Juventus Faces Sassuolo With Just One Italian Player

Three weeks into the 2026-27 Serie A season and one of the loudest debates isn’t about tactics or title favorites. It’s about passports.

Lineups across the league are drifting away from the traditional Italian core, and nobody has embodied that shift more than Como, the billionaire-backed fairytale that has already sent out multiple starting XIs without a single Italian on the pitch.

Juventus aren’t quite at that level yet. But on Sunday night at the Mapei Stadium, they’ll come close.

Vicario, Alone With the Flag

Luciano Spalletti’s squad has been ripped apart by injuries, and the Tuscan coach is expected to name a starting lineup against Sassuolo featuring just one Italian: Guglielmo Vicario.

Unless Spalletti springs a late surprise, the goalkeeper will be the lone Italian voice in the huddle before kickoff. The rest of the side? A fully international cast.

The reasons are brutally simple. Manuel Locatelli is out long term after undergoing meniscus surgery and won’t be back until 2027. Andrea Cambiaso has been sidelined since the opening game of the season. Federico Gatti, fresh off his late heroics against AC Milan last weekend, still looks set to start on the bench, behind Gleison Bremer and Jhon Lucumí in the pecking order.

So it falls to Vicario to carry the tricolore in the most Italian of clubs.

If this plays out as expected, it will be the first time since February 2023 that Juventus have started a match with just one Italian in the XI.

A Changing Juve, On Paper and On Grass

This hasn’t come out of nowhere. The opening three games of the season have already hinted at the new reality.

Gatti has been reduced to backup status, watching Bremer and Lucumí lock down the center of defense. Cambiaso’s injury has opened the door for Zeki Çelik, who has started all three matches at left back. Up front, Jeff Ekhator — one of the brighter young Italian striker prospects in the squad — has missed most of preseason and will be out for a couple more months.

That left Locatelli and Vicario as the only Italians to start each of the first three games. Now Locatelli is gone until next year, and the responsibility shifts entirely onto the new man in goal.

An Italian Heart, in a New Face

For a club that has long been seen as a pillar of the Italian game, the image of Juventus walking out with just one Italian starter feels jarring. This is Italy’s most successful club, the reference point for generations of Azzurri players, suddenly looking more like a pan-European all-star team than a domestic standard-bearer.

And the irony is sharp: the only Italian likely to start in Sassuolo is one who wasn’t even a Juventus player a few months ago.

Vicario already looks and sounds like a natural Juventino, embracing the pressure and the identity that comes with the shirt. He understands what it means to be Italian and to represent this club. But he is still barely 270 minutes into his Juventus career.

For now, that’s all Juventus have to lean on — one new face, one Italian, one flag-bearer in goal. The question is how long a club built on a national identity can live with that picture staring back at it from the teamsheet.