It is of course too neat and too simplistic to claim that one man per decade has stood firm in Juve’s net post the Second World War.
Naturally some careers overlap, bleeding into a different era, while the occasional stopper – Giuseppe Vavassori and Wojciech Szczesny to name but two – have excelled for a short period before moving on.
Yet what is also true is that Giovanni Viola took care of business in the nineteen-fifties while the Sixties was Roberto Anzolin’s domain.
The subsequent decade was dominated by the great Dino Zoff before the impenetrable figure nicknamed the ‘Monument’ handed over the gloves to Stefano Tacconi to steward the Eighties.
Angelo Peruzzi then took up residence in the Nineties, as the Zebras scaled unprecedented heights, both domestically and in Europe, and this takes us up to the Millenium, when the club signed their most expensive player ever, who then became their greatest keeper ever.
These esteemed individuals are rightfully celebrated below. Men who have exasperated countless strikers, won an abundance of silverware, and proved season after season that a fabled Italian institution was in very safe hands.
Edwin Van Der Sar
The towering Dutchman would be much higher on this list had he stayed in Turin longer than two seasons.
A lack of trophies also counts against him with just a singular triumph to his name, and that a UEFA Intertoto Cup success, achieved by winning a mere three matches, all against vastly inferior opposition.
The truth is that Van Der Sar was magnificent for Ajax, sublime for Fulham and a study in solidity for Manchester United but dropped the occasional clanger in Serie A, with one in particular vs Roma essentially costing I Bianconeri the title.
In both years, Juve finished runner-up in the league and with this falling short of their exceptional standards the club took extremely expensive measures in the summer of 2001, signing Gigi Buffon for 100 billion lira.
Roberto Anzolin
For much of the Sixties, Inter Milan were on the rise while Juve fell into the chasing pack and this meant several venerated names left Turin with barely a trophy on their C.V. Arguably they deserved better.
Defender Ernesto Castano was one such figure and Anzolin another, the ‘Mosquito’ diving every which way to keep the Zebras in contention.
A Coppa Italia merit in 1965 and a Scudetto two years later was ultimately all he had to show for his troubles.
Giovanni Viola
Viola was tall, commanding and assured, but most crucially of all, he was consistent. Mistakes were as rare as hen’s teeth. The same goes for spectacular saves because they never needed to be.
Born just a bus ride or two from the Stadio Comunale, he made 245 appearances for his local club, winning three league titles along the way.
Stefano Tacconi
A perennial deputy to Walter Zenga on the international scene, Tacconi was known as the ‘best back-up keeper in the world’ for a while, and though this can be viewed as a back-handed compliment it also speaks of his excellence.
His vocal annoyance, meanwhile, when he wasn’t brought on to face the pens in Italy’s ill-fated 1990 World Cup semi-final shootout speaks of his arrogance. For Tacconi wasn’t ever shy in letting management, the public, and his own defenders know how good he was.
When it came to pure shot-stopping he admittedly had a point.
He remains the only goalkeeper to have won every international club tournament, including a European Cup triumph in 1985 despite the football betting favouring Liverpool.
Angelo Peruzzi
Known as the ‘Boar’ for his stocky physique, Peruzzi was all calm efficiency between the sticks, viewing diving as a necessary evil that reflected poorly on his positioning.
He held similar distaste for distribution too, preferring to kick long with the ball at his feet, usually aiming for the trusty white hair of Fabrizio Ravanelli or Gianluca Vialli’s shiny dome.
Peruzzi joined Juve from Roma with the club enduring relatively troubled times, no longer pre-season favourites in the sports betting and minus a Scudetto for several years.
He left 208 games later with I Bianconeri back at the summit domestically and furthermore with a Champions League winners medal.
Gianpiero Combi
An end-of-century poll conducted in 1999 affirmed that Combi was the 16th greatest goalkeeper in the game’s history, and though he has probably since been nudged out to the high twenties he remains an integral figure in Juventus’ story.
Said to be a commanding yet elegant shot-stopper the Turin-born great made 367 outings for the Zebras, winning five league titles as the club established themselves as a major force in Italian football.
In 2025, he was inducted into Juventus’ Hall of Fame.
Dino Zoff
Famously, Zoff won a World Cup with the Azzurri aged 40 and perhaps – in a similar vein to Ryan Giggs – his astonishing longevity has come to define him, with an entire generation admiring him for that above all else.
It’s worth noting therefore that the farmer’s son from Venezia finished runner-up for the 1973 Ballon d’Or, after bolstering Juventus to a league title success in his first campaign in Turin, conceding a meagre 22 goals all season long.
Zoff was 30 by then, and with 362 professional appearances already under his belt – not to mention a multitude of Italian caps – it could be reasoned that he was entering the autumn of his career. In fact, he was just getting warmed up.
A decade of brilliance followed, as Giovanni Trapattori’s vintage collective ran over everyone and everything in its path.
Gigi Buffon
What new and original accolade can possibly be bestowed on a World Cup winner known throughout the game as ‘Superman’?
The 13-time winner of the Serie A Goalkeeper of the Year award elevated his craft in Turin across most of the 21st century and in doing so claimed ten Scudettos. It would have been 12 had it not been for the Calciopoli scandal that saw the Zebras stripped of two titles.
To Buffon’s enormous credit he remained with the club when demoted to Serie B as punishment and subsequently played a pivotal role as Juventus began a new era of dominance under Antonio Conte.
As part of Conte’s formidable back-line, he broke an Italian top-flight record for the longest streak without conceding, a remarkable 974 minutes. It took a penalty to break the sequence and he nearly got to that.
On retiring – at Parma, where it all began for him – Juventus published an open letter of gratitude to their legend.
“You were our captain and rock,” it read. “You became the goalkeeper to aspire to be.”
