In a 1996 episode of Only Fools and Horses titled ‘Heroes and Villains’, Colin “Trigger” Ball claims to have owned the same sweepers broom for 20 years, despite it having ’17 new heads and 14 new handles’ in a modernisation of the ‘Ship of Theseus’ Paradox. Can an object that has had all of its components replaced be considered the same object? The objects in this case being a ship or a broom. But can this same principle be applied to a football squad?

The example I would like to use as the ‘Squad of Theseus’ is the Turin based outfit Juventus. Known colloquially as the bianconeri (a portmanteau of the Italian words for white and black) the subject matter regarding their changing squad is very far from bianconeri.

In 2015, Juventus faced Barcelona in the Champions League Final with a squad that managed to win Serie A by a clear 17 points and a goal difference of 48, over double what the second place Roma (23) reached. To say that this was resounding is an understatement, but it has grown to become expected every year. The season prior to this Juventus reached an astonishing 102 points, once again beating the second placed Roma by 17. Their most recent scudetto victory caps off a seventh title in a row. Looking from the outside, it would be easy to assume that this success and consistency is due to adapting the team where necessary and holding on to the main players that made the biggest impact. After all, this is what many top European clubs do year in and year out. Barcelona were dominant and terrifying but lacked an out and out striker. The addition of Luis Suarez for £70 million from Liverpool now seems like a bargain. Real Madrid had a good but ageing midfield; the additions of Casemiro, Matteo Kovačić and Isco have helped nip this problem in the bud before it became too late and a complete overhaul was necessary. They have now won back to back Champions League finals – a first for any team in the modern era.

This, however, is not what Juventus have been doing.

The 2015 Champions League final saw Juventus field a team with an average age of 30.4. A defensively focused 4-3-1-2, the only noticeable absence was that of Giorgio Chiellini who had to sit the fixture out with a muscle tear.

Of this starting 11, two players joined the team at the start of the season. Upon their arrival, Alvaro Morata and Patrice Evra were on opposite ends of the age spectrum. Morata was on the fringes of Real Madrid’s first team but with Karim Benzema being the first choice striker at the Bernabéu, he made the cost efficient move to Turin and became a reliable fixture for the Old Lady. He joined in his early twenties and made a good enough impression to warrant Madrid triggering their buy-back clause. At 24, he is yet to reach his peak, with a big money move to either Manchester United or Chelsea looking more and more likely. Patrice Evra, on the other hand, had his best years with United but joined Juventus at aged 33. Despite his age, and despite playing in a physically demanding position, he played over twenty Serie A games as well as all but three Champions League fixtures for the full 90 minutes. Picking up an ageing Evra for £1 million and him becoming a regular starter for a team chasing European silverware is a bold risk, but one that almost paid off perfectly. In his and Morata’s first season (2014/15), Juventus won Serie A, Coppa Italia and reached the final of the Champions League. Only spending a combined price of £20 million in exchange for a chance to win the Champions League? That sounds alright.

The problem, though, is that that isn’t really the case. Let’s compare their team with their opponents.

Barcelona’s 2014/15 window was far more expensive than most. Their starting eleven in that final:

Barcelona’s quintessential 4-3-3. Xavi Hernandez was 35 at the time this match was played and had, for most of the season, played second fiddle to the newly arrived Ivan Rakitić. Xavi had played for Barcelona regularly since 1998, where he often played just behind Barcelona’s manager of the 2014/15 season Luis Enrique. Xavi’s age was quickly catching up with him and Barcelona had the treacherous task of finding a suitable replacement. Having sold Thiago Alcántara to Bayern Munich in the season prior, there was no natural successor to his short passing throne. In comes a player who had managed to make himself known to the Blaugrana in the season prior by notching up a goal and an assist for Sevilla in a 3-2 loss. What Rakitić added to Barcelona was not simply pinpoint accuracy with passing or another trait of a typical deep-lying playmaker, as with Xavi leaving, so to was that role in the Barcelona squad. Instead, the Croatian international brought just about everything else. A box-to-box midfielder whose strength, determination and tireless attitude to winning football matches helped Barcelona’s already strong defence and already obscene attack. With Rakitić, Barcelona essentially bought three or four players for a borderline criminal price of £15 million: a tough-tackling, box-to-box playmaker with an eye for goal.

