SPORT
Cresswell Says Leaving England Was Scary, and Juventus Is the Test
The young centre-back, now in Ligue 1, tells the Guardian he is preparing for the biggest game of his life against the Old Lady.
Tobia Marenghi300 wordsEdition №156Tuesday, 20 October 2026 — Edition № 156
Charlie Cresswell, the young centre-back who could not see a way forward at Leeds, has told the Guardian that leaving England was 'such a scary, scary decision', in a piece by Get French Football News. He moved to Ligue 1, and the interview is timed to a Europa League fixture he describes as the biggest game of his life, against Juventus.
The Guardian's framing is of a player who traded a Premier League club's margins for regular football in France, and who now measures the bet against a European night with one of Italy's most decorated sides. Cresswell also speaks of an international dream, which the piece treats as the horizon of the move rather than a promise.
For the sport desk the angle is the reverse of the usual transfer traffic: an English player looking to a French club to prove himself, with an Italian giant as the audition. It is the kind of story the foreign press files before the Italian public has much reason to notice.
The Guardian's interview, credited to Get French Football News, is built on the admission that a young English defender can be stuck at a big club and invisible at the same time. Cresswell's line about the fear of leaving is the emotional core; the football reason is simpler, that he needed to play.
Ligue 1 is presented as the proving ground, and Juventus as the yardstick. The piece does not forecast the result of the Europa League tie, and this dispatch will not either. What it records is the player's own description of the occasion as the biggest of his career so far, and the international ambition that sits behind it.
There is no Italian voice in the Guardian's account, no Juventus reaction, no tactical preview from the Turin side. That absence is itself the story from abroad: the foreign press is interested in Cresswell's gamble, and the Italian club enters the frame as the opponent that gives the gamble its scale.
La Veduta's sport desk will follow the tie as the world's wires report it, without inventing a team sheet or a quote from the Juventus dressing room. The interview is the news; the match is the test the interview is about.