New Year’s resolutions for some of Juventus most important players

Welcome to 2026, everybody. How’s it been so far? Fun? Exciting? Maybe kinda boring? All of those are acceptable answers. Considering that we just had as Juventus supporters, a little more of a low-key start to the new year is sounding pretty good right about now.

But with the new year comes new things … maybe.

For Juventus, it feels pretty simple: be who you were in the last few weeks of 2025 rather than the first few months of the year.

That is the hope, of course, as we begin the new year with Juve being in a tightly packed top five in the Serie A standings. With Luciano Spalletti now building some momentum after taking over for Igor Tudor in the final days of October, we hit January with some good vibes and some optimism about where the 66-year-old Tuscan is taking this squad after a turbulent first 10 months of 2025 that saw a pair of managerial changes.

Spalletti has brought some calm. He’s brought some steadiness. He’s also brought some really good quotes at his pre- and post-match press conferences.

So as we begin this new year, let’s do something completely appropriate for the first day of January: throw out some New Year’s resolutions for some of Juventus best and most important players.

For Gleison Bremer: just stay healthy

Seems pretty simple, doesn’t it?

In 2024, Bremer was forced to miss much of the season due to a torn ACL in his knee. Nearly 12 months later, Bremer was forced to miss over two months due to meniscus surgery in that same knee. Just when it looked like the big Brazilian center back was going to be back to his impressive best, he was forced off the field with another knee issue that clearly played a role in the trajectory of the early months of the 2025-26 season.

Bremer, thankfully, is back in the fold and is coming off an appearance in Juventus’ win over Pisa in which he played the entire 90 minutes and looked rather spry doing so. The thing is now to just keep it going.

Considering what Juve’s defense has been with and without Bremer the last 18 months, it’s pretty easy to know just what a difference arguably the best center back in Serie A makes a massive difference when he’s in the lineup. Without him, Juventus’ defense is just an ordinary kind of unit. With him, though, their floor is just so much higher than when he’s missing.

It’s just about keeping him healthy, keeping him fit during a time when the schedule is going to get busy again shortly and Spalletti figuring out a way to make sure his best defender by a wide margin can consistently be available without pushing it over the edge and risking even more extended periods out of action.

Because let’s face it, folks: If you’re an opposing attacker, is the man pictured below somebody you really want to see staring you down a few yards away?

Yeah, that’s gotta be a thing nobody wants to see shouting in their direction. Don’t let the finely-tuned line up with his hair or the good looks fool you. That is a bad man, and he wants to try and prevent you from doing anything good if you’re on the opposing team.

And when he’s healthy, that is something he does quite often, if not the vast majority of the time. Now it’s just about keeping him healthy and allowing one of the most important players at Juventus to play regularly again.

For Kenan Yildiz: just keep being you

There has been no one singular thing that has been more enjoyable over the last 12 months than to see Yildiz continue to be the shooting star that everybody thought he might truly be.

Yildiz’s 2025 looked a little bit like this:

• 18 goals
• 10 assists
• Fifth-place finish in the Kopa Trophy voting

And who’s to say that 2026 is going to be any different?

Or, maybe it’s better phrased like this: Who’s to say that 2026 isn’t go to be even better than his 2025?

Yes, Yildiz’s importance to this Juventus squad only seems to get bigger and bigger by the week these days. You need to look no further than how he closed the calendar year, making goal contribution after goal contribution during Juventus’ back-to-back-to-back wins to close out December. It may not be logical to expect him to continue on that kind of pace because your head tells you that’s just not how this game usually works, but this is a 20-year-old player who is only getting better as time goes on.

Plus, you throw Spalletti’s impact on Yildiz’s game into the mix, and you’re sitting there rubbing your hands together like Birdman because you just can’t help but think about how good this young man can be.

It truly feels like the sky is the limit for Yildiz, who won’t turn 21 until May. Where he takes his own form and this Juventus squad over the course of these next few months remain to be seen. But it sure does feel like it will be quite enjoyable watching him only continue his trajectory toward stardom as the second half of the 2025-26 season arrives.

Oh, and get the contract extension done, Juventus. I can speak for everybody here: We don’t want a January transfer window that is full of rumors about Kenan maybe or maybe not being tempted by the Premier League. Just sign him to the new deal, get it across the finish line and let him cook some more. That’s all.

For Pierre Kalulu: just get some rest

At this point last season it felt like Kalulu had played just about every possible minute there had been — and mostly out of necessity because of the depth crunch that Juve dealt with for much of early months of the 2024-25 campaign.

So far this year, that’s actually the case.

