Weston McKennie, Mr. ‘Do Everything, is back from Juventus brink and starring once again.

Weston McKennie is in Year 5 at Juventus, and despite being advised to leave by “haters,” he is prospering once more. He feels at ease in Italy, “just chillin’, playing soccer, living life,” as he stated during a recent training session. In some respects, as Juve’s second-longest-tenured non-goalkeeper, the 26-year-old American has become a fixture at Serie A’s most successful team.

I questioned him, “Do you feel like a veteran?”

“Um. “Ehhh,” McKennie said. “I don’t know.” Then he laughed. “Obviously,” he remarked with a mischievous 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 attempting, since he arrived in Turin one day before his 22nd birthday. “They told me that Juve was too big for me, and that I would never play,” he recently claimed. In truth, the club was not particularly large; he played; nevertheless, he moved on loan to England for five months, and when he returned to Italy in 2023, he did not have a locker. He’d misplaced his jersey number and parking space. He was compelled to change in a different locker area with academy players and was almost forced to find a new club.

He replied with the most successful season of his career. Juventus replied by exiling him again. “I was still able to use the locker room, and I had a parking spot,” McKennie adds with a grin. But he was exercising late in the afternoon, apart from the rest of the group, with many other players whom Juve was looking to unload.

“It was difficult,” McKennie recalls in a serious tone. “Very difficult, to be fair.”

So, while transfer speculations circulated, the fun-loving Texan got his head down and toiled. He has earned a spot in new coach Thiago Motta’s plans. He broke into the starting lineup. Since scoring in his debut Champions League start against PSV, he has seldom left the pitch.

And he seldom departs because Motta, only months after abandoning McKennie, now trusts him to play practically anyplace. He has played as a left back, wing back, and right back. In midfield, he has been a roving attacker as well as a dependable defender. “Weston can do everything,” Motta praised after a Champions League triumph against Manchester City in December. “It’s a fortune to have players of this quality.”

Of course, for a self-described “midfielder at heart,” it’s “a double-edged sword,” McKennie adds. “Obviously I would love to be able to [play every week] in midfield.” However, playing somewhere else is preferable to playing nowhere.

So he’s come to embrace, or at least tolerate, the utility job. “It’s more so that I have to embrace it,” according to him. He may not want to, but he understands his friends’ remark: “Dude, you’re only doing it to yourself — because you’re playing in all these positions, and you’re performing.”

How McKennie reclaimed Juventus and his coach

The alternative, in the summer of 2023 or 2024, would have been for McKennie to accept his fate as a casualty of soccer’s brutal industry. He talked with Motta shortly after the Brazilian-born Italian coach took over at Juve in June; McKennie was under contract until 2025, but “I was told that I was not part of the project, and that I would be training by myself if I decided to stay,” he recalls.

“Obviously,” McKennie says. “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 the athlete and coach influenced their interactions. McKennie was with the US men’s national team at the Copa América, so they chatted over the phone rather than in person. “I think he might’ve got the wrong impression of me over the phone,” she adds. McKennie’s “past hiccups,” or uncontrollable internet tales, may have contributed to his perception of 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,'” he says.

“But obviously, I’ve grown and matured,” he says. He told this to Motta. And more importantly, he demonstrated it.

He demonstrated it day after day, even after Motta stated publicly that he and a few other Juventus players “have to find a new solution and a new club as soon as possible.” He would practice alongside outcasts like Wojciech Szczęsny, Federico Chiesa, Arthur Melo, and others. They were left out of the preseason friendly.Most eventually departed the club, whether on loan or permanently.

McKennie persevered, however. Motta welcomed McKennie back to the first squad just a few days before the Serie A start, telling the media that he 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 tells me.

A week later, he signed a contract extension until 2026.

He also had to win back Juve fans who had turned on him. That, too, “hurt a little bit,” McKennie adds. “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 realized, however, that the only solution was to continue donating. In his fourth start, in the 82nd minute of a furious Champions League encounter in Germany, with Juventus down to 10 men, he chased down a Leipzig counterattack, smashed it with a lunging challenge, and initiated the sequence that ultimately to Juve’s triumph.

“That play says everything you need to know about Weston,” Motta explained days later. “It is worth more than the goal.” I’m thrilled to have Weston on the team; he’s been a huge assistance to us.”

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