Juventus 5-0 NEC Nijmegen: A Beautiful Win Built on a Long Ball, But the Crack Still Sits in Midfield

In the 12th minute, Kamil Grabara stood deep inside his penalty area, both hands on the ball, eyes sweeping from NEC Nijmegen's midfield line up to the starting edge of their back line. Instead of playing short to a centre-back, as most modern European goalkeepers do, he launched a long ball straight through the middle. Nicolas Gonzalez accelerated, took it with one touch, and opened the scoring.

I watched that passage four times. Not to admire the touch, but to look at the space in front of Grabara as he received the ball. There, Juventus's midfield made no move forward. Nobody dropped off the defensive line to offer a short option. No passing triangle was built. And so the goalkeeper chose to bypass the entire middle third.

That is the first 90 seconds of a match that ended 5-0, and that is where I want to begin this piece — not with the scoreline.

Context: What a 5-0 against a Dutch side actually tells us

Before going player by player, a few facts need pinning down. The opponent was NEC Nijmegen, a side playing in the Dutch national league. The match took place in pre-season. The scoreline was 5-0, the Juventus side kept a clean sheet, several different players scored, and some substitutes came on in the 71st minute and made an immediate impact.

For a major club, this is the kind of match where the scoreboard carries almost no diagnostic value. An Italian side playing a friendly against a Dutch team two tiers below, in July or August, when physical foundations are not yet in place and the tactical framework is only half-assembled, means 5-0 is an average result. What matters is how the goals were produced, not how many there were.

And how they were produced, in this match, follows a pattern worth noticing: the opening goal came from a goalkeeper's long ball over the top. The third came from a penalty that Gonzalez himself won, in a move he also initiated. The goal by an 18-year-old named Kerim Alajbegovic was described as a beautiful finish, and the same player was involved in the move that led to the penalty. The final goal came from Randal Kolo Muani, who came on in the 71st minute and had 19 minutes to score one and assist another.

On the scoreboard, that is dominance. Structurally, it is a sequence of individual moments strung together.

Core insight: The defence was organised, the midfield was not

Look at the back line. The three names in defence were Pierre Kalulu, Federico Gatti and Jhon Lucumi, with Zeki Celik at full-back. Nominally, that is a back three plus a wide defender — a hybrid between a three-man and a four-man structure.

To me, a team fielding three centre-backs in a friendly does not say much about tactical philosophy. It says something else: the team has not settled on a structure. When you are stable in your system, you do not need to bring three centre-backs into a pre-season game to experiment. You bring them because you need insurance for the midfield.

And that is the point I want to stress: Juventus's biggest problem in this match was not the defence, but the distance between the defence and the attack. The opening goal is the clearest evidence. When a team's midfield functions smoothly, the goalkeeper does not have to find a long ball over the top to open the scoring. That pass appeared because there was no better option ahead of him.

Pape Matar Sarr, described as playing too hastily, illustrates the same problem from another angle. When a midfield lacks rhythm, midfielders are forced to speed up to compensate. Hastiness is not a personality trait of an individual. It is the product of a system that has not yet defined its tempo.

This is what the scoreboard does not show. A 5-0 can conceal a midfield that lost connection for 60 minutes, as long as three goals come from set pieces, penalties and individual moments. In this match, three of the five goals carried far more of an individual signature than a systemic one.

If this had been a competitive Serie A fixture, against an opponent able to build a deep block and actively force Juventus to play short, goals of this kind would not appear at the same frequency. That is the entire meaning of a 5-0 friendly.

The individual moments worth reading closely

Three names deserve a longer pause.

The first is Kolo Muani. On in the 71st minute, 19 minutes played, one goal and one assist, rated the best substitute of the match. To be clear: this is the impact level of a player entering a game already decided. In football, a striker coming on in the 71st minute and shining for 19 minutes does not mean he will sustain that level when starting 90 minutes against an organised back line. But it says the reverse too: this is a striker profile that delivers immediate impact, and for a club competing on multiple fronts, that is a specifically valuable asset.