The other recent additions to the Barcelona squad were Luis Suarez and Marc Andre ter Stegen. Ter Stegen did not play a single league game for Barcelona in that season. In a tactical decision that became vogue across many European clubs, ter Stegen was Barcelona’s designated “Cup Keeper”, with Claudio Bravo taking the games of La Liga. Ter Stegen’s arrival from Borussia Mönchengladbach was, like Rakitić, dirt cheap for what they got. £10 million for a young, but proven keeper who could be set to start for the club for at least a decade is a fantastic deal. As well as the longevity that ter Stegen could promise, he was also a significant upgrade to Victor Valdes, a reliable if accident prone keeper that one could not help but believe was only the Barcelona keeper for so long because he was a local. The other new addition to Barcelona’s starting eleven for this final was not quite as cheap as ter Stegen or Rakitić. In fact he cost over double both of their fees combined. At £70 million, Luis Suarez became the final piece of a puzzle that is frustratingly, indescribably and offensively talented. When the attacking trio of Lionel Messi, Luis Suarez and Neymar, commonly known as “MSN”, played against my team, Bayern Munich, I remember sitting in my chair and shaking my head, muttering the same thing over and over again, ‘this just isn’t fair.’

Suarez hit 16 goals and 17 assists to help Barca win La Liga that season. On top of that: the Copa Del Ray and the Champions League final all yielded silverware in his first season. For someone who was suspended for the first three months of the campaign, 25 goals and 26 assists in all competitions is a very solid return. Just under £100 million for a treble? That sounds more than alright.

Let us examine each starting line-up and look at how much each squad cost to put together:

You can see from Figures C and D that the Juventus squad cost less than half that of the Barcelona squad to put together. Maybe even more scary is that a combination of only Neymar and Dani Alves costs as much as their opponents. But this is not about how much money you spend. It is easy to scream from the rooftops about how you need to spend big to win big, however, looking at the big picture, that statement is very far from accurate.

There are outliers in each squad in terms of longevity: Gianluigi Buffon of Juventus who arrived from Parma in 2001 and Andrés Iniesta and Lionel Messi from Barcelona, who arrived in the team after plying their trade in La Masia, Barcelona’s development centre.

For Juventus, their only other long-serving player from their 2015 line up was Claudio Marchisio, their answer to Iniesta. At seven years old, Marchisio joined the Italian’s youth system and has stayed there his entire career – save for one season on loan at Empoli. His professional debut came in 2006 in the Coppa Italia, on a day where Buffon kept goal and was supported by a centre back partnership of Alessandro Birindelli and the current Juventus vice-captain Giorgio Chiellini.

To understand more clearly the concept of legacy in each squad, this bar chart displays the amount of arrivals, per season, of players who featured in the 2015 Champions League final:

The stretch between 2008 and 2011 is where the majority of players for both teams arrived, with each team welcoming in nine players: five for Barcelona and four for Juventus. If you can draw any conclusion from this, it is that Barcelona had a longer time with a main core of players than Juventus did. Four players for Barcelona had been familiar with the Catalan philosophy for at least six years before the final; Andrés Iniesta, Lionel Messi, Sergio Busquets and Gerard Pique.

The components of Barcelona’s MSN strike force who transferred into the team (the “S” and “N”) arrived in quick succession and with individual price tags not too far off the entire total of Juventus’s whole eleven. While he is a Barca-boy, born and bred, one can only imagine the price tag that Lionel Messi would go for in today’s market. The fact that he is the Barca-boy is a stroke of luck that simply cannot be quantified by price.

If looking at the transfer fees tells us one thing, it’s that there is more money in Spanish football than in Italian football (the highest paid footballer in the Italian Serie A is Gonzalo Higuaín who earns €7.7 million a year1, approximately €150,000 a week, with both Barcelona and Real Madrid have at least four players in their squads earning more than that). But looking at the players that are no longer with their clubs, it shows that Barcelona spends big on players that they keep for as long as they need. Their transfers can almost be described as fearless. The Catalan giants have the ability to hold on to players knowing full well that no one will dare try and take them away, only selling players that they deem unfit for further seasons. There are exceptions to this of course, no club is infallible – Thiago Alcántara’s transfer to Bayern Munich proves this. However, it is otherwise true. Pedro Rodríguez had been a part of the Barcelona system since 2004, but with the arrival of Neymar and the return of Messi to the right wing, Pedro did not have a place in the starting line up. A player of his calibre needs regular, guaranteed minutes. Within seconds of coming on as a substitute in the 2015 Champions League final, he registered an assist for Neymar in a goal that made their victory all the more definite. Elsewhere, in the 2015 UEFA Super Cup, he scored the winning goal in a 5-4 victory against Sevilla. This was not enough for Luis Enrique and Barcelona President Josep Bartomeu. As such, he was a Chelsea player nine days after the Super Cup victory.

