One wonders whether they speak about it in the Continassa dressing room — the one where these young players aggregated to the first team leave their bags alongside the senior squad’s. One wonders whether they are aware of what it means to carry those surnames inside the training ground of the Juventus Football Club. Whether they feel the pressure of it, or only the joy of having arrived this far. What will become of Alfonso Montero and Davide Marchisio remains entirely to be written. For now, they are training with the grown-ups. Two sons of legends.
Paolo Montero and Claudio Marchisio — in different eras — burned their names into the history of Juventus and into the hearts of the supporters. One remains today the emblem of the player who gives everything for the shirt, who fights to the last and beyond; the other is the example of how, with class, you can make your way all along the path from the youth academy to the first team. What we are discussing here, however, is a completely different book — one still largely unwritten — and not another chapter, not an appendix, to the story of the fathers.
Alfonso Montero — Starter in the Next Gen, Now Under Spalletti’s Eye
Since the start of the international break, Alfonso has moved his equipment to the Continassa and has begun training with the first squad alongside other young players. He has demonstrated the qualities that have earned him a starting role in the Next Gen this season — his first campaign having stepped up from the Under-20. Not a trivial distinction: a confirmation of the esteem Brambilla holds for the young defender born in 2007.
The early feedback from the Continassa has been positive. Spalletti appreciates his temperament, his work ethic, and his qualities — both the defensive ones, naturally, and his ability in build-up play. The latter is a specific characteristic the manager of Certaldo actively seeks in his defenders, and Montero’s capacity to carry the ball from the back and initiate from deep places him in a profile the current squad urgently needs to develop.
Davide Marchisio — the Under-18’s First Professional Contract, Now Beside the Stars
Davide Marchisio, born in 2009, centrocampista dell’Under 18 and the holder of his first professional contract — signed on 21 September and generating warm celebration across the club’s official channels. He has joined the first-team training sessions during the international break alongside Montero, giving Spalletti a direct and extended view of a player his father describes in the Gazzetta interview as “a good lad and further ahead at my age than I was.”
The paywalled second chapter — “Montero, Spalletti e l’opportunità in prima squadra” — addresses the question of whether the international break’s integration sessions represent something more than a standard development exercise: whether Spalletti, surveying the squad’s midfield emergency with Locatelli and Thuram both out for months, sees in Davide Marchisio a player who could be considered for a first-team role sooner than any external timeline would suggest.
What is already confirmed is that Gatti’s ferocity in training has made a deep impression on the younger Marchisio — the quote from Claudio’s Gazzetta interview, “Dad, the way Gatti presses, he’s always right on top of you,” was apparently delivered with the respect of someone who had just encountered something they had never quite experienced before. A new book. Different surnames, different paths, different stories to write. But the same black-and-white thread running through all of it — unchanged and unchangeable.
