Samuel Iling-Junior: Profile, playing style, scouting report

The young English forward recently scored on his first-team debut for Juventus

Samuel Iling-Junior is an English professional footballer who plays as a winger for Serie A giants Juventus. A youngster who spent nine years with Chelsea from 2011 to 2020, Iling-Junior then made the switch to Turin and his incredible performances for the Italian side have made some of Europe’s biggest clubs stand up and take notice.

Iling-Junior made his debut for reserve team Juventus U23 in the 2021–22 season, while also reaching the UEFA Youth League semi-finals with the U19 squad, and is currently playing for the first team in Juventus and has impressed the Juventus coaching staff very much.

Past Experiences

London, Iling-Junior joined Chelsea Academy in 2011 at the age of eight and spent nine years with the club. He was promoted to the under-19s aged 16. In 2020, he decided to leave Chelsea, rejecting an athletic scholarship deal, attracting interest from clubs such as Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund and Juventus; he signed a three-year contract with the latter in September of that year. On 7 October 2020, Iling-Junior was included in The Guardian's list of the 60 best young talents in the world born in 2003.

On 6 October 2021, he made his debut for the England U19s as a substitute during a 3–1 defeat to France in Marbella, Spain. On 17 June 2022, Iling-Junior was included in the England U19 squad for the 2022 UEFA European Under-19 Championship, which England won with a 3–1 extra-time victory over Israel on 1 July. On 21 September 2022, he made his England U20 debut in a 3–0 win over Chile at the Pinatar Arena in Spain. On 24 March 2023, he scored a brace in England U20's 2–0 win to Germany U20.

Stats

He made 58 appearances for Juventus Primavera, scored 14 goals and provided 15 assists and he was among the best-performing wingers in the Primavera 1. Also made 13 appearances for the Juventus Next Gen, and scored 5 goals and 2 assists.

Type of Player

Iling-Junior is a winger, an out-and-out winger. A distinction needs to be made between an inside forward and a winger. He tends to play in pockets of space and link up with the centre-forward, operating almost as second-strikers and amassing a huge number of goals over the years. Iling-Junior is a throwback to a more simplistic time in the sport when wingers were wide midfielders, and their sole aim was to beat the fullback and whip crosses into the box. But more on this later.

Since his arrival at Juventus, Iling-Junior has predominantly played on the left, holding a high position. Iling-Junior isn’t a prolific goalscorer. While still chipping in with a couple of goals, his style of play makes consistent scoring difficult due to positioning himself so wide.

Similar type of player

In the modern game, the likes of Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mané, and Marcus Rashford have excelled between the lines, inverting to allow their fullback to advance higher up the pitch. Iling is also very similar to them, he likes to invert into halfspaces and allows the fullback to come high up the pitch so that the team can create numerical superiority in the attacking front line. He is very robust and athletic like Rashford and Mane.