In Turin, it is a different state of affairs. In Figure C, every player beneath Stephen Lichtsteiner has left the club for a variety of reasons. Andrea Pirlo, Patrice Evra and Carlos Tevez left due to age catching up with them, Paul Pogba returned to his boyhood club of Manchester Untied, Alvaro Morata’s buy-back clause was activated by Real Madrid and he returned there. As for Arturo Vidal, during the Copa America of 2015, the Chilean international suffered injuries while driving under the influence of alcohol. This bad reputation caused his market value to drop significantly and Bayern Munich were able to capitalise on this by bringing him in as replacement for their own home-grown box-to-box midfielder Bastian Schweinsteiger. Often considered one of the best midfielders around, Bayern were able to procure the services of Vidal for just under £37 million, a price-tag that could easily be seen as a steal. But the only Juventus players that remain from 2015 are their central defenders; the all-Italian, all-bianconeri, all-over-30-years-old defence.

The 2015 Champions League final was missing Giorgio Chiellini. After his £6 million transfer from Fiorentina, Chiellini has shown domestic, European and world football that he is one of the best centre backs around, and has remained a consistently solid defender for Juventus since he arrived in 2005.

For many years, the Italian national team and Juventus defence have been identical. Often referred to as BBC, the trio of Bonucci, Barzagli and Chiellini epitomise the traditionally Italian 3-at-the-back. But herein lies a problem bigger than a few players around them leaving every year. Buffon, despite the persistent rumours of his immortality, has recently hinted at his impending retirement. His longevity has been coupled very nicely with a level of consistency that can only be described as other-worldly. Perhaps benefitted by playing in the least physically demanding position on the pitch, Buffon has still remained in contention as one of the best goalkeepers for as long as anyone can remember. He isn’t “very good for a goalkeeper”, he is just very good.

The average age of retirement for a football player is around 35. The average age of BBC is 32.6. When you add the 39 year old Gianluigi Buffon to the mix, that average age becomes 34.5. While the average age of retirement is not something that is set in stone, nor is the concept that Juventus’s backline is only half a year away from not existing, there is a huge elephant in the room in that age and tradition could potentially be the downfall of a club that not only has tradition running through its veins but also calls itself ‘The Old Lady’. This famous four of Juventus and Italy begs the question: can a football squad that has had all of its players replaced so quickly still be considered the same squad?

There is no point in talking about teams who have players that leave after a couple of years and claiming it is a really specific problem for one team. It happens everywhere. Monaco, Sevilla and Benfica all have players who leave for huge price tags later on. But to see it as such a prevalent issue at a club of Juventus’s calibre is confusing to say the least.

If we were to compare the 2015 Champions League final to the 2017 Quarter Final matches between the same teams, this concept of longevity and legacy becomes more apparent. For clarity, I have removed the shirt numbers of the players that did not feature in the 2015 Final.

In terms of numbers, Juventus have only kept one player more than how many Barcelona have added. Buffon, Bonucci and Chiellini remain the core of Juventus with everyone changing around them.

Sami Khedira, Paulo Dybala, Mario Mandžukić and Alex Sandro all joined after the Champions League defeat in 2015. Juan Cuadrado joined on loan from Chelsea once in 2015, a second time in 2016 and eventually signed a permanent contract in May of 2017. And at either end of the pitch Juventus fielded two players that have often been considered amongst the best in their field; Gonzalo Higuaín joining from domestic rivals Napoli and Dani Alves, joining from Barcelona of all places.

A total of eight new players in the span of two years. It is worth noting that Claudio Marchisio is still with the Juventus squad and was fit to play in both quarter-final legs against the Blaugrana. Max Allegri, by this point, had apparently found his favoured line up – a continental favourite of 4-2-3-1. Marchisio would presumably feature alongside Sami Khedira in the more defensively focused midfield area, as the 10 position was taken by Paolo Dybala, who was playing more as a secondary striker behind Higuaín. To say that Marchisio is being phased out of this Juventus outfit may not be the case. But the fact that your second longest serving player, who is only just on the other side of the team’s average age (the average for the Juventus 30.2 years whereas Marchisio turned 31 in January of 2017), is not in your starting line up against the favourites to win the competition is questionable. For the first leg, Marchisio was an unused substitute. For the return, he did not even make the bench.

In stark contrast; Barcelona brought in two new players; one if you consider that Sergi Roberto is a product of La Masia. Roberto has been seen as a successor of Dani Alves’s right back position. So far it has not been as prosperous as Barcelona would have hoped for. Alves is a player who has lived his career on his own terms, leaving Barcelona for free at the end of the 2015/16 season. As Juventus were able to get past Barcelona in these fixtures without conceding, one has to wonder whether allowing the Brazilian full-back to see out his contract was a bad decision. Samuel Umtiti, the only new new player, arrived from Olympique Lyon for £21.25 million during the 2016 Summer transfer window.

