Samuel Iling-Junior (11 Viewers)
- Thread starter Hust
- Start date
Oooh interesting idea
- - - Updated - - -
Like this in attack
And collapse to this in defence
Leaves us in a good position for counters, especially with the overlap of Iling on the left and Soulé on the right.
Dusan
Kostic----------Chiesa
Iling---Fagioli Locatelli--Soulé
Rugani Bremer Danilo
Tek
If we organised it right so we weren't too exposed on the counter this could be very effective
Kostic----------Chiesa
Iling---Fagioli Locatelli--Soulé
Rugani Bremer Danilo
Tek
If we organised it right so we weren't too exposed on the counter this could be very effective
- - - Updated - - -
Like this in attack
And collapse to this in defence
Leaves us in a good position for counters, especially with the overlap of Iling on the left and Soulé on the right.
Attachments
Last edited:
Oooh interesting idea
- - - Updated - - -
Like this in attack
And collapse to this in defence
Leaves us in a good position for counters, especially with the overlap of Iling on the left and Soulé on the right.
Dusan
Kostic----------Chiesa
Iling---Fagioli Locatelli--Soulé
Rugani Bremer Danilo
Tek
If we organised it right so we weren't too exposed on the counter this could be very effective
Kostic----------Chiesa
Iling---Fagioli Locatelli--Soulé
Rugani Bremer Danilo
Tek
If we organised it right so we weren't too exposed on the counter this could be very effective
- - - Updated - - -
Like this in attack
And collapse to this in defence
Leaves us in a good position for counters, especially with the overlap of Iling on the left and Soulé on the right.
Oooh interesting idea
- - - Updated - - -
Like this in attack
And collapse to this in defence
Leaves us in a good position for counters, especially with the overlap of Iling on the left and Soulé on the right.
Dusan
Kostic----------Chiesa
Iling---Fagioli Locatelli--Soulé
Rugani Bremer Danilo
Tek
If we organised it right so we weren't too exposed on the counter this could be very effective
Kostic----------Chiesa
Iling---Fagioli Locatelli--Soulé
Rugani Bremer Danilo
Tek
If we organised it right so we weren't too exposed on the counter this could be very effective
- - - Updated - - -
Like this in attack
And collapse to this in defence
Leaves us in a good position for counters, especially with the overlap of Iling on the left and Soulé on the right.
Dusan
Kostic----||----Chiesa
Iling---Fagioli || Locatelli--Soulé
Rugani Bre || mer Danilo
||
||
\/
\/
attack
Tek
Kostic----||----Chiesa
Iling---Fagioli || Locatelli--Soulé
Rugani Bre || mer Danilo
||
||
\/
\/
attack
Tek
Anybody got access to The Athletic? Is it worth subscribing?
https://www.footitalia.com/iling-junior-vlahovic-is-like-drogba/
https://www.footitalia.com/iling-junior-vlahovic-is-like-drogba/
here's the whole interview:
full price is expensive, but there are always discounted offers, those might be worth it. i paid less than 20€ iirc, there's certainly enough quality material for that price.
Samuel Iling-Junior exclusive: from Highbury to Juventus’ first team — via Chelsea
It’s a crisp winter’s day in Turin, the snow-capped Alps visible from the training pitch at the Juventus Training Centre. Massimiliano Allegri’s assistant, Simone Padoin, the lucky charm and cult hero from his first spell in charge, is overseeing some crossing drills ahead of Fiorentina’s visit to the Allianz Stadium, the crowd gathered in the stand for this open training session resisting the temptation to sing the old chant, “who gives a toss about Ronaldo when we’ve got Padoin?”. Samuel Iling-Junior alternates between whipping the ball in for his team-mates and finishing off some moves.
“Cosa ha combinato?” a kid sat behind The Athletic shouts in wonder after watching him hit a volleyed rabona into a mini-goal with impressive focus and assurance. Practising in the same penalty area as Iling-Junior is Leandro Paredes. Soon afterwards, his compatriot and fellow World Cup winner Angel Di Maria emerges. “Ballers,” Iling says, incredulous and proud of how far he has come in so short a time.
