Only Two Serie A Names on the Ballon d'Or Shortlist: Alajbegović and Juventus's Fracture

The night the Ballon d'Or shortlist was released, I sat in front of my screen in São Paulo with a blank sheet of paper. I crossed out every player currently in Serie A, one by one. In thirty-five years of watching football, I have learned an odd habit: I trust the blank space a list leaves behind more than the list itself. I crossed. Lautaro Martínez survived. Kerim Alajbegović survived. The rest was white space.

A league that once produced Paolo Maldini, Alessandro Del Piero, Francesco Totti and Andrea Pirlo now contributes just two names to the most prestigious award list on the planet. And of those two, only one wears Juventus colours — the club that was once the emblem of Italian dominance. Kerim Alajbegović, a Bosnian kid nobody yet dares to call a star, is the sole hope of a sleeping empire.

Serie A is no longer a destination for record-breaking transfers. After the post-Cristiano Ronaldo era, Juventus entered a rebuild with a budget squeezed by UEFA's financial fair play rules. Blockbuster signings vanished. Established stars chose the Premier League, La Liga or the Saudi Pro League. What remains is the academy — and that academy, for years, has not produced enough talent to fill the void.

People laughed at me for asking Mbappé about emotion; then an entire France cried with happiness. I bring it up to say that football reaches beyond dry numbers. A Ballon d'Or nomination for a young player carries a whole story of belief, expectation and pressure pressing on shoulders not yet twenty.

Alajbegović rose at the World Cup in a Bosnia shirt. Those performances, in the words of the original report, would make Juventus back him without hesitation. Here is the crux: not a single concrete statistic was provided. No xG. No passing numbers. No successful dribbles. Only a nomination, and a belief.

A nomination is not a contract; it is a promise without a signature. And Juventus, in its current state, is living on promises.

In 2026, I learned to listen to football with my heart when the stadiums had no human sound. That lesson taught me to always check both the executive and the coaching floor. At Juventus, those two floors are speaking in different voices.

Sporting director Frederic Massara is described as someone who is not unconvinced about Alajbegović. That is a positive signal at executive level. The coaching floor is a different story. Luciano Spalletti is portrayed as someone who still needs convincing. The gap between the two floors is not trivial. It shows that the board believes in the future while the bench needs immediate results. For a young player, those two forces usually collide.

Based on my experience tracking Serie A matches this season, I recognise a familiar pattern. Italy's big clubs talk about giving youth a chance in press conferences, then field a line-up of established names out of fear of dropping points. The youngster sits on the bench, plays a few final minutes, and slowly loses momentum. It is the cycle Atalanta and Roma have broken; Juventus has not.

Alajbegović falls outside the usual academy prospect mould. He is the only Juventus player recognised internationally at individual level. That says two things at once: he has genuine quality, and Juventus is severely short on other players of stature.

When a club that once owned Zinedine Zidane, Pavel Nedvěd and Gianluigi Buffon has only one name on the shortlist, the problem lies in the system that produced him, not in him.

Inter is the clearest counter-example. Lautaro Martínez is not an academy product. He arrived from Racing Club for a significant fee and is now the backbone of a title-winning side. That is Inter's path: buy established stars, build around them. Juventus, in its rebuild, cannot afford stars, so it must lean on the academy. Yet that academy has not delivered enough for years.

My central argument is this: Juventus's problem is not that Alajbegović has been underused; it is that he is the only case worth discussing.

A big club needs a continuous flow of talent, not a single lonely star. Barcelona has La Masia. Real Madrid has Fabrica. Bayern Munich has a scouting network across Europe. Where has Juventus's system been in recent years? The young names who came out of Turin and stayed in the first team can be counted on one hand.

More worrying is the signal from the shortlist. Two Serie A players appear across all award categories. That number does not reflect the strength of a league once called the world's tactical school. It reflects the shrinking of its star layer, and Juventus sits at the very centre of that shrinkage.

I could be wrong, and I should say so clearly before going too far.

There is another way to read this story. A Ballon d'Or nomination for a young player is, to some degree, a media product. The list is built on form, but also on visibility, narrative and market. A young player from Bosnia, playing for Juventus, shining at the World Cup — that is a perfect story to tell. The nomination may not fully reflect his true standing against other talents across Europe.

Second, I have not watched enough footage of Alajbegović to assess his specific skills. I do not know his position, his strengths or his weaknesses. No xG, no passing data, no heat map. An honest analysis must admit the limits of its own data.

Third, pushing a young player into a leading role too early can backfire. I have seen too many young talents crushed by expectation. Bojan Krkić at Barcelona. Renato Sanches at Bayern. Names once celebrated, then faded. The pressure of a nomination can be a gift, or a burden.

If Juventus does not give Alajbegović enough minutes, he may lose momentum. If he plays fewer than five hundred minutes this season, his development will stall, and the nomination will become a mere footnote in the club's history.

My prediction, verifiable: if by the winter transfer window Alajbegović has not started at least four Serie A matches, he will consider leaving — on loan or permanently. And if Juventus does not produce at least one more young talent breaking into the first team within two seasons, the blank space on the golden list will only grow wider.

A woman said a small thing; people mocked her. Five years later, they repeated it. I just hope Juventus remembers this before it is too late.