OFFICIALLY OFFICIAL: Canadian midfielder Julia Grosso signs with Juventus Women

By virtue of the roster being the best in Italy, seeing Juventus Women make a signing during the winter transfer window isn’t a common practice. With depth at all three position groups, midseason acquisitions haven’t been both necessary and something that would prove all that much valuable as they rolled to another Scudetto.

But this winter is different in the sense that there is some business actually taking place.

And the Juventus women, with potentially a big 2022 ahead of them, have added another talented youngster to a team full of talent.

Juventus Women announced Monday the signing of Canadian midfielder Julia Grosso. The 21-year-old Grosso spent the last three years playing at the University of Texas, but more notably already has nearly 30 caps to her name with the Canadian women’s national team, including scoring the winning penalty in the gold medal game against new teammate Lina Hurtig and Sweden this past summer at the Olympics in Tokyo.

Grosso will officially be able to compete in matches later this month of Dec. 28, with the first chance to play in the Italian Super Cup against Sassuolo on Jan. 5, 2022.

The interesting part of the Grosso signing besides just the timing of it all is the simple fact that she will be joining a midfield that is really, really good to begin with. Joe Montemurro has very much used the fact that he can rotate the five main midfielders and see no real drop off in terms of the team’s overall performance level. In the first 10 league game of the 2021-22 season, just one midfielder, Annahita Zamanian, has played more than 600 minutes. (Rotating the squad is really just something that Montemurro has done all over the place, with no player starting all 10 games so far this season.)

Now you add Grosso to the fold and Montemurro has yet another option at his disposal.

Of course, the young Canadian could very well be slow-played into the squad knowing that this will be her first time playing professionally abroad after spending three years at the college level in the United States. The counterargument to that is that she’s already got a ton of international experience with Canada and she turned 21 years old all of 3 ¹⁄₂ months ago at the end of August.

Either way, Juve’s done a rare piece of winter business and it’s resulted in another good player added to the roster full of them. Plus, you know, with a name like Grosso in Italy, there’s already a pretty good precedent for somebody with that last name.