Still only 19, it must feel like only yesterday Iling-Junior was playing on the Park View estate in north London. “I’m a Highbury boy,” he beams. When Juventus won a friendly against Arsenal at the Emirates in preparation for Serie A’s return during the World Cup, the boy who made his first steps in the game at Clissold Park Rangers and on the football pitches of Market Road came full circle. He played a key part in their second goal in the 2-0 win too, his shot deflected beyond Aaron Ramsdale. “It was a good experience,” Iling-Junior nods, an understatement on paper but not in person. You see how much it meant for this son of a nurse and a computer engineer from Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to have his friends and family in the ground that day, a ground that looms so large over their neighbourhood, a reward for the sacrifices they made to help Iling-Junior get to where he is today.
“I’ve got a good bond with Tek,” Iling-Junior explains, using the nickname of Juventus’ Arsenal til-I-die goalkeeper Wojciech Szczesny. “We’re supporting Arsenal from afar.”
Iling-Junior ended up coming through on the other side of town at Chelsea and is understandably conflicted about his allegiances after joining their youth setup aged seven. It was a long old commute from north London to Chelsea’s training base in Surrey. In the early days, Iling-Junior’s mother used to hop on the train to Cobham and Stoke d’Abernon to take him to practice, the round trip sometimes dragging on for three hours. His father would pick him up and drop him off at home on his way to a night shift. “Then I started to get my own freedom, go by myself, get my big boots on,” Iling-Junior laughs. “I went into digs and lived with another family at 14. That’s when I went full-time with Chelsea. School, GCSEs and everything. I’d go home on a Friday before a game and then travel back up with my parents.”
It was all worth it.
Iling-Junior signed a contract with Juventus in 2022 (Photo: Filippo Alfero – Juventus FC/Juventus FC via Getty Images)
The generation Iling-Junior belonged to at Chelsea was a special one. “Someone you might know is Jamal… Jamal Musiala.” All of a sudden, Iling-Junior’s eyes light up. “Everything he is doing now at Bayern he used to do in those days. The way the ball sticks to his feet. He can just create chances from nothing.”
Surrounded by talent, Iling-Junior lists the names. “Levi Colwill is definitely someone to watch for years to come. He’s just solid. He’s always had that quality left foot and that swagger about him when he’s making those passes and steps out from the back. We played three at the back and he was on the left of the defence. I played in front of him as the wing-back and he didn’t really like it when I’d go off and dribble because he liked to overlap,” Iling laughs. It is remarkable how many of them have made it. “Harvey Vale is in and around the first team and just came back from loan. There was Charlie Webster, Prince Adegoke, one of the goalkeepers, and Luke Bailey Badley-Morgan, who has gone to Stoke.”
The competition spurred Iling-Junior on. Musiala in particular was his north star. “When I was 10, he was the year above me and he would go off and play with boys two or three years older than him,” he explains. “I’d look at him and think, ‘I need to be around him and make sure I either follow in his footsteps or just play with him’.”
Musiala has made a huge impression for Bayern Munich and Germany (Photo: Maja Hitij/Getty Images)
As Musiala moved to Germany, a proposition from Italy arrived for Iling-Junior. Juventus’ scouting manager Matteo Tognozzi noted his performances and flagged them to his old boss, the club’s former chief football officer, Fabio Paratici.
At Chelsea, Iling-Junior looked up to Didier Drogba and Eden Hazard. But as he began to think more about his game, he found other role models. He enjoyed watching Leroy Sane at Manchester City and later at Bayern with Musiala. “I think he’s quite similar to me,” Iling-Junior observes, in terms of skill set and his function in the team. “Sane is left-footed and plays on the left.”
Tognozzi was straight up with him. “He was nothing but honest. It wasn’t just like, ‘We’re going to put you in here’. It was more, ‘Regardless of how you do, we’re going to push you’.” Music to Iling-Junior’s ears. “You do well to get pushed,” he says. Players can’t necessarily take that for granted.
On the face of it, his decision to go to Italy was unusual. While Serie A now has a burgeoning group of ex-Chelsea academy graduates — from Tammy Abraham and Fikayo Tomori to Jeremie Boga, Ola Aina and Ethan Ampadu — Iling-Junior made the switch far earlier, at 16. English prospects his age tend to go to Germany on the back of Jadon Sancho, Jude Bellingham and now Jamie Bynoe-Gittens’ success at Borussia Dortmund.
