Reports: Juventus, Cristiano Giuntoli have held talks over sporting director role

When it comes to summer plans for Juventus, there only seems to be concrete direction in which the club is going right now — sign a sporting director to be the guy who leads the Bianconeri into a new era now that so much of the front office has changed over the last six months.

And there is very much one clear-cut name atop of that list.

According to multiple reports out of Italy over the weekend, Juventus has zeroed in its search for a new sporting director on the man who just put together a Scudetto-winning squad in Southern Italy. That would be Napoli sporting director Cristiano Giuntoli, who has a year left on his contract with the newly crowned champions and has built quite the squad during his time in Naples. According to Italian journalist Nicolo Schira, Juventus have offered the 51-year-old Giuntoli and his right-hand man Peppe Pompilio contracts through 2026.

Fabrizio Romano says that Juve “are pushing to appoint Giuntoli,” with the objective being to hire one of the best sporting directors in Serie A not named Beppe Marotta as soon as possible.

As you can see in the tweet from Romano above, Giuntoli’s quote from Napoli’s Scudetto celebrations on Sunday at the Stadio Diego Maradona can be taken a few different ways. Some will see what he said as an indirect declaration of his departure seeing as he talked more about the Napoli squad without him being involved. Others will see it as praise for the guy who is still very much his boss and is getting a whole lot of plaudits thrown his way in recent days and weeks.

But with everything going on in the front office over the course of the last five or six months and the fact that Federico Cherubini appears to be set to leaving Juventus at the end of the season, getting a strong figure like Giuntoli would be a huge get for the club’s new board of directors. (And, like Schira reported, it wouldn’t be just Giuntoli, either, with Pompilio potentially coming to Turin as well. You’d have to think he would try to bring others to to Juventus as well because that Napoli scouting network is a pretty dang good one.)

Plus, the earlier Juventus can potentially get a Giuntoli deal done, the sooner they can get to the second-most important thing for the summer — getting the roster in order.

These things are connected, and Juventus clearly have identified a very good person that they want to come in and get things back on track when it comes to roster construction. (Because, let’s face it, Juve are still very much feeling the effects of Fabio Paratici’s run as the club’s chief football officer.)