Juventus travel to Lecce on Saturday evening with little room left for another compromised result. The match at the Via del Mare, kicking off at 18:00, comes fewer than 72 hours after the Europa League meeting with Rennes and during an injury-hit period, but Luciano Spalletti’s side need a league win above all else.
The decision
The club has not signalled any immediate change in the dugout, yet the memory of last autumn gives this eighth Serie A round a particular weight. Juventus have collected 11 points from their opening seven matches. Victory in Lecce would take them to 14; a draw would leave them on 12, while defeat would keep them on 11.
Anything short of 14 points would represent Juventus’ weakest start to a league season for a decade. A draw would match the 12-point total recorded at this stage last year, while defeat would leave the club with the same return as the previous campaign’s lowest point in the opening rounds.
The comparison is uncomfortable because 26 October 2025 marked the moment Igor Tudor’s Juventus slipped to a 1-0 defeat at Lazio. It was their third straight loss and extended a winless sequence to eight matches across Serie A and the Champions League. Tudor’s side were on 12 league points, and the Croatian was dismissed the following day.
Massimo Brambilla, then coach of Juventus Next Gen, took charge from the bench for the midweek fixture against Udinese while the club worked towards an agreement with Spalletti. The current coach is therefore operating against a recent institutional memory rather than merely a poor run of form.
Remarks from within the club inevitably carry added scrutiny in that context. Before the Rennes match, CEO Giovanni Carnevali said Spalletti understood that he had work to do, adding that the Juventus shirt carries pressure and the bench can become difficult, although he stressed that the situation did not directly concern the club. Those words recall Giorgio Chiellini’s public backing for Tudor five days before his dismissal, when he said the club wanted to continue with the coach and that Tudor retained its support.
Spalletti, his players, the directors and the supporters will want Lecce to ensure that those parallels end there.
Sunday’s picture
Juventus have not won in Serie A since before the international break. Their current return also sits well below the standards set by several recent starts: Massimiliano Allegri’s title-winning sides had 21, 19 and 24 points after eight matches, while Maurizio Sarri’s Juventus had 22.
Even other less celebrated opening stretches were stronger. Andrea Pirlo began with 16 points, Allegri’s second spell produced returns of 14, 13 and 17, and Thiago Motta’s team started on 16.
Failure to reach 14 points in Lecce would also place Juventus close to a statistic not seen for almost half a century: two consecutive seasons with fewer than 14 points after eight rounds. The previous instances came in 1977-78 and 1978-79, although the league context was very different. Thirteen points brought third place in the first of those seasons, while 11 points meant sixth in the next.
This time, another failure to win could leave Juventus on the right-hand side of the table. For a club accustomed to measuring its season against the title race, Lecce is not simply another away afternoon; it is a chance to stop the opening chapter from becoming a familiar crisis.
