The purchase of the Brazilian is one of the most important moves of the Italian football market.
When the news of Douglas Luiz at Juventus he started to appear in our timeline, the feeling was almost immediately one of surprise. A player like Douglas Luiz, on the threshold of his prime, comes to play in Serie A: isn’t that a contradiction? Generally, Those who reach high levels in the Premier League rarely escape from that systemif not to level up further.
After years in which Serie A has mainly collected the broken toys of the Premier League to give them new life – Pulisic, Loftus-Cheek, Smalling, Mkhitaryan – seeing a player of this level arrive, in the Brazilian national team and coming off two exceptional seasons with Aston Villa seems like a glitch in the system.
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The reason why Douglas Luiz, one of the best midfielders in the last editions of the Premier League, arrived in Serie A is as simple as it is ironic. It involves a dynamic that we know well in Italy: thethe need for capital gains. Without going into too much detail – this article by Paolo Bellini, in case you want to know more – Aston Villa needed approximately around thirty million pounds of capital gains to fit within the parameters of the Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR) and avoid the same penalties handed down to Everton and Nottingham Forest last season.
Also for this reason, the conditions with which Juventus took Douglas Luiz seemed too good to be true, those negotiations invented by some fake insider to collect a few more clicks: compared to the valuation of 60 millionAston Villa ended up settling for the half in compensation and the cards of Barrenechea and Iling Jr, players who at Juve seemed destined for a future of capital gains – the second was also expiring in 2025.
Even on paper alone, Douglas Luiz has begun to be talked about as an exceptional purchase. An enthusiasm that, for those who have not followed Aston Villa in a particularly continuous way, could seem excessive, but in fact perfectly justified. After all, being part of the elite in the Premier League It means being one in Europe too: for a Juventus that in recent years has had to fight against a lot of tactical misunderstandings in midfield, bringing in a high-ranking player can only be exciting.
Which player are we talking about?
Douglas Luiz is one of those midfielders you can ask for anything: his game has many strong points – dynamism, intensity, technical clarity, reading of spaces – but none that particularly stands out above the others, making him a piece that can be inserted into any midfield.
It is precisely this characteristic that has led him into one of the historic debates that in England concern players like this – Declan Rice, to give a fairly similar example –: is it a 6 or an 8? In other words: And a director or a mezzala?
The answer that Douglas Luiz always wanted to give – the number on his shirt speaks for itself – is the 6the director, even if his game is not exactly attributable to that. In the first four years in Europe – first 18 months at Gironaunder the control of Manchester City, and then at Aston Villa – Douglas Luiz was often assigned construction tasksemploying him consistently in the second line both alone and paired with more or less dynamic players.
In this role, the Brazilian has shown that he has the quality of ride – short e long – quite high but not deriving from choices that belong to him by nature – the tendency to move with the ball, at times excessive for the function it would have, is a clear sign of this.
In a very reactive Aston Villa like that of Dean Smith – a team from the lower half of the Premier League – Luiz was often called upon to handle a few build-up balls and to do so with one essential directive: go fast from Grealish to unleash his dribbling or from Watkins to generate second balls. This context – both as a reactive team and as a team fighting to survive – has maximized two aspects of Douglas Luiz’s playmaking: the long gamewhose foundations have always been excellent, and the dribblingstylistically essential but also very reliable, aided by a structured but not massive physique.
As with almost all of his now former teammates, the moment that marked the difference in Douglas Luiz’s career was the arrival of Unai Emery. In fact, with the Basque coach, the Brazilian’s position has changed significantly: right from the start, the former Arsenal and Villarreal coach has exploited the presence in the Aston Villa squad of a positional player like Boubacar Camera to entrust him with the majority of the ball-out duties, making Douglas Luiz a figure of support.
From our analysis of Emery’s Aston Villa, one of the most common situations in construction: Douglas Luiz leans into the second line, alongside Kamara in the first build-up.
In this aspect, you can see a lot of Unai Emery’s engineering work on his players. With Kamara taking over the second line on a permanent basis, Douglas Luiz finds himself in the ideal context for his hybrid nature: starting from that position he can participate in the first construction, where he can still make himself very useful thanks to his associative skills in the passages, without having a static position: can break away from the line, follow the action and, in some cases, even occupy the area.