Even among Iling-Junior’s Italian contemporaries, youth development at club level in Italy has been regularly criticised for not producing enough players. Alberto Aquilani, the former Roma and Liverpool midfielder who has been cutting his teeth coaching Fiorentina’s under-19s to silverware, recently claimed the gap between Serie A and youth-team football is a bridge too far, the equivalent, in his opinion, to “five divisions”.
Juventus had also stopped bringing players through. When Claudio Marchisio was suggested as an example to the club’s former chairman Andrea Agnelli, he openly admitted that was “an emergency situation” in light of Juventus’ relegation in the Calciopoli scandal in 2006. “He would never have played in the team with (Patrick) Vieira and Emerson.” Why entrust the Old Lady with youth development then?
Everything changed in 2018. Italy failed to qualify for the World Cup for the first time in 60 years and an intervention was staged to sort the game out.
Empowered to introduce root-and-branch reforms, Alessandro Costacurta pushed through legislation allowing Italy’s top-flight clubs to register a B team in the third division. The idea was to follow the examples of Real Madrid Castilla and Barcelona B in Spain and allow boys to play men’s football in a competitive environment earlier.
Rather than loaning prospects out to teams who had little interest in developing them — there were around 450 loans in Italy in 2018 compared with 129 in England — kids could enjoy the stability and sense of belonging that comes from being at the same club all your life and continue learning in a more rough, ready and challenging context. At the time, only 2 per cent of players from the Primavera or under-19 league in Italy made more than 10 appearances in Serie A and B (the highest-profile among them Nicolo Zaniolo, Alessandro Bastoni and Andrea Pinamonti).
Juventus were the only club to take the Italian Football Federation up on its offer and launch an under-23 team, later rebranded the Juventus Next Generation.
The club wanted to create its own version of Alvaro Morata, who had made nearly 100 professional appearances for Castilla and Real Madrid’s first team, scoring 56 goals and winning the Under-21 Euros with Spain in 2013, before joining Juve in 2014. What they wished to avoid was a repeat of what happened with Leonardo Spinazzola, who had nowhere to go within Juventus after the under-19s and headed out on loan five times in three seasons, a level of disruption that stalled his development. Five years into the project it is now bearing fruit. “You’re playing men’s football,” Iling-Junior says. “It really does help because that’s the goal. That path is key. As a youngster, you need to be playing.”
Some players might turn their noses up at playing away to Pergolettese, Arzignano and Feralpisalo in Serie C. But not Iling-Junior. After all, it did World Cup winners like Luca Toni, Fabio Grosso, Andrea Barzagli and Vincenzo Iaquinta the world of good and, as Iling-Junior says, “the reality of football is you have to show it”.
It’s like a video game. Complete a level. Go up a level. Be ready for the next level. “The football is quite different,” he admits. “Especially coming from Chelsea where we dominate possession and create so many chances. For Chelsea, I know if I beat a man and lose the ball, I can try to win it back or my team-mate is going to win it back and we’ll just keep possession again. Whereas in Serie C you don’t get many chances, you get one chance, one goal. And that’s how it is in men’s football. It’s knowing how to take your chances.”
Iling-Junior has played for England up to under-20 level (Photo: Claudio Benedetto/LiveMedia/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
When Iling-Junior signed as a professional for Juventus in 2020, he moved in with the other lads in the academy and attended the Juventus College next door to the training centre, studying history and an intense course in Italian. “Posso portarlo a casa?” Iling-Junior asks when Federica, the Juventus press officer, presents him with the Best Young Bianconero of the Year award for 2022, a prize voted by the Giovani Bianconeri website. Can he take it home with him? Of course he can, Federica says.
Iling-Junior broke into the first team around the same time as fellow Next Gen graduates Nicolo Fagioli and Fabio Miretti, both of whom won their first caps for Italy in the last international break, as well as the silky Matias Soule, another Tognozzi discovery from Velez Sarsfield in Argentina. Having played together for three years, the transition to the first team has been easier. “They were the first boys I met when I joined,” Iling-Junior says. “I was surprised by them. Soule was injured in my first few months, then he came in. He’s from Argentina and I started to see the different types of players there are around the world. It makes you adapt your brain and think maybe I can try something like this, maybe I can bring it into my playing style. Miretti is technically a genius. He’s so smart.”
