Player Focus: Assessing Juve’s Paolo De Ceglie

Aside from among the Serie A aficionados, the name of Juventus left-back Paolo De Ceglie is unlikely to be a familiar one to many football fans. Yet the announcement, made via the Turin club’s official website recently (March 21), that the 25 year old had signed a new contract raised an almost unanimous chorus of approval among the supporters of Italian football’s Old Lady.

There is of course the usual clique of dissenting voices, as there are with almost every player at every club but, thanks to his form over the past eighteen months, De Ceglie enjoys an extremely high level of popularity among those who follow the Bianconeri. A quiet and unassuming player, his Twitter feed is a study in the banal – with a sprinkling of geekiness thrown in – as he tells his followers where he’s going for pizza or who he’s beating on his latest Pro-Evo marathon.

On the field however, we are now looking at a full-back who is almost unrecognisable from the kid handed his professional debut back in 2006 by Juve’s then-coach Didier Deschamps. Coming on that day as a 55th minute substitute, he was thrown into one of Calcio’s most hostile atmospheres; the intimidating and vociferous Stadio San Paolo in Naples. Helping his side to a 1-1 draw, he would make six more appearances that season – which was of course spent in Serie B – and would net his first goal for the club a few weeks later in a 4-1 demolition of Lecce.

Often employed on the left of midfield, his pace, acceleration and impressive crossing all seemed to mark him out as, if anything, an eventual successor to the brilliant Pavel Nedved in that same wide berth. He may have inherited the number eleven worn with such distinction by the iconic Czech, but today’s De Ceglie is clearly happiest at left-back, a position he has fought off some heavyweight competition – not to mention some wholly unnecessary snubs and a series of terrible injuries – in order to make his own.

The following summer, for arguably the only time in his career (at least prior to the arrival of Andrea Agnelli and Beppe Marotta), the club would make a decision which was the best course of action for both them and indeed De Ceglie when it was agreed he would spend the season on loan at Siena. By then aged just 21, he would make 25 starts – with a further five appearances as a substitute – for a Tuscan side who would comfortably avoid relegation, his two goals and two assists helping Robur to a richly deserved 13th place.

Since returning to Turin he found room under Claudio Ranieri, the Roman giving him eleven starts towards the end of the 2008-09 season and deeming him to have done enough to be ahead of Cristian Molinaro. It wouldn’t last and Ciro Ferrara, a coach widely expected to bring many of Juve’s successful youth sector players into the first team, used the hugely disappointing Fabio Grosso instead, a mistake Alberto Zaccheroni (who replaced Ferrara) and then Gigi Delneri would not repeat. In 57 appearances across those two disappointing seasons for the club, the player himself (despite failing to score and registering just two assists) made huge strides forward.

If De Ceglie’s recent good form can be attributed to the belief shown in him by Conte, what must also be recognised and credited is the stellar work done by his predecessor. The pragmatic Delneri took the raw flyer and, as we have seen so many times in Serie A, converted him into a genuinely reliable defender. Working him harder than any other member of the squad throughout pre-season, the coach would spend hours on the training pitch, often almost on a one-to-one basis as he drilled De Ceglie in the art of positioning, tackling and the responsibilities that go with becoming a regular starter at a club like Juve. He was much improved in the first six games of the campaign before his season was prematurely ended by a broken knee-cap, the timing of which was devastating to the player.

Of course all thoughts are on the current season and the title battle with Milan, but in the longer term, De Ceglie could be forgiven for harbouring hopes of a call up to Cesare Prandelli’s Italy squad for this summer’s European Championships in Poland and Ukraine. He would undoubtedly be competing for a place against Angelo Ogbonna (Torino) and Domenico Criscito (Zenit) as a reserve to the stand out Azzurri left-back, Palermo’s Federico Balzaretti.

So, how does the Juve man stack up? Comparing him to other Serie A left-backs, he ranks first in pass completion percentage (87.7, good enough for 13th across the league as a whole) while his 1.1 clearances per game rank behind only Manuel Pasqual of Fiorentina. Drawing a direct parallel between him and Prandelli’s preferred starter Balzaretti makes an interesting comparison, with De Ceglie trailing slightly on tackles per game (2.3 to 1.8), interceptions (2.2 to 1.5) and clearances, the Juve man has the edge in cross completion (28.1% over 23.3%) and what is a key stat for their position; he has been beaten by a dribbling opponent just eight times all season compared to Balzaretti’s 21.

He still has a long way to go before he is the finished article as a player but has perhaps the ideal coach to drive him on in search of perfection and he is certainly no longer the weak link in Juve’s backline, which has become the best in the league. Paolo De Ceglie has played a key role in that and can legitimately dream of blue shirts and trophies for the first time in his career.