In this sense, Douglas Luiz is a player with more dimensions: in construction, although not a positional player, he knows how to move the ball well and – once he has passed the first line – he also knows how to advance it well both with long plays and with conduction into spaces, leveraging his qualities as a dribbler.
The idea of don’t lock him into a fixed role It is essential to not limit his qualities: when Kamara suffered a cruciate ligament rupture at the beginning of February, Emery decided to replace him with two originally more offensive players, Tielemans e McGinnasking them to adapt rather than transfer the construction tasks to the Brazilian, with the risk of limiting his forward movements and the Insertionsthe aspect in which Douglas Luiz has grown the most under Emery.
In the last two years he has scored 15 goals and provided 15 assists between the Premier League and the Conference League, but the contribution of the set pieces has been decisive in inflating his statistics. 5 of his 9 goals in the 2023/24 season have come from penalties, a third of his average shooting opportunities (1.02 out of 3.52 per 90′ in the last season in England) come from set pieces. This is not necessarily a bad thing but it partly hides how the Brazilian is still a player to develop in choices: he tends, for example, to take particularly difficult shots, and is not overly creative in his choices with the ball at his feet.
Douglas Luiz’s shots (goals in green) in the last Premier League: the Brazilian tends to shoot often from 20-25 meters but with a fairly modest effectiveness. In the area, in comparison, he is more lucid. (data: Understat)
It is worth noting that Douglas Luiz is a top-level midfielder for the amount of things he can offer his teams: it’s a smuggler of quality, a dribbler who hardly loses the ball, a incursion with interesting margins and, when it arrives in the area, a finalizer pretty cool.
If you need to find some defectthis lies in the defensive aspects: under Dean Smith, Douglas Luiz had mainly covering and supporting duties in the positional defence phase, managing to read the passing lines – in the early years he had good numbers in shots and passes blocked, which gradually decreased when Aston Villa started to keep possession more.
In the transition to the Unai system Emerywhose non-possession phase is meticulously managed and requires a higher mental effort, Douglas Luiz has shown some cracks, not always maintaining the correct distances in counter-attacking and also suffering a fair number of errors. cards – 16 in 53 total games in 2023/24 – also and above all for fouls committed in defensive transitions.
What does Thiago Motta bring to Juventus?
Douglas Luiz’s career has shown us a player who doesn’t seem to need any particular periods of adaptation to new contexts: it is likely that he will be able to take his place in Thiago Motta’s team without too much effort. Furthermore, given both his status and his versatilityit will probably be more his teammates who will be chosen around him to accommodate him than the other way around.
To understand what his/her potential might be role It is crucial to visualize what the setting of the Bianconeri’s midfield. At the moment Juventus has, as a player most similar to replicating the work done by Kamara at Aston Villa, Manuel Locatelli: for this reason, a hypothetical three-man midfield it could imply the presence of one between Luiz and the ex-Sassuolo player in the central slot, with the risk of combining their difficulties in the counter-pressing phase and, at the same time, blocking the position of one of the two in the possession phase and penalising their strengths in movement.
This last problem could disappear if, having to choose, Thiago Motta opted to keep Locatelli in the role in which Allegri has often used him: a small waste for the qualities of the former Sassuolo player, but understandable in the idea of to ensure Douglas Luiz has the mobility he needs.
Another scenario that cannot be ruled out is that Juventus decides to give a even more new face in its midfield. Shortly after announcing Douglas Luiz, the Bianconeri also closed the purchase of Khéphren Thuram – who numerically should replace Rabiot, whose contract expired and was not renewed – and the interest in Teun Koopmeiner is far from diminished. If Juventus were to also get rid of other profiles – McKennie first and foremost – it cannot be ruled out that they decide to intervene again to integrate, for example, a profile more similar to Barrenechea.
Meanwhile, the purchase of Douglas Luiz seems like a statement important of Giuntoli and Thiago Motta, who seem intent on creating a Juventus with some decidedly superior physical and technical qualities to those seen in recent years.
2024-07-05 13:00:00
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