Manca, manca, celo, celo — have it, have it, missing, missing. The kind of card swap that children conduct in the playground, applied with bitter irony to a Juventus squad whose midfield has been reduced to fragments in the space of a few days. With both first-choice central midfielders — Manuel Locatelli and Khéphren Thuram — heading into surgery and neither expected to return before the new year, Luciano Spalletti is faced with a fundamental reconstruction of his engine room that must work not just for Sunday’s trip to Sassuolo but across the full duration of a demanding autumn campaign.
The Numbers — Three Pure Midfielders, One Preferred Further Forward
The pure central midfielders available to Spalletti are, in the most literal count, three: Douglas Luiz, Teun Koopmeiners, and Pape Matar Sarr. Weston McKennie can and frequently does operate in midfield, but Spalletti’s preference — loudly stated throughout pre-season — is to deploy the American in the more advanced trequartista role, where his intelligent running off the ball and his late arrivals into the box are maximised.
Two positions to fill. Three available players. The arithmetic looks manageable until you factor in that McKennie and Sarr are both returning from muscle problems, neither is guaranteed to be fully fit for Sunday, and the season already contains nine matches in 22 days.
The Sarr Hierarchy — a €30 Million Investment Demands Significant Minutes
The first clue to how Spalletti will configure his midfield in the medium term lies in the financial logic of the Sarr signing. A conditional obligation to purchase worth approximately €30 million — triggered on achieving European qualification and reaching 50% of possible appearances — does not describe a rotation option. It describes a player earmarked for consistent, high-volume deployment.
When Sarr reaches full fitness — a process that is ongoing but advancing — he takes a starting position in the double pivot. He is, as Gazzetta notes, tactically comparable to Locatelli in several respects: a player who covers the entire pitch, distributes with intelligence, and provides the ball-recovery function in the first phase of pressing that is so fundamental to Spalletti’s system. His arrival was always intended to address the Thuram void. He will now be asked to address the Locatelli void too.
Douglas Luiz vs Koopmeiners — and Why the Brazilian Has Pulled Ahead
With Sarr’s eventual starting role established, the remaining position in the double pivot is a competition between Douglas Luiz and Koopmeiners — and after three Serie A matches the hierarchy is becoming clear. Despite Koopmeiners having contributed a goal against Parma and an assist for Gatti’s equaliser against Milan from the bench, the opening weeks have placed Douglas Luiz ahead of him in Spalletti’s internal ranking. The Brazilian’s qualities as an orchestrator — the most pronounced among all the available midfielders — give him the strongest claim to the playmaking role in Locatelli’s absence. Koopmeiners remains important and effective as a substitute who raises the tempo; his role as a starter is currently secondary.
For Sunday at Sassuolo, however, with both McKennie and Sarr carrying residual muscle concerns, the most likely midfield combination is Douglas Luiz alongside Koopmeiners — a pairing Spalletti has been preparing for precisely this kind of emergency.
The Less Obvious Options — González as Mezzala, Lucumí as Midfielder
Beyond the obvious candidates, the Continassa is evaluating less conventional possibilities for moments when injury, suspension, or fatigue demands creativity. Against Milan, Nico González was already deployed as a mezzala in a 4-3-3 — the Argentine dropping deeper and moving centrally to provide the balance that three attacking players require. He has the experience and the intelligence to perform that function when circumstances demand it.
More intriguing still — and a detail that will surprise many supporters — is the observation from the article that several of Jhon Lucumí’s Bologna coaches considered the Colombian capable of playing as a central midfielder. His reading of the game, his distribution from deep, and his physical presence in the middle of the pitch are qualities that, in a genuine emergency, could be deployed in an unconventional position.
Owusu — the First-Team Debut That Is Coming
The most significant development flagged in the article is the imminent senior debut of Augusto Owusu. Already included in the Europa League squad list in List B, the Juventus Next Gen midfielder is now being considered for first-team minutes — initially from the bench — in the immediate future. With two midfielders simultaneously unavailable for the foreseeable future, the academy product’s moment has arrived ahead of schedule. His debut, when it comes, will be watched with the particular combination of hope and protective anxiety that always accompanies the first steps of a youth system graduate into the senior football the club spent fifteen years preparing him for.
