A résumé many would envy, an image kept consistently immaculate, a smile that suggests savoir-faire and ease in front of the cameras. Giovanni Carnevali has all the traits of the classic Italian executive: a figure who projects assurance and naturally inspires trust, as though no contingency could unsettle him. He belongs to a lineage rooted in northern Italian football administration, often placed alongside Braida, Galliani and Marotta – names that marked his professional formation. Not only in terms of presence, but also in the way he has learned to inhabit the media space shaped by the transfer market.
It is in this frame that Juventus have turned to him. After twelve years at Sassuolo, Carnevali becomes the club’s new CEO and General Manager. The transition follows Damien Comolli’s brief tenure, ended after a year.
Comolli’s period at Juventus never found its register. Communication remained opaque, the sporting direction failed to deliver results, and the project struggled to take shape. He arrived with the profile of a data-driven reformer, yet his language and posture remained distant from the dressing-room and from the wider culture of Italian football. “I read and learn all the time, I never stop. But I never read about football, it’s boring,” he said at Hudl Performance Insights. A declaration that, in Turin, quickly defined his perimeter more than his project did.
The issue was never the idea of a more analytical approach to football. It was its translation. The model did not take root in the context it was meant to inhabit, and the distance between system and environment remained unresolved. His background at Toulouse under RedBird only reinforced the sense of an approach shaped elsewhere, in a different football culture.
Carnevali is positioned at the opposite end of that spectrum. He is a figure comfortable in public, shaped by a managerial path that began with the founding of Master Group in 1996 – a marketing and events company tied to the operational side of Italian football ceremonies, from fixture draws to transfer deadline-day productions – and by a longer history in the game that stretches back to the 1980s, when he founded Milanese, an amateur club.
The simplicity of the contrast, however, is misleading. His appointment is not a return to an “old” model against a “new” one that failed. At Sassuolo, over twelve years under Giorgio Squinzi, Carnevali effectively constructed a top-flight club structure from the ground up: infrastructure, training centres, and the decision to relocate matches to Reggio Emilia to strengthen its commercial base, aligning revenues with far more established Serie A institutions.
The sporting project followed the same logic. Coaches such as Di Francesco, De Zerbi and Grosso were chosen within a coherent framework, and the club developed a recognisable identity built on progression and valuation of players. Locatelli, Frattesi, Scamacca, Raspadori, Boga – profiles developed and moved on within that system.
Juventus, at this stage, present a fragmented structure in search of stability. Carnevali’s experience within Italian football’s institutional and operational fabric, combined with his familiarity with its internal codes, places him in a position of immediate relevance.
His arrival also reopens an older line of continuity with Inter CEO Beppe Marotta – former mentor, colleague in Monza, Como and Ravenna, and later best man at his wedding. Carnevali describes him simply: “He is a friend as well as my mentor. We met when he was at Monza and I was at Milanese Calcio, a youth side. I suggested a player, he trusted me, and I gave him the registration. That is how it began.”
Seen in this light, his appointment reads less as rupture than as adjustment. Juventus turn to a figure who knows the internal geography of Italian football and its informal structures as much as its formal ones. Whether this restores balance is another matter. For now, it marks a shift in direction that feels deliberate rather than experimental.