It is a real earthquake for Serie A. All members of the Juventus Turin board of directors, including its president Andrea Agnelli, have resigned, the Italian club announced on Monday, plunged into sporting and financial and judicial problems.
The director general, Maurizio Arrivabene, has been given the mandate to stay in charge of current events until a new board is formed. The next general meeting is scheduled for 18 January. Juventus “will continue to collaborate and cooperate with the supervisory and sector authorities”, he assured.
A club in the crosshairs of the Turin prosecutor’s office
The board, which includes Andrea Agnelli and his vice-president Pavel Nedved, “deemed it was in the best social interest” to resign, “considering the centrality and relevance of the pending legal and technical-accounting issues”. the investigation that the Italian justice has been carrying out for more than a year. The Turin prosecutor’s office is interested in the practice, which Juve has multiplied, of “false exchanges” of players: cross-selling with other clubs, without exchanging money but allowing capital gains to be recorded in the balance sheet. Magistrates have calculated these “fictitious” capital gains at around 155 million euros between 2018 and 2021, according to media reports.
The club, listed on the stock exchange, also hid from its investors the existence of private agreements with players, including Portuguese striker Cristiano Ronaldo, to settle some deferred salaries. Juventus, for its part, explained on Monday that it had “reexamined the objections of the Public Prosecutor’s Office” of the Turin court, and that it had decided “to adopt legitimate alternative accounting methods” in the matter of wage integration.
“These estimate revisions and assumptions therefore lead to adjustments to the estimates of the attributable charges” between 2020 and 2022, the effects of which are “significantly null on the cash flow and on the net financial debt, both for the previous years and for the year closed and the years to come,” the club said.
Adding to these legal setbacks are financial problems. The “Old Lady” has been eliminated from the group stage of the Champions League, an early exit that will result in a shortfall of around €20m, according to the Calcio e Finanza website. The club, which has been in the red for five years, had posted losses of €255m last season – a record deficit in Italian football.
