. Arthur’s also a case of the club misjudging a player’s actual level, which is a separate problem, but even if he’d been the player they thought he was, the fit still wouldn’t have made sense.Zoom out further and the pattern gets worse.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementIn the team’s various free-fall over the last few years, the club has hired possession-based attacking managers, defense-first pragmatic managers, and some managers with no clearly stated philosophy at all. There’s no thread connecting the recruitment to the coaching to a style of play. And honestly, I don’t think there ever was one. It seems like the plan was “get good players,” full stop, and the fitting-together part got sorted out later.But we know that’s not how this sport works. We can look to England for an obvious example, where Manchester United have run something close to the same experiment with an even bigger budget and gotten a similar result — a roster full of players who look talented individually and incoherent together, cycling through managers with different footballing philosop