21 hours ago
9
Four years have passed since Andrea Agnelli, still the chairman of the European Club Association and president of Juventus back then, floated the idea of selling 15-minute viewing subscriptions for football games. A response to research showing that younger generations – “tomorrow’s spenders” – had shorter attention spans.
Agnelli’s judgement has been called into question a few times since, between the failed launch of a European Super League and his suspension from Italian football following an investigation into financial irregularities at Juventus. But perhaps he was right about the need to serve modern audiences a faster fix of sporting theatre.
This week his former club delivered us a complete tale of humiliation and redemption in the space of three days. On Saturday, Jonathan David was an arrogant ne’er-do-well whose lazy penalty cost Juventus a win over Lecce and ought to be chased out of town. By Tuesday, he was a beloved teammate and the best player on the pitch in a 3-0 win over Sassuolo.
Is it possible, with hindsight, that the reaction to his spot-kick was just a tiny bit overblown? David had attempted a Panenka, aiming straight down the middle of the goal, but failed to get any lift on the shot. Lecce’s goalkeeper, Wladimiro Falcone, dived early but was able to adjust mid-flight and keep the ball out with his boot.
A bad penalty, no question, but the response to it felt more like an unburdening of six months’ frustrations than a response to the shot itself. In the Dazn TV studio, the former Juventus player Emanuele Giaccherini suggested that “someone who hasn’t scored since August and earns €6m-a-year” should have had the decency to put his foot through the ball. “You can miss, that’s always possible,” he added. “But you’ve got hit it like you mean it.”
Over on Sky Sport, Paolo Condò was even more blunt. “He went to take that penalty as though he was a phenomenon who can go and score a phenomenal goal,” said the veteran pundit. “I think the message we need to give David right now is that ‘we don’t think you’re a phenomenon. From what you have shown us up till now you’re just a very modest centre-forward.’”
The signing of David on a free transfer last summer was celebrated as a coup. At 25, he was coming off a five-year stretch in which he had scored 109 times for Lille – hitting double figures every season. His strike rate for Canada’s national team hovered around one for every two games and his seven Champions League goals in 2024-25 included strikes against Real Madrid, Atlético Madrid, Liverpool, Dortmund and Juventus themselves.
Together with Loïs Openda, signed from RB Leipzig, he was supposed to bring a little spice to a Juventus attack trapped in an unhappy marriage to Dusan Vlahovic. David started and scored in the season opener against Parma but failed to build on that momentum and was seeing ever-less playing time before the Serb suffered an adductor injury in late November.
Reports began to circulate of off-pitch problems, asserting that David had failed to develop relationships with his teammates and consequently not been invited to group dinners. Several established squad members took to social media to call these stories absolute twaddle, sharing pictures of themselves with David.
The defender Federico Gatti said the only thing more surprising than “the circulation of completely unfounded news stories” was “how many people believed them”. Luciano Spalletti, who replaced Igor Tudor as manager in October, sought to defuse the tension with humour, saying of his Italian players: “[They] did well not to take [David] to dinner. The first time they invited him he grated parmesan on pasta with clams, so they didn’t ask him again after that.”
Spalletti has something of a reputation as a striker-whisperer in Italy, each of Francesco Totti, Edin Dzeko, Mauro Icardi and Victor Osimhen having become Serie A’s Capocannoniere while playing for him. Despite failing to unlock David’s potential so far, he has consistently been generous in his assessments of the player and defended him forcefully after the penalty against Lecce.
Kenan Yildiz and Manuel Locatelli – both of whom ordinarily sit ahead of David in Juventus’s penalty-taking order – had been criticised for handing him the ball, but Spalletti made it clear he supported their choice. “A centre-forward, in my opinion, can take a penalty,” he said – pointing out that David has a strong career record from the spot and accusing the critics of being fans of other teams trying to destabilise them.
If anyone doubted Spalletti’s sincerity, he backed it up by naming David in his starting XI again on Tuesday night away to Sassuolo. The player responded with easily his best performance yet in a Juventus shirt.
He had a hand in his team’s 16th-minute opener, releasing Pierre Kalulu down the right before the defender’s cross was headed in for a rather magnificent own goal by Sassuolo’s Tarik Muharemovic. But better was yet to come. Early in the second half, David took a knock-down from Weston McKennie and delivered a two-touch lay-off to release Fabio Miretti through on goal to make it 2-0.
It felt like one of those moments where you see a player’s confidence bloom in real-time, the speed with which David diagnosed and executed the best course of action under close attention from a defender offering a sharp contrast to so many uncertain touches this season. Within two minutes, he had added a goal of his own.
David created the chance for himself, pressuring Jay Idzes into a horrible backpass that the striker was able to intercept before rounding the goalkeeper and side-footing into an empty net. His first Serie A goal since August, celebrated by the whole team together. Juventus’s bench emptied onto the pitch as those teammates with whom he had supposedly not formed any bonds ran to mob him.
Even Spalletti made it there by the end, working through the huddle to congratulate David. “As I was saying the other day, when you are inside a situation it’s different from seeing it from the outside,” said the manager at full-time. “After all those insults, all those statements made against him, I would have been surprised not to see the team make themselves his shield.”
Serie A midweek results
Show
Lazio 2-2 Fiorentina, Parma 0-2 Inter, Torino 1-2 Udinese, Bologna 0-2 Atalanta, Napoli 2-2 Verona, Sassuolo 0-3 Juventus, Lecce 0-2 Roma, Pisa 0-3 Como
Photograph: Lorenzo Cattani/Shutterstock Editorial
One swallow does not make a summer. As excessive as some of the overreactions were to David’s penalty miss, it would be very silly to go too far now in the other direction. Sassuolo have played some good football at times since returning to the top-flight but on Tuesday they were awful. Few other opponents are likely to be so generous, and David missed a presentable chance to add another goal after his first.
Time will tell if Spalletti can help him to become a consistently effective player in this league. What we can observe, contrary to earlier reports, is that both his teammates and Juventus’s coaching staff are still very much behind him.
Asked whether they would allow him to put parmesan on his clams on Tuesday night, Spalletti attempted to deadpan his response, but buckled into a laugh. “Always! He’s got us used to this invention of his now. We’re out here creating new dishes.”
