Italian journalist Riccardo Trevisani has delivered a scathing response to Damien Comolli’s recent comments about his work at Juventus, critiquing the club executive’s unwavering devotion to data analysis in football. In an appearance on Cronache di Spogliatoio (as quoted by Calciomercato), Trevisani did not hold back as he dissected what he described as “truly terrifying” remarks from the Juventus CEO.
Trevisani began his analysis by questioning whether Comolli would become a successful executive for Juventus, but he was unequivocal about the damaging nature of the director’s statements over the last five months. According to Trevisani:
“I don’t know if Comolli will be a winning executive, but I know for certain that his statements have cancelled out five months of effort trying to convince us he’s a smart guy. I’m not judging the work done—though what Juventus did in the summer is pretty obvious—but I’m repeating what he said: that players are chosen exclusively on the basis of data, and if the coach agrees, fine, if not, friction is created.”
Trevisani continued, outlining some of the comments he found particularly disturbing:
“He said that sometimes at Toulouse, they tried to select players based on their month of birth. He said that football is boring and that he doesn’t read books about football, that he gets informed about other sports but not football. He said a series of truly terrifying things and that he was chosen specifically because of his focus on data. According to him, data is the only objective thing in football and we have to start from there. If you look at Sofascore or those apps that talk about data after matches, you’ll see that sometimes the goalkeeper comes out as man of the match because he made 37 passes—even though he didn’t make a single save and maybe even conceded two goals. Data, therefore, needs human interpretation and competent people. Moving forward just with data is not enough, because with only data, you have nothing.”
Trevisani highlighted how dangerous an over-reliance on statistics could be, warning that human expertise cannot be replaced by numbers alone.
He added:
“He also said, ‘If I’m the smartest person in the room, something is wrong’ and that’s probably the only thing I agree with. But I can’t understand how anyone, in 2025 after 100 years of football, can think that only numbers can trump the human eye, experience, knowledge, and expertise. Data is an addition, data is fundamental—you see how many kilometres players run, how they move, they’re like GPS trackers, super-monitored, so data is absolutely essential, but it needs to be integrated. Because if according to your data Joao Mario is faster than Alberto Costa, you haven’t improved Juventus, you’ve made them worse. If Openda did well at Leipzig, it doesn’t mean he’ll do well at Juve. If David did well at Lille, it doesn’t mean he’ll do well at Juventus: you have to see which player you’re buying, not just buy David’s 15 goals from last season. Only with data, you’re not going anywhere.”
