Collective resignation of the president and members of the board of directors of the club, request for a legal referral, leaks of compromising listening … The famous football club is at the heart of a crisis whose consequences could be very heavy.
by Allan Kaval (Rome, correspondent)
Juventus Turin has crossed one of the darkest weeks in its history, and Calvary is not over, every day bringing a share of bad news for the club to the thirty-six titles of champion of Italy . The team with the emblematic black and white jersey, whose national status with many football enthusiasts is unique in the peninsula, is plunged into a large -scale financial and judicial crisis.
Friday, December 2, the Italian press published extracts from compromising conversations between club executives, intercepted by investigators from the Italian Finance Guard. Some of these exchanges, where bad practices are recognized, even concern the former president of Juventus Andrea Agnelli and his cousin John Elkann, heir to the Fiat Empire and at the head of the Holding Exor, the majority shareholder of the club . The day before, the prosecution of the capital of Piedmont had requested the legal reference of Andrea Agnelli and twelve leaders of Juventus, suspected of major irregularities.
The first drama of the week intervened in the evening of Monday, November 28, when Mr. Agnelli and the entire Board of Directors of Juventus announced collectively their resignation, echoing the judicial investigations targeting the club for possible accounting embezzlement. After the announcements of Italian justice, the European Union of Football Associations (UEFA) also said that it opened an investigation into the club, whose action fell on the Milan Stock Exchange.
The current turbulence result from the worsening of a crisis established around an investigation opened in 2021 on suspicions of embezzlement within the club as the presentation of false accounting information to investors and the production of invoices related to nonexistent transactions. The goal of such maneuvers would have been, in both cases, to make up the club’s financial situation, degraded by the hazardous strategic choices made in recent years. Juventus has recorded large losses linked, among other things, to the salary paid to the former Portuguese star player Cristiano Ronaldo between 2018 and 2021, therefore during the period of the Pandemic of Covid-19, where the recipes fell because of the Closing stages.
“false exchanges” of players
To artificially improve its assessment, the club used a system of false exchanges of players. This cross-sales mechanism with other training courses does not involve a financial exchange but has made it possible to register in the accounting assessment of the fictitious capital gains club associated with the valuation of the players concerned. According to Italian media, the sums registered in this way could reach up to 282 million euros.
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