Many players for Barcelona such as, Sergio Busquets, Gerard Pique as well as Sergi Roberto were promoted from La Masia on the orders of Pep Guardiola. The current Manchester City manager’s adamance on utilising the tools he had been developing at Barcelona B can be seen as the blueprint to how Barcelona have performed over the past few seasons. Promoting youth that could hold their own rather than buying the supposed “right” players for a short period of time before they go elsewhere. The benefit of having the players stay with the club for a long time is that they form a connection. Lionel Messi, Andrés Iniesta, Xavi, Carles Puyol, Victor Valdes; they were all crucial in Barcelona’s dominance of the mid to late 2000s and they all came from La Masia and stayed with the club for the majority of their career. One only has to look at Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s season at the Camp Nou to see that buying the big name players does not necessarily work out how you would expect. If you start developing from early on, it negates any real need to spend big. With that in mind, Barcelona have spend almost £150 million on finding the right team mates to get the very best out of the talisman Lionel Messi. But what has come to Barca since Suarez and Neymar’s arrival is virtually priceless.

Compared to Figure E, Figure G shows that the differences between clubs is almost astronomical. In two years, Juventus bought in as many players as Barcelona did in close to ten. Although the amount of players ‘bought in’ can mean a number of things. If we are going just on starting eleven versus starting eleven, we can use this word:

“replace”

Claudio Marchisio is a versatile and talented midfielder who has been part of the bianconeri since 1993 (a year on loan at Empoli disrupts this otherwise very impressive run). He has won the Serie A title six times, the Coppa Italia three times and stayed with the club after the Calciopoli scandal. No one deserves anything in football but when you give your entire life to a club through its ups and downs, it isn’t unreasonable to want something in return. But the simple fact is that Claudio Marchisio is being replaced by either Sami Khedira and/or Miralem Pjanic. Injuries are always going to be a problem for any player performing at a high standard for their entire career. However, even when fit, Marchisio does not look like he is a first choice midfielder at a club he has been with since he was 7. The only player to have come through Juventus’s primavera system and break into the senior squad, Marchisio is not just a Juventus player, he is one of five players that is Juventus and has been for quite a while now.

Andrea Barzagli. Leonardo Bonucci. Gianluigi Buffon. Giorgio Chiellini. Claudio Marchisio.

Average tenure at Juventus: 10.8 years

Average age: 33.6

The Italian league has a magical aura to it that somehow manages to extend a players career for much longer than that of your average footballer; Francesco Totti, Antonio di Natale and Buffon being the prime examples of this. But what is happening at Juventus right now is something that the mystical powers of Serie A can only postpone for so long.

I mentioned earlier that just because the average age of retirement is 35, that does not necessarily mean that the Juventus defence is only a year or so away from no longer existing. This, however, does not mean that BBC will last forever. It is a very real problem that Juventus are facing but it is a problem that is bigger than just the defence. Juventus are, if the average is to be taken, just over two or three seasons away from have a squad so massively different to that of only a few years prior that it is almost unrecognisable. This team that embodies Italian football, that formed the defence of the Italian national team is quickly becoming a team of some other players.

There is an epidemic across Europe right now with youth centres being revamped in order to produce the next big thing. After a financial takeover from Russian investors in late 2011 AS Monaco did not reach the dizzying heights that their new owner would have initially hoped for. What this resulted in was Monaco focussing on youth development and bringing in younger French players. In 2016/17, Monaco won Ligue 1, despite having been bottom of Ligue 2 when the takeover was completed. Barcelona’s La Masia got it right/lucky with Messi, Xavi, Iniesta, Busquets et al. Elsewhere in Spain, Atletico Madrid have cultivated a sense of religion with several of their players. Koke and Saul Ñiguez have already pledged their careers to the red and blue Madrid club, with Ñiguez having recently signed a nine year contract. Real Madrid have moved away from galáctico signings (for the most part) and have started to integrate more and more younger players into their teams. Marco Asensio, for example, is 21 years old yet already has goals against Bayern Munich and Juventus in the Champions League. If he keeps progressing at the rate he is at, Real Madrid will not have to worry about what happens once Cristiano Ronaldo leaves.

But where does this leave Juventus? This Squad of Theseus has an ageing squad, and once the central defender team is broken up, they will have to face the same issue elsewhere on the field.

It is in the face of these constant changes that the concept of supporting a team becomes more abstract than simply cheering on the players. The supporters cheer the shirt that only a select few players will the kiss the badge of. And that is ultimately what supporting a team is. Supporting a team is less about the people and more about the badge. Which is fine… unless you support Juventus, of course.