Weston McKennie is in Year 5 at Juventus and, fueled by “haters,” after being told to leave, he is thriving yet again. He is comfortable in Italy, “just chillin’, playing soccer, living life,” as he said after a recent training session. In some ways, as Juve’s second-longest-tenured non-goalkeeper, the 26-year-old American has become a fixture at Serie A’s winningest club.
So, I asked him: Do you feel like a veteran?
“Um. Ehhh,” McKennie began. “I don’t know.” Then he laughed. “Obviously,” he said with a cheeky smile, “you don’t feel like a veteran after every summer, coming back and having to prove yourself again.”
McKennie has been proving himself, or at least trying, ever since he arrived in Turin one day before his 22nd birthday. He remembers the critics; “they told me that Juve was too big for me, and that I would never play,” he recently said. In reality, the club wasn’t too big; he did play; but then he went to England on loan for five months, and when he returned to Italy in 2023, he didn’t have a locker. He’d lost his jersey number and his parking space. He was forced to change in a separate locker room alongside academy kids — and nearly forced to find a new club.
He responded with the best season of his career. Juventus responded by exiling him again. This past summer, “I was still able to use the locker room, and had a parking spot,” McKennie says with a chuckle. But he was training late in the afternoon, separately from most of the squad, with several other players whom Juve was trying to offload.
“It was difficult,” McKennie says, now in an earnest tone. “Very difficult, to be fair.”
“But,” he quickly adds, “nothing that I haven’t faced before.”
So, as transfer rumors swirled, the fun-loving Texan put his proverbial head down and worked. He earned a place in new coach Thiago Motta’s plans. He broke into the starting lineup. Ever since scoring on his very first start, against PSV in the Champions League, he’s rarely left.
And he rarely leaves because Motta, mere months after discarding him, now trusts McKennie to play almost anywhere. He has been a right back, wing back and left back. In midfield, he has been a roaming attacker, reliable defender and both simultaneously. “Weston can do everything,” Motta raved after a Champions League win over Manchester City in December. “It’s a fortune to have players of this quality.”
For a self-described “midfielder at heart,” of course, it’s also “a double-edged sword,” McKennie explains. “Obviously I would love to be able to [play every week] in midfield.” But playing elsewhere beats not playing at all.
So, he has grown to embrace, or at least accept, the utility role. “It’s more so that I have to embrace it,” he says. He doesn’t necessarily want to, but he also knows that what his friends jokingly tell him is true: “Dude, you’re only doing it to yourself — because you’re playing in all these positions, and you’re performing.”
How McKennie won back Juventus and his coach
The alternative, in the summer of 2023 or 2024, would have been for McKennie to accept that he’d become a casualty of soccer’s cutthroat business. He spoke with Motta shortly after the Brazilian-born Italian coach took the Juve job in June; McKennie was under contract through 2025, but “I was told that I was not part of the project, and was told that I would be training by myself if I decided to stay,” he says.
“Obviously,” McKennie recalls, “I was a bit upset, because it’s never good hearing that you’re not wanted.” In retrospect, he wonders how much the physical distance between player and coach colored their interactions. They spoke by phone, not face to face, because McKennie was with the U.S. men’s national team at Copa América. “I think he might’ve got the wrong impression of me over the phone,” McKennie says. And perhaps that impression was impacted by what McKennie calls his “past hiccups,” “past stories” that once spread uncontrollably across the internet — and suggested immaturity.
“Not knowing someone, and then just reading all of that, or going off of ear-to-mouth-to-ear, you would also probably think to yourself, like, ‘Oh, I’m not sure about this guy,’” McKennie admits.
“But obviously I’ve grown, and I’ve matured,” he continues. He explained that to Motta. And more importantly, he showed it.
He showed it day after day, even after Motta said publicly that he and a handful of other Juve players “have to find a new solution and new club as soon as possible.” He’d train with the outcasts — Wojciech Szczęsny, Federico Chiesa, Arthur Melo and others. They were left out of squads for preseason friendlies. Most ultimately left the club, either on loan or permanently.
But McKennie kept plugging away. A few days before the Serie A opener, Motta brought him back to the first team — and told the media that McKennie was “a useful and functional player.”
“I think when [Motta] saw me in person, and my personality, and my work ethic, and how I am, I think he actually understood who I was as a player and as a person,” McKennie says.
A week later, he signed a contract extension through 2026.
He also had to re-win over Juve supporters who’d soured on him. That, too, “hurt a little bit,” McKennie says. “I was thinking to myself, ‘I’ve been here for so long, I’ve given you guys my blood, my sweat, my tears, and I’ve performed for you guys.’”
He knew, though, that the only remedy was to keep giving. In his fourth start, in the 82nd minute of a frantic Champions League clash in Germany, with Juventus down to 10 men, he chased down a Leipzig counterattack, busted it with a lunging tackle, and sparked the sequence that led to Juve’s winner.
“That play says everything you need to know about Weston,” Motta said days later. “It’s worth more than the goal. … I’m so happy to have Weston in the squad, he’s helping us a lot.”
McKennie on the grind, versatility and the choices ahead
Injury and fatigue briefly interrupted McKennie’s run in the Juve lineup. But with teammates struggling as well, Mr. “Do Everything” found his way back in. Since scoring off the bench against Man City, he started eight consecutive games in a span of 36 days. Then, on Day 39, this past Tuesday, he and Juve traveled to Belgium, where they clinched their place in the Champions League knockout rounds. On Saturday, they’ll visit Serie A leaders Napoli.
Their schedule, McKennie says, “in general,” is “a bit much.” The grind can be “overwhelming.” Even for a bubbly, “jolly,” energetic player in the prime of his career, “it’s not a fun time not having any time off during the winter.”
He acknowledges, of course, that he’s getting paid (well) to endure it, but he sometimes has to explain to people back home in the States: “It’s not like other sports, basketball or American football, where you get three months [off]. … We get 20 days’ break in the summer, but 10 of those days, you’re training by yourself to get fit to come back in the preseason. So you don’t really get a lot of free time.”
It has been like this, he notes, ever since the 2022 World Cup. And it will be like this for the foreseeable future. After battling in the Champions League, Coppa Italia and Serie A over the next four months, Juventus will travel to the U.S. for the Club World Cup. That novel tournament, slated for June 14-July 13, will overlap with the CONCACAF Gold Cup (June 14-July 6), the USMNT’s last competition before the 2026 World Cup.
For most of McKennie’s U.S. teammates, that Gold Cup will be both an opportunity and measuring stick. Mauricio Pochettino, the national team coach, will call upon his A-team, which will gather, train and play together for more than a month.
But there is an exception. Club World Cup rules state that, for participating teams, “it is not mandatory” to release players to their national teams; instead, “each participating club automatically undertakes to … field their strongest team throughout the competition.”
So, for McKennie and teammate Tim Weah, there is a conflict. When asked if he, Juve and U.S. Soccer had decided which tournament he’ll play, McKennie said he’ll likely go with Juventus: “The players that aren’t in the Club World Cup will probably play in Gold Cup, and the players that are in the Club World Cup will obviously, I think, play the Club World Cup. That would be my assumption.”
He clarified, though, that he isn’t sure — just as he wasn’t sure what position he’ll be playing Saturday at Napoli. (He usually finds out the day before a game.)
“I’m kinda just the guy that gets told where I need to be,” he says with a laugh. “And I’m there.
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