After Losing Tevez and Pirlo, How Will Arturo Vidal's Departure Affect Juventus?

Italy’s Serie A used to be the place to be.

According to MyFootballFacts.com, the world football transfer record was broken 21 times between 1952 and 2000, and on 17 of those occasions it was an Italian team splashing the cash.

Serie A was glamorous. It was the place to truly test yourself as a footballer, and it was where all the best players wanted to go. Since 2000, though, that transfer record has been broken five times—all by Real Madrid, including on two occasions when they were taking players from Italy in Zinedine Zidane and Kaka.

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The recent movements out of Juventus haven’t quite reached record levels, but with BBC Sport reporting that Arturo Vidal has agreed to join Bayern Munich for £26 million (just over half a Raheem Sterling in terms of transfer fee), the news will leave both Juve and Serie A fans with familiar feelings of remorse as a top-class player is spirited away to another country.

Vidal will have his reasons for moving to Munich—playing under Pep Guardiola, a better chance of winning the Champions League and a return to Germany where he played for Bayer Leverkusen for four years will be among them—but it won’t stop Juve supporters from feeling that their team is being ripped apart.

Granted, the decisions of Andrea Pirlo and Carlos Tevez to turn their backs on Turin in the past couple of months were very different ones. Like other high-profile midfielders of his generation have done this summer, Pirlo wants to experience a new way of life and a new league in the USA, while Tevez just wanted to go home.

But the losses of the pair and Vidal have ripped the heart out of the Juventus side that so impressed on their way to the Champions League final last month, as well as securing the domestic double at home.

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The trio were arguably the symbols of Massimiliano Allegri’s impressive team, and while the club are making the effort to replace them—as Sami Khedira, Mario Mandzukic, Paulo Dybala and Simone Zaza all get their feet under the table—the star quality that the departed trio brought is now missing.

Turin is shrouded in a feeling of loss.

Chile’s Vidal came of age at Juventus. Having initially been seen as a full-back, his performances in midfield marked him out as a huge favourite at the imaginatively named Juventus Stadium, but as Paul Pogba is experiencing right now, there quickly became a sense that he was always destined to move on to another division.

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Manchester United were consistently linked with him in 2014, such as here in the Daily Star, while Arsenal and Real Madrid also saw their names next to his in the press, as reported in the Daily Express. You could argue whether all of those are bigger clubs than Juve, but they certainly play in more attractive divisions.

It didn’t seem to matter where the destination was going to be, everyone just seemed to know that Vidal would leave Juventus eventually. Far from being seen as the premier team in the No. 1 league across Europe, Juve are now a stepping stone for the elite on the next level above them.

That is largely to do with the strength of Serie A (although the calciopoli scandal didn’t help), but Juve’s existence on that second tier shouldn’t preclude them from dreaming big. Like Atletico Madrid, they are recent league champions and battled their way to a Champions League final.

But while the new additions are likely to mean that Juve will again be strong enough to dominate in a comparatively weak Serie A, they might find that rediscovering their Champions League form is more difficult. Pirlo brought them poise in that competition, Tevez was the turbo-charged front-runner and Vidal was vital in midfield.

The new signings are all good players—particularly Khedira—but that sense of sadness that pervades over the club might end up affecting their performances.

They’ll know that Serie A isn’t the place to be any more, and that they are only there because others don’t want to be.