Three months of exhausting negotiations. Deals that can no longer disguise the galloping financial deterioration of Italian football. And at the end of it all — with the window finally, mercifully closed — the impression, according to Tuttosport’s editor-in-chief Guido Vaciago, is that very little has changed at the summit of Serie A.
The Landscape: Inter First, Roma Frightening, Juventus Logical
The hierarchy, as Vaciago reads it, is essentially the same as it was when the summer began. Inter remain the strongest — and would have been even without the three Premier League arrivals that have further enhanced an already superior squad. Napoli are unchanged but still capable of finishing anywhere between second and third. Milan have undergone a profound renewal from boardroom to playing squad, but Amorim’s tactical fingerprint has not yet translated clearly enough onto the pitch to judge whether they are meaningfully stronger or weaker than twelve months ago.
Como have spent extravagantly and built a squad capable of competing for the Champions League places — but calling them Scudetto contenders, Vaciago notes, remains premature. And then there is Roma — whose first two performances of the season have been, in his words, “impressive and ferocious,” built not on new arrivals but on the existing quality of Dybala and the surprising Malen, animated by Gasperini’s tactical genius. A genius, Vaciago adds with characteristic acidity, whose poor public relations and prickly personality will forever prevent him from receiving the credit Guardiola receives for changing the game.
Juventus: More Logical and Solid — but Not a Substantial Leap Forward
The verdict on Juventus is honest, measured, and impossible to dismiss. They have begun a climb on a steep and narrow path constrained by UEFA’s financial guardrails — and the team that has emerged from it is, in Vaciago’s assessment, more logical and more solid than last season. But not substantially better. Not Scudetto-level better.
The individual comparisons, however, are unambiguously positive. Vicario is better than Di Gregorio. Lucumí is better than Kelly — who remains an excellent alternative. Çelik is better than the Cambiaso of the past eighteen months. Pape Sarr was not there last year. And Woltemade, whatever his limitations, cannot be worse than Openda or David. Alajbegovic has a potential that is entirely unexplored and carries no burden of having to change the squad’s destiny — only, perhaps, to embellish it with his talent.
The Logic of a Club That Has Finally Chosen the Sustainable Path
What follows is the passage that best captures Vaciago’s broader argument. “After years of miraculous recipes that promised resurrection in three months, Juventus have perhaps taken a less glamorous but more concrete road.” If Woltemade and Sarr do not prove to be up to the level required, they will not puncture the balance sheet the way Openda or Koopmeiners did. If Çelik, Lucumí, and Alajbegovic work, they increase the solidity of the foundation on which to continue building next year.
The Europa League must be an objective. So must the growth of a group that still lacks genuine leaders. The club has done what it could — and it has done so with logic.
The Wider Window: Italian Football’s Uncomfortable Finances
Vaciago closes with the observation that has been sitting beneath every transfer story of the summer without ever quite being stated as plainly as he states it here. With the exception of Como and Fiorentina’s ambitious spending, what prevailed across the Serie A window was the necessity of balancing the books and the structural economic inferiority of Italian football relative to the Premier League and Europe’s wealthiest clubs.
The summer’s defining refrain — “to buy you must first sell” — has become, he writes, as tedious and unavoidable as a reggaeton chorus. A market in which everyone is trying to sell and nobody can buy becomes a vertiginous spiral of illusions, compromises, and gambles.
His final observation needs no embellishment: a system that does not synchronise the end of the transfer window with the start of the football season is, he concludes, one that continues to harm itself. “Let’s carry on like this — let’s keep hurting ourselves.” It is the weariest, most Italian sentence in the whole piece. And also, perhaps, the most accurate.