Juventus reached the semi-finals of the UEFA Youth League last season, a major breakthrough, losing only to eventual winners Benfica. Iling-Junior was then called up for the first-team squad for the visit to Florence on the final day of the last campaign. He didn’t get on but a senior debut felt within grasp. “It gives you the feeling: ‘I’m close. Don’t stop now.’ A member of the England squad that won the Under-19 Euros in the summer — England eliminated Miretti and Fagioli’s Italy in the semis — Iling-Junior came back hungrier than ever. He scored four goals in his opening seven games for the Next Gen and Allegri — “a serial winner” — rewarded him with a first appearance in Serie A, against Empoli in October.
Iling-Junior, Brooke Norton-Cuffy, Daniel Oyegoke and Jamie Bynoe-Gittens of England celebrate with the European Under-19 Championship trophy (Photo: Christian Hofer – The FA/The FA via Getty Images)
Iling-Junior has loved being around the first team. He thinks Dusan Vlahovic has the same aura as Didier Drogba.
“Didier had that energy,” he says. “Obviously he was a finisher. But when you go on the pitch I think energy is the most important thing in a top player. It goes through the team. You can see everyone else is going to back him up, especially leading the line. Dusan has got the lot. He speaks on the pitch. But it’s more his energy. When he’s going to press, he just naturally takes you with him.”
Training up close and personal with Di Maria has also been an education. “It’s the little things. First touches, touches around players if I’m beating my man, and then mentally they’re winners. You’ve got to have that winner’s mentality. This club is about winning. They settle for nothing less.”
At the weekend, Juventus overcame Fiorentina 1-0 at the Allianz and upon watching Adrien Rabiot’s winner, The Athletic couldn’t help but marvel at Iling-Junior’s prophecy a few days earlier. He had expressed a sense of wonder at Di Maria’s ability to pick out his team-mates. “Every ball he puts into the box, it lands on someone. I don’t know how he does it. It’s the little details of always getting the ball precisely onto someone’s head.” The assist for Rabiot’s header came from none other than El Fideo.
His skills are rubbing off on Iling-Junior.
Five minutes into his Champions League debut in Lisbon against Benfica, the forward set up a goal for Arkadiusz Milik. He then put in another cross which wrought so much havoc in the penalty area that Weston McKennie scored.
That same weekend, Iling-Junior took on his man in Lecce, offloaded the ball to Fagioli and watched him curl in the winning goal. Unfortunately for Iling-Junior he hurt his ankle at the Via del Mare and is only now back again, fresh from signing a new contract until 2025, just in time for Europe and the Europa League tie with Nantes.
Iling-Junior desperately wants another taste of Champions League football. “It made me feel like I want to be here all the time. This is where the big boys play. You can only get into the Champions League if you’re a good team, so you’re not playing against anyone that’s not good enough.”
The Next Gen kids have been a silver lining in the storm clouds that have gathered around Juventus this season. On the one hand, the situation calls for a heightened sense of responsibility. On the other, the team needs spensieratezza and sbarazzini — the carefree, happy-go-lucky, breezy, fearlessness of youth.
“I’m 100 per cent enjoying it,” Iling-Junior says. He has to pinch himself sometimes when he’s walking through Piazza San Carlo and taking his girlfriend to Leonardo Bonucci’s restaurant. Iling-Junior’s family has no background in sport. He has not followed in his father’s footsteps in the way Federico Chiesa has.
“It means I can create my own legacy,” he says. “Not many people can say they’ve come from London as a 16-year-old boy and made it to the Juventus first team. I have to take a step back every now and then and say, ‘I’ve done something good’.
“But I can’t rest on my laurels. I’ve just got to keep going. Why can’t I do more? There’s so much more to do, taking those steps to get my name into the starting line-up, playing in the Champions League consistently. You look at players I’ve played with like Jamal, Harvey Elliott. You just want to be playing with your mates at the highest level.”
It’s a crisp winter’s day in Turin, the snow-capped Alps visible from the training pitch at the Juventus Training Centre. Massimiliano Allegri’s assistant, Simone Padoin, the lucky charm and cult hero from his first spell in charge, is overseeing some crossing drills ahead of Fiorentina’s visit to the Allianz Stadium, the crowd gathered in the stand for this open training session resisting the temptation to sing the old chant, “who gives a toss about Ronaldo when we’ve got Padoin?”. Samuel Iling-Junior alternates between whipping the ball in for his team-mates and finishing off some moves.
