Grading all Juventus transfers for the month of July

Signing Merih Demiral and Cristian Romero: A

I grouped these two moves together because they are players in a similar situation who serve a similar purpose. Both of these players are 21 years old, just had the best seasons of their young careers, started every match they appeared in last season, both played for teams in the bottom half of the table, and both were brought in to secure the long-term future of this defense. We got to see a bit more of Romero last season because he made 27 starts for Genoa while Demiral was only with Sassuolo for half of the season, but both looked like very promising talents.

I was a bit surprised by the way these two moves were handled. I would have thought Demiral would be loaned back to Sassuolo so he could gain some more experience before being thrown into the fire at Juve, but it ended up being Romero who was loaned back to Genoa. There is still time for Juventus to loan Demiral out before the transfer window closes, but for now he looks like a rotational option in a suddenly crowded defense.

Both of these moves should serve to allay the fears of Juventus fans who got a glimpse at what  the team’s defense would look like once Giorgio Chiellini retires and really hated what they saw (myself included).

Even with as well as Chiellini continues to play, we all know it is only a matter of time before Juve will need to replace him and coming into this summer they had absolutely nobody worthy of the spot. Daniele Rugani still hasn’t reached the level Juve had hoped when they brought him in as a top prospect and Leonardo Bonucci was a disaster last season.

Now these two signings and the next signing I will discuss seem to have fixed that problem. Juventus only needs one of these signings to pan out to form a talented young core to the defense. If both continue to develop then Juve will have a very deep backline and it will be a long time before Juve fans need to worry about the defense like they did last year.