Welcome, Juventus, to 2023. It is supposed to be a celebratory year; the centenary of Italian sport’s most influential family, the Agnellis, taking control and setting about the transformation of what would become Italy’s most decorated club. Marking 100 years of, mostly, setting the highest standards, and an enduring marriage between the so-called Old Lady and a dynasty of go-getting industrialists and society dandies with their fast cars — the Agnelli legacy to European football.
All of a sudden, the anticipated period of self-congratulation has been clouded. Three days before the beginning of the centenary year, Andrea Agnelli — the grandson of Edoardo, the son of the founder of Fiat who in 1923 became the epoch-shaping president of what was then a middling provincial club — found himself obliged to tell shareholders why he and several board members had abruptly resigned. “The club is having to defend itself against certain accusations and it is opportune for me to step back, so there can be no suggestion I am influencing choices the club now faces.” said Agnelli, who in late November formally ended 12½ years as president.
Piling up in the in-tray for a hastily assembled emergency board are a list of accusations of false accounting, carrying serious possible penalties. First up, Agnelli and ten former club executives — including Pavel Nedved, the club’s Ballon d’Or-winning former midfielder, and Fabio Paratici, the sporting director until shortly before he joined Tottenham Hotspur as managing director of football in 2021 — will learn on January 20 whether or not criminal changes of false accounting, market manipulation and misleading financial statements are to be pursued against them and the club, after an investigation led by Turin’s public prosecutor. The Prisma probe centres on Juventus’s published accounts over three years up to 2021, with capital gains declarations under scrutiny.
In 2021, the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) launched an investigation into 62 transfers involving various clubs, many of them loan deals, to establish whether or not the valuations of players being transferred had been artificially set, with the possible benefit that clubs, by inflating a player’s asset value, could report a false profit, massaging accounts in a way that might be useful in, say, meeting Financial Fair Play (FFP) targets. But the FIGC acknowledged that making a clear case that any player had been overvalued was tough, with the market having no independent standard. In April last year, 11 clubs, including Juventus, were cleared of wrongdoing.
But the Turin prosecutor persisted. The Prisma investigation, a report running to 14,000 pages and including documents seized from Juventus’s offices and wiretap transcripts of communications between executives, will argue that the club “systemically operated exchanges of players with other clubs, specifically to realise capital gains”. Juventus maintain their practices and actions were “correct” and “will further demonstrate their correctness”.
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Juventus are also alleged to have made misleading statements about salary costs, specifically during the pandemic. The markets were informed that players had agreed a wage cut to limit losses when football was shut down and then stadiums emptied of paying fans. It is alleged that the agreement, privately, with players was merely for a partial wage deferral. Stock market regulations may have been breached and football’s governing bodies misled. Uefa has opened its investigation into agreements previously reached with Juventus over meeting FFP requirements. Possible sanctions for false statements include exclusion from Uefa competitions.
Juventus were hardly thriving in Europe in the tailend of Agnelli’s presidency. In November they finished third in their Champions League group, dropping out of the competition before Christmas for the first time in eight years. Agnelli said he felt “ashamed” after he watched Maccabi Haifa beat them 2-0.
This was barely 18 months after Agnelli had been fronting, with his counterparts at Real Madrid and Barcelona, a plan to launch a breakaway European Super League, designed largely to entrench the elite status of clubs such as his. Next month, Juventus will join the fellow Super League diehards Barcelona and former Super League signatories Manchester United in the play-offs for a place in the round of 16 of the Europa League. The European high points of the Agnelli era, the Champions League finals of 2015 and 2017, fade ever further into the past.
It is three years, too, since Juventus’s most recent scudetto. Up to and including 2019-20, they won nine Serie A titles in succession — as many as Edoardo, Gianni or Umberto Agnelli oversaw in their combined stints chairing Juventus in the 20th century — but the past three campaigns have been brittle, featuring late, desperate scrambles to finish in the Champions League positions. Juventus scraped into fourth place in 2020-21 and again last May. They will resume this season away to Cremonese on Wednesday, after the World Cup break, in third place, but ten points shy of the leaders, Napoli.
The transfer-market legacy of the Agnelli presidency provides its own commentary on the difficulties of assigning any absolute value to footballers. Juventus came into this season beaming that the club’s time-honoured knack of scooping up out-of-contract superstars had come good again. Paul Pogba had returned, fee-free, for a second spell. World champions-to-be, Ángel Di María and Leandro Paredes, the latter on loan, had arrived from Paris Saint-Germain.
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Pogba has yet to play this season because of injury. Di María and Paredes are scheduled to rejoin training today after Argentina’s triumph in Qatar, where both played vital roles — and far more so than Paredes (no Serie A starts since mid-September) or Di María (three league starts, three injury layoffs, one red card and a two-match suspension) have in their stuttering Juventus careers. In 2023, Juventus expect better from their discreet trio of World Cup winners.