“Cosa ha combinato?” a kid sat behind The Athletic shouts in wonder after watching him hit a volleyed rabona into a mini-goal with impressive focus and assurance. Practising in the same penalty area as Iling-Junior is Leandro Paredes. Soon afterwards, his compatriot and fellow World Cup winner Angel Di Maria emerges. “Ballers,” Iling says, incredulous and proud of how far he has come in so short a time.
Still only 19, it must feel like only yesterday Iling-Junior was playing on the Park View estate in north London. “I’m a Highbury boy,” he beams. When Juventus won a friendly against Arsenal at the Emirates in preparation for Serie A’s return during the World Cup, the boy who made his first steps in the game at Clissold Park Rangers and on the football pitches of Market Road came full circle. He played a key part in their second goal in the 2-0 win too, his shot deflected beyond Aaron Ramsdale. “It was a good experience,” Iling-Junior nods, an understatement on paper but not in person. You see how much it meant for this son of a nurse and a computer engineer from Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to have his friends and family in the ground that day, a ground that looms so large over their neighbourhood, a reward for the sacrifices they made to help Iling-Junior get to where he is today.
“I’ve got a good bond with Tek,” Iling-Junior explains, using the nickname of Juventus’ Arsenal til-I-die goalkeeper Wojciech Szczesny. “We’re supporting Arsenal from afar.”
Iling-Junior ended up coming through on the other side of town at Chelsea and is understandably conflicted about his allegiances after joining their youth setup aged seven. It was a long old commute from north London to Chelsea’s training base in Surrey. In the early days, Iling-Junior’s mother used to hop on the train to Cobham and Stoke d’Abernon to take him to practice, the round trip sometimes dragging on for three hours. His father would pick him up and drop him off at home on his way to a night shift. “Then I started to get my own freedom, go by myself, get my big boots on,” Iling-Junior laughs. “I went into digs and lived with another family at 14. That’s when I went full-time with Chelsea. School, GCSEs and everything. I’d go home on a Friday before a game and then travel back up with my parents.”
It was all worth it.
Iling-Junior signed a contract with Juventus in 2022 (Photo: Filippo Alfero – Juventus FC/Juventus FC via Getty Images)
The generation Iling-Junior belonged to at Chelsea was a special one. “Someone you might know is Jamal… Jamal Musiala.” All of a sudden, Iling-Junior’s eyes light up. “Everything he is doing now at Bayern he used to do in those days. The way the ball sticks to his feet. He can just create chances from nothing.”
Surrounded by talent, Iling-Junior lists the names. “Levi Colwill is definitely someone to watch for years to come. He’s just solid. He’s always had that quality left foot and that swagger about him when he’s making those passes and steps out from the back. We played three at the back and he was on the left of the defence. I played in front of him as the wing-back and he didn’t really like it when I’d go off and dribble because he liked to overlap,” Iling laughs. It is remarkable how many of them have made it. “Harvey Vale is in and around the first team and just came back from loan. There was Charlie Webster, Prince Adegoke, one of the goalkeepers, and Luke Bailey Badley-Morgan, who has gone to Stoke.”
The competition spurred Iling-Junior on. Musiala in particular was his north star. “When I was 10, he was the year above me and he would go off and play with boys two or three years older than him,” he explains. “I’d look at him and think, ‘I need to be around him and make sure I either follow in his footsteps or just play with him’.”
Musiala has made a huge impression for Bayern Munich and Germany (Photo: Maja Hitij/Getty Images)
As Musiala moved to Germany, a proposition from Italy arrived for Iling-Junior. Juventus’ scouting manager Matteo Tognozzi noted his performances and flagged them to his old boss, the club’s former chief football officer, Fabio Paratici.
At Chelsea, Iling-Junior looked up to Didier Drogba and Eden Hazard. But as he began to think more about his game, he found other role models. He enjoyed watching Leroy Sane at Manchester City and later at Bayern with Musiala. “I think he’s quite similar to me,” Iling-Junior observes, in terms of skill set and his function in the team. “Sane is left-footed and plays on the left.”
Tognozzi was straight up with him. “He was nothing but honest. It wasn’t just like, ‘We’re going to put you in here’. It was more, ‘Regardless of how you do, we’re going to push you’.” Music to Iling-Junior’s ears. “You do well to get pushed,” he says. Players can’t necessarily take that for granted.