Kalulu goes into the new year having played every single second of all 24 games Juventus have played so far this season. As we know, a lot of those starts have come on very short rest with how compact the schedule can be in between each of the international breaks. But that hasn’t stopped Kalulu from being the one constant presence in a starting defense that has seen plenty of other players be in and out of the lineup due to injury.

Plus, let’s not forget, he start this season playing as a wingback before Spalletti arrived. That is a thing that actually happened, people! And for a good amount of games, too!

But now that Kalulu is back in the three-man defense that Spalletti has kept in place, he just looks to be much more comfortable and back to playing at the level that he was for much of last season when he was one of Juventus’ best players. (You know, the kind of form that made the buy option look like a mortal lock to be picked up.)

At some point — especially with a busy January ahead — you expect Kalulu to get some rest and take a game off. But until then, he’s just going to go out there and keep being as steady as can be. After him being like that for his first 18 months at Juventus, there’s no reason to think it won’t keep being the case no matter how many minutes he has logged this season.

For Khephren Thuram: rediscover the player we saw much of last season

As the number of days before the 2025-26 season began got smaller and smaller, I couldn’t help but get pretty excited about the potential of Thuram’s second year in Turin and how much better it could be compared to the first.

The reality of what has actually played out compared to my hopes haven’t matched up.

Be it physical problems or just struggling in general, Thuram’s form has not been the explosive kind of last season. While he’s on pace to play around the same amount of minutes in Serie A as he did last season, Thuram only has one goal and one assist to his name through Juventus’ first 17 league fixtures. After a debut season in Turin in which he had nine goal contributions, that is a follow-up number that is not exactly something to boast about.

We know Juventus’ midfield is far from where it’s been even at the start of the decade, but Thuram is easily the player in the group who has the highest ceiling. Now it’s about trying to get back to showing just what kind of player he was last season because that version was really, really fun to watch.

For Loïs Openda and Jonathan David: take full advantage of Dusan Vlahovic being out

We probably won’t be seeing the big Serbian striker for at least a couple more months, so that means there’s going to be plenty of chances for Juve’s two summer arrivals to get playing time. (Minus some sort of surprise January signing or the resurrection of Arek Milik now that he’s healthy again.)

It’s about what Openda and David can do with those chances.

There’s been signs of life from both in recent weeks. How much of that is connected to the fact that they know they’re not competing for minutes with Vlahovic for the next few months is unknown, but it definitely is not nothing. Openda had a very good game against Roma when Juve figured out how to use him best. David, for the struggles he still clearly shows, does have goals in Juve’s last two Champions League fixtures.

So … it’s something!

One of Spalletti’s biggest tasks since he first showed up has been to get things a little more productive in attack. While we’re probably still working to get to that point on a consistent basis, there’s still plenty of room for things to improve with both Openda and David. The tricky thing is that they simply aren’t the same kind of striker, so it’s not like you can just plug and play and keep things pretty much the same with how you play. They have different strengths, different weaknesses, and have obviously struggled to shake off their early-season struggles when Spalletti was watching from his farm in Tuscany.

But hopefully as time without Vlahovic continues to go on during his injury absence they continue to find their footing because Juve need more than just Yildiz in attack right now. (Plus, playing without Vlahovic is something we all pretty much expected to be the case this season when the summer transfer window first began, so this could very well be a glimpse into how things might look going beyond the first half of 2026.)

For Andrea Cambiaso: make 2026 more like 2024, not 2025

In my book, there may not have been one more disappointing player than Cambiaso during the 2025 calendar year. We know the trend by now: he was playing some of his best ball of his career 12 months ago, injured his ankle around the same time Manchester City were thinking of a potential deal and then never truly recovered from the injury — and probably the move to the Premier League — the rest of the season.

Those struggles carried right on over into the new season.

Cambiaso has been far from the player he was prior to the ankle injury he suffered last season. For whatever reason it may be — and you feel like there’s a multitude of things that we can read into — the player who was a driving force in Juve’s best performances under Thiago Motta is now somebody who seems a fraction of that as we hit 2026.

Spalletti is clearly somebody who rates Cambiaso. But he’s also somebody who has been very honest and said that the 25-year-old Italian fullback/wingback can certainly do more than he’s showing right now. It’s that kind of thing that gives you the hope that if a manager can help him get out of this year-long funk that he’s in, then it’s somebody like Spalletti because he is going to keep it real as real can be.

But the level in which Cambiaso spent a large portion of 2025 just isn’t going to be enough for Juventus. It doesn’t matter if it’s on the defensive end or when this very attack-minded fullback goes forward, he needs to be better and show that the 2025 version of himself was just something he can leave in the past.