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The most glitzy club in Italy has been rocked by a string of financial scandals. But does the situation at Juventus point to a more serious problem with global football?
The Italian Football Association stunned supporters all over the world on January 20 of this year when it docked Juventus, its most famous club, 15 points midway through the season.
In an abrupt move, Juventus fell seven spots in the Serie A standings. The team was charged with lying to shareholders in a different case and with fraudulently inflating the value of players in transfer negotiations. Juventus was charged by the Italian Football Association (FIGC) with “repeated violations of the principle of truth.”
Juventus is a distinctively national team in a nation notorious for its provincialism. With a fan base of roughly 8 million, it is far larger than its closest competitors, Milan and Inter, and is based in the northern city of Turin. However, in the wake of numerous scandals, the team has also come to represent the demise of Italian football.
A string of dubious transfer agreements were at the heart of the team’s current predicament. 42 of the 62 player transfers between Italian and foreign clubs that the Italian football governing body brought up with the FIGC in 2021 involved Juventus.
The team is charged with depending on a method through which two teams exchanged players for precisely the same sum and, miraculously, saw an improvement in their balance sheets—all without really making any purchases or deposits. Both parties to the transaction are said to have artificially increased the value of the players being traded in order to demonstrate “plusvalenze,” or capital gains (the profit on the sale of an asset).
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“I feel like I’m selling my soul”: a podcast delving into Juventus’s internal crisis
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The club’s most recent crisis was the points deduction, which Juventus contested right away. Due to pending criminal charges, the entire board of directors, including the former player Pavel Nedvīd and chairman Andrea Agnelli, resigned two months ago.
Juventus is currently involved in two ongoing legal cases: one is a criminal case in which Juventus is accused of false accounting, market manipulation, obstructing inspectors, and making false financial statements; the other is a capital gains case overseen by the sporting magistrature.
An even bigger task lies ahead. Juventus’s operating costs rose 7.6% in 2022, while its revenues fell by 8%. The club has requested €700 million (£619 million) in cash infusions from shareholders over the last five years to offset losses of €612.9 million. The chair of Juventus from 2006 to 2009, Giovanni Cobolli Gigli, told me, “It’s as if there’s been a sinkhole.” “They should have been focusing on reducing excessive and unnecessary expenses instead of constantly pursuing income.”
Juventus was not the only team involved in the Plusvalenze scandal. Victor Osimhen, the star of this season’s Serie A, cost €70 million to move from Lille to Napoli. The deal is also clouded in controversy, with four minor Napoli players allegedly being massively overvalued at €19.8 million to offset the cost. Although Juventus wasn’t the only team to shuffle players around like chess pieces for bookkeeping purposes, the claims, if validated, would demonstrate that the team went above and beyond in this regard. Investigators probing the club’s shady finances captured an executive from Juventus saying, “I feel as if I’m selling my soul.”
Serie A was the world’s richest and most glamorous league in the 1980s and 1990s, when fans watched the best football and players were paid the highest salaries. Presently, it has turned into the less fortunate sibling of the other prominent European leagues, with numerous clubs descending into financial ruin. As per the most recent report by the FIGC, Italian football has accumulated debts amounting to €5.3 billion.
Juventus’s 15-point deduction was overturned in mid-April, subject to a new trial, and the team shot back up the standings to take third place. However, that ruling did nothing but reinforce the idea that Serie A is a creaking product, with the most illustrious club in the league’s standing determined by legal, not sporting, outcomes. The Juventus scandals provide a glimpse into the rot at the core of the sport as well as the larger problems facing Italian football.
Juventus has long been associated with both aristocratic glitz and a reputation for chicanery among Italians. A group of wealthy young people from Turin founded the club in 1897, giving it a fancy Latin name that means “youth” and a uniform consisting of pink shirts with black bow ties. The workers tended to support Torino, the other club in the city, while it was perceived as the team of the upper classes.
This reputation was cemented in 1923, when armaments, aviation, shipping, ball bearings, textiles, cement, steel, and retail stores all contributed to Giovanni Agnelli’s acquisition of Juventus. (At that point, Juventus had abandoned its signature pink shirts in favor of their distinctive vertical black-and-white stripes; due to connections in the textile industries between Nottingham and Turin, players who requested new uniforms from England ended up receiving the Notts County black-and-white strip.)
The story of Juventus has been the Agnellis’ story for the last century. Often compared to the Kennedy clan in Italy, they are a royal family within a republic whose name conjures up tragedy and mystery. Giovanni appointed Edoardo Agnelli as the Juve chair; he perished in a plane crash in 1935, and his wife, who was the mother of his seven children, perished in a car accident in 1945. A son of the couple passed away in a mental health facility in 1965; a grandchild, then 33, died of cancer; and a further grandchild committed suicide in 2000.
Success and romance were also present. Giovanni’s grandson, Gianni Agnelli, took over as Juventus chairman in 1947. Vanity Fair called him the “international playboy” and the “godfather of style,” and he was known to hang out with Rita Hayworth, Errol Flynn, and Prince Rainier of Monaco.
Additionally, he had an affair with Pamela, the daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill. The Agnelli family’s business, Fiat, ruled the postwar Italian industrial scene, and supporters of Juventus felt a connection to the cosmopolitan Agnelli golden dust. It was a group of people who wanted to be like the bosses, as well as the bosses themselves.