On the face of it, his decision to go to Italy was unusual. While Serie A now has a burgeoning group of ex-Chelsea academy graduates — from Tammy Abraham and Fikayo Tomori to Jeremie Boga, Ola Aina and Ethan Ampadu — Iling-Junior made the switch far earlier, at 16. English prospects his age tend to go to Germany on the back of Jadon Sancho, Jude Bellingham and now Jamie Bynoe-Gittens’ success at Borussia Dortmund.
Even among Iling-Junior’s Italian contemporaries, youth development at club level in Italy has been regularly criticised for not producing enough players. Alberto Aquilani, the former Roma and Liverpool midfielder who has been cutting his teeth coaching Fiorentina’s under-19s to silverware, recently claimed the gap between Serie A and youth-team football is a bridge too far, the equivalent, in his opinion, to “five divisions”.
Juventus had also stopped bringing players through. When Claudio Marchisio was suggested as an example to the club’s former chairman Andrea Agnelli, he openly admitted that was “an emergency situation” in light of Juventus’ relegation in the Calciopoli scandal in 2006. “He would never have played in the team with (Patrick) Vieira and Emerson.” Why entrust the Old Lady with youth development then?
Everything changed in 2018. Italy failed to qualify for the World Cup for the first time in 60 years and an intervention was staged to sort the game out.
Empowered to introduce root-and-branch reforms, Alessandro Costacurta pushed through legislation allowing Italy’s top-flight clubs to register a B team in the third division. The idea was to follow the examples of Real Madrid Castilla and Barcelona B in Spain and allow boys to play men’s football in a competitive environment earlier.
Rather than loaning prospects out to teams who had little interest in developing them — there were around 450 loans in Italy in 2018 compared with 129 in England — kids could enjoy the stability and sense of belonging that comes from being at the same club all your life and continue learning in a more rough, ready and challenging context. At the time, only 2 per cent of players from the Primavera or under-19 league in Italy made more than 10 appearances in Serie A and B (the highest-profile among them Nicolo Zaniolo, Alessandro Bastoni and Andrea Pinamonti).
Juventus were the only club to take the Italian Football Federation up on its offer and launch an under-23 team, later rebranded the Juventus Next Generation.
The club wanted to create its own version of Alvaro Morata, who had made nearly 100 professional appearances for Castilla and Real Madrid’s first team, scoring 56 goals and winning the Under-21 Euros with Spain in 2013, before joining Juve in 2014. What they wished to avoid was a repeat of what happened with Leonardo Spinazzola, who had nowhere to go within Juventus after the under-19s and headed out on loan five times in three seasons, a level of disruption that stalled his development. Five years into the project it is now bearing fruit. “You’re playing men’s football,” Iling-Junior says. “It really does help because that’s the goal. That path is key. As a youngster, you need to be playing.”
Some players might turn their noses up at playing away to Pergolettese, Arzignano and Feralpisalo in Serie C. But not Iling-Junior. After all, it did World Cup winners like Luca Toni, Fabio Grosso, Andrea Barzagli and Vincenzo Iaquinta the world of good and, as Iling-Junior says, “the reality of football is you have to show it”.
It’s like a video game. Complete a level. Go up a level. Be ready for the next level. “The football is quite different,” he admits. “Especially coming from Chelsea where we dominate possession and create so many chances. For Chelsea, I know if I beat a man and lose the ball, I can try to win it back or my team-mate is going to win it back and we’ll just keep possession again. Whereas in Serie C you don’t get many chances, you get one chance, one goal. And that’s how it is in men’s football. It’s knowing how to take your chances.”
Iling-Junior has played for England up to under-20 level (Photo: Claudio Benedetto/LiveMedia/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
When Iling-Junior signed as a professional for Juventus in 2020, he moved in with the other lads in the academy and attended the Juventus College next door to the training centre, studying history and an intense course in Italian. “Posso portarlo a casa?” Iling-Junior asks when Federica, the Juventus press officer, presents him with the Best Young Bianconero of the Year award for 2022, a prize voted by the Giovani Bianconeri website. Can he take it home with him? Of course he can, Federica says.
