By Andy Marston, Sports Pundit
Juventus has launched the Forward Innovation Squad, a major new innovation programme developed alongside CDP Venture Capital and The Players Fund, marking a significant evolution of the club’s open innovation strategy.
The newly launched Forward Innovation Squad operates through a three-tier structure, allowing startups at different stages to engage through experimentation, validation, or deeper collaboration. The programme formalises innovation as a strategic operating function, focused on experimentation, validation, and capability building.
CDP Venture Capital will relocate its Sportech and Wellness accelerator from Rome to Turin, turning Allianz Stadium into a national hub for sports startups and enterprise acceleration, embedding Juventus more deeply within Italy’s innovation infrastructure.
The Players Fund joins as a strategic partner, adding international deal flow, benchmarking expertise, and venture capability. The emphasis sits on helping Juventus become venture-ready and on building repeatable collaboration models that align with the club’s priorities.
Juventus Forward builds on a decade-long track record of experimentation, spanning creator-led digital content at scale, sustainability leadership, next-generation talent development, real-estate-led infrastructure innovation, and brand activations across Gen Z formats and emerging technologies.
Why It Matters:
Having worked on this partnership, it is important to be transparent about the lens shaping this programme.
Through its partnership with The Players Fund, Juventus has positioned venture capital as one component within a broader innovation toolkit. Investment sits alongside internal teams, pilots, partnerships, and procurement, without dominating the overall strategy.
The current focus centres on learning, validation, and readiness. Progress is measured in insight gained, pilots run, and capabilities built. Equity remains a strategic option instead of a default outcome.
The reason this is important is because innovation inside a club should, and in this case does, start with problems. This could be operational bottlenecks, under-used assets, inefficient workflows or other opportunities sitting just beyond the current business model. Venture becomes powerful when it helps surface stronger external solutions to those challenges with greater speed and context.
Rights holders are naturally inward-focused, delivering seasons, performance, and partnerships. Venture, and specifically in this case The Players Fund, expands that field of view, offering early exposure to emerging technologies, cross-sector pattern recognition, and a pipeline of founders solving real problems.
This approach recognises that no two rights holders require the same model. Maturity, ambition, internal capacity, and infrastructure all shape how innovation should function and the role venture can play.
The takeaway, in my view, is that innovation does not and should not equal investment. Used selectively and strategically, investment can accelerate innovation, however when treated as the starting point, it often constrains it. The value is in understanding how and when to use this tool, as it can be incredibly powerful in the right situations.
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