“I don’t know if it was destiny,” says a beaming Khéphren Thuram over a video call from Turin, but all the same he can glimpse a certain poetry in his journey. Born in Italy, the son of the great Juventus defender Lilian Thuram, now running the midfield in those same black and white stripes. “It’s a beautiful story,” he says. “People outside see the romance in it. But I’m just doing my job.”
On Wednesday his job takes him to Villa Park in the Champions League, the first time the 23‑year‑old will play competitively on English soil. Not that he will be underprepared. His teammate Douglas Luiz has already briefed him on their forthcoming opponents. “We speak about Aston Villa,” Thuram says. “He told me he had a great time over there, that the fans are great. And I watch a lot of Premier League. It’s going to be a good game.”
But then the younger Thuram has always been something of an attentive student and perhaps this is inevitable when you can call on his kind of footballing education. His father is not just a World Cup winner but one of the leading thinkers in the game; his older brother Marcus, a French international and Serie A champion with Inter. Football in the garden, football chat at the dinner table.
When Lilian moved to Barcelona, the young Thurams would have kickabouts with Lionel Messi and Thierry Henry. One of the great modern central midfielders in Patrick Vieira was an early coach of Khéphren’s at Nice and another in Thiago Motta is his coach at Juve. That thirst for learning, for improvement and finding new edges, developed from an early age.
“At the beginning, it’s just love of the game,” Thuram says. “When you’re little, you want to do what your dad does. And it doesn’t seem like work, but you’re working on your game without realising it. Then when we grew up, my dad became more specific, stuff like position, what we should do on the field.
“I love watching the game. I love watching good players. But Thierry Henry always told me, ever since I was small, that when you watch a game, don’t watch it like a fan. Analyse what’s happening. Why did he do that? Why is he in that position?”
Then there are the role models. As a 6ft 4in central midfielder with bundles of technical ability, there were some obvious and some less obvious idols. “I watched a lot of Yaya Touré, Paul Pogba, Patrick Vieira because they were taller players. They were box-to-box, they ran with the ball, they had that technical ability, they had that intelligence.
“But then I also looked up to Thiago Alcântara because I needed to look at a small player. Because I didn’t want people to say: ‘Oh, he’s just tall and strong, no technical ability.’ So I looked to Thiago and what he can do in small spaces. I try to take a little bit of everyone. I’m not yet at their level. But I’m trying.”
Fair to say, things are going well. Having spent five years at Nice learning his craft, fending off interest from bigger clubs, Thuram made the leap in the summer to Juventus, a grand old club with an exciting young squad and one of the most promising managers in Europe. “The energy is really positive,” Thuram says. “Because we’re all young, we all want to learn, we talk about the same stuff in the dressing room.”
There was a much-shared video of Motta from the wild derby against Inter last month. Thuram is getting ready to come on as a substitute when Kenan Yildiz equalises for Juventus to make it 4-4. A pumped Motta turns to Thuram and screams: “È questo che manca, il cuore! Hai capito o no?” – “That’s what’s missing: the heart! You understand or not?”
Thuram smiles at the memory. “He’s someone that when he speaks, you listen,” he says. “Because of what he did as a player. What he did last year with his team [Bologna]. And because he puts the team first.”
Juventus are unbeaten under Motta, with the best defensive record in Serie A. Things haven’t yet quite clicked at the other end, but early in the project the direction of travel feels encouraging and Thuram has established himself as a key player in midfield: tactically disciplined, defensively solid, but with the licence to get into the final third and create.
Take the opener in the 2-0 win at Udinese this month, a neat swivel and shot after a fine team move that was given as an own goal by Udinese’s goalkeeper, Maduka Okoye. “The nutmeg and the shot, that’s instinct,” he says. “But before – the pass to Manuel Locatelli, where he finds the pass in front and it comes back to me as the third man – that’s something we work on a lot in training. The coach is always telling me: respect the tactics, but bring my qualities.”
Thuram’s education is one that goes beyond football. His father was not just an athlete but an activist, a writer, an anti-racism campaigner, and he instilled his two sons with the same spirit. Marcus was named after Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican political activist who organised the first Black nationalist movement in the US. Khephren was one of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. There were family holidays to the pyramids and Ivory Coast, black history as a way of understanding the black present. “It’s a beautiful thing,” Thuram says of his father’s activism. “Just being with him, listening to him, makes me grow.”
To be Khéphren Thuram is to have all the tools at your disposal. The youth, the talent, the opportunity, the hunger, the perspective, the inner peace, the desire to grow. Perhaps most important of all, the joy: the simple relish of what can be done with a football and what football can do.
“Sometimes you wake up and it’s cold, you’re a little bit tired,” he says. “But then you realise, ‘No. Come on. There’s people outside that are really suffering. People that are doing jobs they don’t like, and you’re coming to the best job in the world. Playing at one of the best clubs in the world.’ It’s joyful. Every day is a happy day.”