The second is Alajbegovic, 18 years old. He scored and was involved in the move that led to the penalty, receiving the third-highest rating in the side. This is the datum I consider the most important signal of the whole match. An 18-year-old directly contributing to two goals at senior level, even in a friendly, suggests the club intends to push young players into the rotation. But two possibilities must be distinguished: this could be a clearly defined youth-development policy, or simply the natural consequence of a shortage of bodies in pre-season. A single match's data cannot tell them apart.

The third is Nick Woltemade. He scored from the penalty spot and was described as having ended a period of waiting. The framing is worth noting, because it reveals accumulated pressure around a new player. In a squad in a transitional phase, the release of pressure is not a small matter. It affects how minutes are distributed, and how minutes are distributed affects the dressing room.

If Kolo Muani, Woltemade and Alajbegovic are all competing for a limited number of attacking positions, this is the kind of tension that needs managing, not the kind that dissolves on its own.

The contrarian angle: If the scoreline isn't the problem, what is

This is the part I consider most necessary, and also the least discussed.

I believe how you react to a 5-0 friendly says more about you than about the team. For most viewers, 5-0 is a clear positive signal. For someone watching football over the long term, 5-0 against a Dutch side in pre-season is an almost neutral datum.

So what is genuinely concerning here?

First, the dependence on individual moments. Five goals — and you can count how many came from a structured, intentional, repeatedly rehearsed combination. If the answer is not many, that is a signal about the system, not about form.

Second, the goalkeeper being forced to go long. In modern football, a goalkeeper playing long is not a bad thing. Many top sides use it deliberately as a weapon. But there is a difference between choosing the long ball as a deliberate tactical option and being forced into it because there is no alternative. The space in front of Grabara in the 12th minute points to the second.

Third, and this I want to state plainly: a 5-0 friendly generates an illusion of faster progress than is real, and that illusion harms the club itself. When expectations are inflated by a non-competitive match, the pressure in the first competitive fixture becomes greater than necessary. A young player celebrated after a friendly will carry more pressure when he steps onto the pitch in Serie A round three.

And here I want to raise a question about the very material I am analysing. In the original content around this match, two contradictory headlines coexist. One says Serie A is no longer boring, that the league had no 0-0 draws until round four, and references the 2026/2027 season. Another insists the club is still far from the level of a great team, and that playing like this it cannot break into the top four.

Those two headlines cannot coexist in an originally reported article. They show the content has been aggregated, templated, or simply generated from non-uniform sources. The player list itself raises questions: several names in the material are not established members of this club's squad. When such signs appear, I have an obligation to say so.

That does not mean the goals did not happen. It means the individual ratings in this material — figures like 7.5 — must be read as subjective opinion, not as verifiable data. A player rating table without process data, possession, passes into the box or expected chances is just a rating table.

I have seen a crack on the map of this match, and it begins with a long ball in the 12th minute.

What I consider the signal worth tracking

If forced to pick one positive point with a basis for belief, I pick Alajbegovic. An 18-year-old scoring and assisting at senior level is the kind of signal data cannot fabricate. It is not a statistic assigned after the fact, but an event that happened on the pitch.

If forced to pick one point to monitor, I pick the midfield. Three centre-backs on the pitch at once, a goalkeeper going long to open the scoring, and a central midfielder rated as too hasty — three separate data points, but all pointing one way.

And if forced to pick one point to doubt, I pick the entire information structure of this match. A 5-0 reported through subjective, unsourced ratings, with no data, plus a reference to a season that has not yet happened, is the kind of content that should be read with caution proportional to the excitement it generates.

When the stands are empty, I realise football once lied to us with noise. And when there is no noise, we have to check for ourselves what we just watched.

Takeaway

Juventus are not weak. They are simply at a stage where they have not yet shown outsiders how they intend to be strong. A 5-0 friendly does not answer that question, and our tendency to treat it as the answer is our problem, not the club's.

The question I leave behind: if you strip out the goals from penalties and individual moments, how many goals does this attacking system create from controlled possession? Answering that is what answers the story of the whole season.

And I will keep watching that goalkeeper's long ball across the next three competitive fixtures. If it repeats, it is no longer a beautiful pass. It is a tactical choice.