It was seemingly a straightforward task. Select the ten greatest midfielders who have adorned the famous black and white stripes of Juve. The most esteemed artisans to have graced their centre-circle. The most combative and clever destroyers to have prowled with serious intent behind them.
Being historically one of the most successful clubs in world football, Juventus have produced, or bought, a multitude of deserving candidates for this list, special players all, and yet several names sprang immediately to mind while several more – on reflection – were shoo-ins.
It almost compiled itself. Only then came a numbing realisation. There were eleven outstanding nominees and not one of them could possibly be omitted. Each were just too good for that, their input and achievements in Turin too momentous to ignore.
Here then is a team of sublime Juventus midfielders, a team that would presumably concede often, what with not having a goalkeeper, and would perhaps be overly reliant on Michel Platini for goals.
But boy would they boss possession, and do so classily.
Giuseppe Furino and Alessio Tacchinardi
Between them, these legendary number sixes made 789 appearances for the Zebras, won 13 league titles and numerous European honours, and started a gazillion attacks from deep.
Both were physical and industrious but also tactically astute, anticipating passages of play before it even entered the mind of the opposition.
Of the two, Furino was the more aggressive. He was, after all, nicknamed ‘Fury’ by the Torinese faithful. Then again, his era demanded that.
As for Tacchinardi, his midfield partners down the seasons reads like a who’s who of Italian and world football. He made each of them infinitely better.
A full decade separates the former’s retirement and the latter’s debut yet they were cut from the same rare cloth.
Claudio Marchisio
By turns a creator and a menace, Marchisio gave weekly box-to-box masterclasses, exhibiting such a broad range of attributes he can, without hyperbole, be deemed a perfect midfielder.
He could tackle and pass. He could read the game like few others could. He had vision to spare while his decision-making was never less than on point. Most of all, he had energy and commitment. Bags of it.
The ‘Little Prince’ was born and raised in Turin, joining the club aged seven, and ultimately becoming the driving force that returned the glory years back to a giant in danger of sleeping.
The Italian Steven Gerrard? No, Marchisio was better.
Didier Deschamps
One of only three men – along with Mario Zagallo and Franz Beckenbauer – to have won the World Cup as a player and a coach, Deschamps aptly patrolled centre-circles in a similar manner to his approach to management.
He was pragmatism writ large but also too he would constantly look for the angles. On the pitch this took the form of shrewd passing. In the dug-out, tactical decisions in-game.
Famously downplayed as a ‘water carrier’ by Eric Cantona, the multiple Serie A winner shored up a magnificent Juventus midfield and did so with a degree of panache he’s rarely given credit for.
Antonio Conte
When Conte headed to Turin in 1991 from Lecce, smiling for the cameras but scowling on the inside, I Bianconeri were in a sorry state, drifting post-Trapattoni. That May they had finished seventh, their worst league posting for 29 years.
It didn’t take long for his tenacious midfielding to have a substantial effect, actuating five titles and keeping the De Boer brothers occupied in the 1996 Champions League final. Juve were back.
Post-retirement Conte returned to his spiritual home to again find the club languishing in seventh.
Within months they may as well have suspended the football betting as Juventus reigned supreme, winning three titles in three seasons under their hero, conceding only 0.7 goals per 90 along the way.
Andrea Pirlo
Pirlo’s positional switch at Brescia has gone down in footballing lore, transforming the devilish schemer into a deep-lying playmaker who dictated proceedings with genuine guile.
Much later, at the peak of his powers, he would revisit this role within a midfield that also contained Marchisio and Paul Pogba. He was rather good at it.
Pirlo’s quarterbacking – coupled with his fondness for wine and a seductive beard – made him a hipster icon but his impact in Turin should not be diminished by such frivolities.
As writer Michael Cox mused at the time – “Is he the best player of his generation? Not quite, but he is the most important.”
Edgar Davids
Davids was a force of nature, his dynamic hustling and bustling, combined with skills honed from street football in his youth, making him one of the finest exponents of box-to-box midfielding witnessed in the modern era.
For a grand total of seven seasons in Turin he covered every blade of grass countless times over, as well as stepping on a few toes. If Juventus needed a threat man-marked out of a contest they turned to their Dutch ‘Pitbull’.
Books have been written about his immense contribution to Ajax and Juventus but a four word description by Marcello Lippi summed him up to a tee. He was a ‘one-man engine room’.
Pavel Nedved
The levels Nedved reached in Italy cannot – and should not – be underestimated.
Fifty-one goals in 247 outings for the Zebras is testament to his attacking prowess but, as impressive as that return is for a wide midfielder, it wasn’t his finishing that won him a Ballon d’Or in 2003. Or at least, they were merely a contributing factor.
Moreso, it was his influence on games big and small that caught the eye. As well as possessing an elite skillset in possession, the blonde Czech was combative and fiercely competitive. He was a nuisance in addition to being a maestro.
In the early-2000s Juve’s midfield consisted of Nedved, Davids, Conte and Mauro Camoranesi. Small wonder then they were perennial favourites in the sports betting to win every trophy going.
Zinedine Zidane
It is of course easy in hindsight to map out Zidane’s rise to greatness, to look back on his Ballon d’Or won while in Italy, and the two Scudettos he orchestrated, and see all of these feats as inevitable.
Zizou after all makes up one quarter of football’s proverbial Mount Rushmore.
Yet the most gifted player of his generation was all skinny potential when signed from Bordeaux, a 24-year-old who had failed to perform at that summer’s Euros and who would initially struggle in Serie A.
A couple of months in, he was described as a ‘cross-country runner’ in a particularly scathing write-up from a respected Italian sports journalist.
Nothing was a given in 1996 but Juventus was ultimately the making of Zidane and he in turn offered the club’s sizable fan-base moments of balletic grace they will take to the grave.
Marco Tardelli
No-one would dare claim that Tardelli was a superior player to Zidane but he still deserves a higher billing here. Juve’s supporters would insist on it.
A key component of Giovanni Trapattori’s magnificent Seventies collective – who arguably only got better in the early-Eighties – the Italian World Cup winner was an incendiary mix of Rodri and Roy Keane: classy, almost elegant in possession but a bulldog with a wasp in its mouth when deprived of the ball.
His energy and passion – the latter there for all to see when celebrating scoring the decisive goal in the 1982 World Cup final – propelled the Old Lady to European Cup success and domestic dominance.
Michel Platini
Until Messi and Ronaldo came along and elevated football to unprecedented heights only three players had ever won the Ballon d’Or on three occasions.
There was Johan Cryff, naturally. His phenomenal compatriot Marco Van Basten was another. Then there was Le Roi (The King), an attacking midfielder who crafted and created magnificent works of art on the Peninsula, without fail with his shirt untucked and often with a barbarous hatchet-man flailing in his wake.
It is crushingly disappointing who Platini became in later life, a powerful administrator plagued by accusations of corruption and unethical behaviour. It’s like a romantic poet morphing into a dictator.
