On Sunday evening, when Juventus travel to the Mapei Stadium to face Sassuolo, Giovanni Carnevali will return to the place where he spent twelve years building one of Italian football’s most admired and most studied models. He will not show it. But he will feel it.
“He Decided Everything Without Being Authoritarian”
The essence of what Carnevali represented at Sassuolo is captured in a single observation from Tuttosport’s Paolo Pirisi: every decision, however apparently marginal, passed through his desk. He was not a monarch. He was, as Pirisi puts it, a prime minister — operating within a structure provided by the Squinzi family, who entrusted him with the club in 2014 and never regretted it. The dialogue with the ownership was constant but not intrusive. Carnevali had the freedom to act — and the judgement to act well.
He arrived from the world of marketing and communications, not from football’s traditional administrative structures. And yet he understood the context immediately, seeking one quality above all others from those around him: trust. Directors, players, coaches, and staff — all treated equally in principle, all treated differently in practice. He knew their personal stories. The door to his office was always open. But it rarely needed to be opened, because Carnevali intercepted every problem before it became one.
“Tutti si Sono Messi a Piangere” — They All Cried When He Left
The moment that most captures the human impact of Carnevali’s time at Sassuolo is the one that occurred on the day he announced his departure for Juventus. Gathering the entire staff to share the news, he found himself surrounded by people in tears. “Because by that point he was no longer simply a boss — he had become a pillar. A certainty, like day and night.”
He had not merely run a football club. He had built a world — a community within a club, in a city that had given Sassuolo something considerably larger than its size would traditionally justify. He was impeccable in his appearance, always suited and tied even in the height of an Emilian summer, before allowing himself to relax at lunch. He was the architectural intelligence behind the Mapei Football Center — a training facility so impressive that it has been envied by clubs of far greater resources and reputation across Italy.
His Great Pupils — Berardi, Frattesi, Raspadori, Magnanelli, and Muharemović
Among the players who most benefited from the environment Carnevali created, five stand out in Pirisi’s portrait. Domenico Berardi — the most decorated product of the Sassuolo system, who spent his entire career at the club under Carnevali’s protection. Davide Frattesi — developed in Emilia before a big-money move to Inter that Carnevali structured with the sell-on mechanisms that have always characterised his best work. Giacomo Raspadori — sold to Napoli in a deal that generated enormous capital. Francesco Magnanelli — the embodiment of the club’s identity and soul. And Tarik Muharemović — whose sale to Leeds and the subsequent triggering of Juventus’s 50% sell-on clause generated €17.4 million for the Bianconeri this very summer.
De Zerbi: “A Real Friendship — Arguments Followed Always by an Embrace”
With Roberto De Zerbi — the manager who most embodied the Sassuolo playing philosophy during its most celebrated period — Carnevali built something that went beyond the purely professional. “Not without clashes — but they always found the way to restart from an embrace.” It is the relationship that, this summer, produced the Vicario loan from Tottenham and the creative possibility of the Suzuki conversations, simply because the two men’s professional trust extended naturally across clubs and borders.
The One Lingering Regret — Luca Reggiani and the Borussia Dortmund Heist
Every administrator has a file that keeps them awake at night — the one that got away. For Carnevali, it is Luca Reggiani: a central defender born in 2008, spotted in the youth football of Castelvetro, signed by Sassuolo from the amateur ranks — and lost to Borussia Dortmund at sixteen. “For Carnevali, who reasoned like a pater familias, it was an incredible blow.” In time, as Pirisi notes with affection, he has made his peace with it. But it remains the single thorn in a decade of otherwise extraordinary work — the one that reminds him, as it occasionally must, that not everything in football can be controlled, even by those who come closest to controlling everything.