Iling-Junior broke into the first team around the same time as fellow Next Gen graduates Nicolo Fagioli and Fabio Miretti, both of whom won their first caps for Italy in the last international break, as well as the silky Matias Soule, another Tognozzi discovery from Velez Sarsfield in Argentina. Having played together for three years, the transition to the first team has been easier. “They were the first boys I met when I joined,” Iling-Junior says. “I was surprised by them. Soule was injured in my first few months, then he came in. He’s from Argentina and I started to see the different types of players there are around the world. It makes you adapt your brain and think maybe I can try something like this, maybe I can bring it into my playing style. Miretti is technically a genius. He’s so smart.”
Juventus reached the semi-finals of the UEFA Youth League last season, a major breakthrough, losing only to eventual winners Benfica. Iling-Junior was then called up for the first-team squad for the visit to Florence on the final day of the last campaign. He didn’t get on but a senior debut felt within grasp. “It gives you the feeling: ‘I’m close. Don’t stop now.’ A member of the England squad that won the Under-19 Euros in the summer — England eliminated Miretti and Fagioli’s Italy in the semis — Iling-Junior came back hungrier than ever. He scored four goals in his opening seven games for the Next Gen and Allegri — “a serial winner” — rewarded him with a first appearance in Serie A, against Empoli in October.
Iling-Junior, Brooke Norton-Cuffy, Daniel Oyegoke and Jamie Bynoe-Gittens of England celebrate with the European Under-19 Championship trophy (Photo: Christian Hofer – The FA/The FA via Getty Images)
Iling-Junior has loved being around the first team. He thinks Dusan Vlahovic has the same aura as Didier Drogba.
“Didier had that energy,” he says. “Obviously he was a finisher. But when you go on the pitch I think energy is the most important thing in a top player. It goes through the team. You can see everyone else is going to back him up, especially leading the line. Dusan has got the lot. He speaks on the pitch. But it’s more his energy. When he’s going to press, he just naturally takes you with him.”
Training up close and personal with Di Maria has also been an education. “It’s the little things. First touches, touches around players if I’m beating my man, and then mentally they’re winners. You’ve got to have that winner’s mentality. This club is about winning. They settle for nothing less.”
At the weekend, Juventus overcame Fiorentina 1-0 at the Allianz and upon watching Adrien Rabiot’s winner, The Athletic couldn’t help but marvel at Iling-Junior’s prophecy a few days earlier. He had expressed a sense of wonder at Di Maria’s ability to pick out his team-mates. “Every ball he puts into the box, it lands on someone. I don’t know how he does it. It’s the little details of always getting the ball precisely onto someone’s head.” The assist for Rabiot’s header came from none other than El Fideo.
His skills are rubbing off on Iling-Junior.
Five minutes into his Champions League debut in Lisbon against Benfica, the forward set up a goal for Arkadiusz Milik. He then put in another cross which wrought so much havoc in the penalty area that Weston McKennie scored.
That same weekend, Iling-Junior took on his man in Lecce, offloaded the ball to Fagioli and watched him curl in the winning goal. Unfortunately for Iling-Junior he hurt his ankle at the Via del Mare and is only now back again, fresh from signing a new contract until 2025, just in time for Europe and the Europa League tie with Nantes.
Iling-Junior desperately wants another taste of Champions League football. “It made me feel like I want to be here all the time. This is where the big boys play. You can only get into the Champions League if you’re a good team, so you’re not playing against anyone that’s not good enough.”
The Next Gen kids have been a silver lining in the storm clouds that have gathered around Juventus this season. On the one hand, the situation calls for a heightened sense of responsibility. On the other, the team needs spensieratezza and sbarazzini — the carefree, happy-go-lucky, breezy, fearlessness of youth.
“I’m 100 per cent enjoying it,” Iling-Junior says. He has to pinch himself sometimes when he’s walking through Piazza San Carlo and taking his girlfriend to Leonardo Bonucci’s restaurant. Iling-Junior’s family has no background in sport. He has not followed in his father’s footsteps in the way Federico Chiesa has.
“It means I can create my own legacy,” he says. “Not many people can say they’ve come from London as a 16-year-old boy and made it to the Juventus first team. I have to take a step back every now and then and say, ‘I’ve done something good’.
“But I can’t rest on my laurels. I’ve just got to keep going. Why can’t I do more? There’s so much more to do, taking those steps to get my name into the starting line-up, playing in the Champions League consistently. You look at players I’ve played with like Jamal, Harvey Elliott. You just want to be playing with your mates at the highest level.”
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