It’s a real earthquake for Serie A. All the members of Juventus Turin’s board of directors, including its president Andrea Agnelli, have tendered their resignation, the Italian club announced on Monday, plunged into sporting and financial problems. and judicial.
The director general, Maurizio Arrivabene, has been instructed to stay in place and to deal with current affairs until a new council is formed. The next general meeting is scheduled for January 18. Juventus “will continue to collaborate and cooperate with the supervisory and sector authorities”, she assured.
A club in the sights of the Turin prosecutor’s office
The board, which includes Andrea Agnelli and its vice-president Pavel Nedved, “considered that it was in the best social interest” to resign, “considering the centrality and relevance of the outstanding legal and technical-accounting issues”. , an allusion to the investigation that the Italian justice has been carrying out for more than a year. The Turin public 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 sheets. The magistrates have calculated these “fictitious” capital gains at some 155 million euros between 2018 and 2021, according to the media.
The club, listed on the stock exchange, would also have hidden from its investors the existence of private agreements with players, including Portuguese star striker Cristiano Ronaldo, to settle certain deferred salaries. Juventus, for its part, explained on Monday that it had “again examined the objections of the public prosecutor’s office” of the Turin court, and decided “to adopt legitimate alternative accounting methodologies” concerning salary supplements.
“These revisions to estimates and hiring therefore result in adjustments to the estimates of chargeable expenses” between 2020 and 2022, the effects of which are “significantly nil on cash flow and net financial debt, both for previous years and for the financial year ended and the years to come,” the club said.
To these legal setbacks are added financial problems. The “Old Lady” was eliminated from the group stages of the Champions League, a premature exit which will lead to a shortfall of some 20 million euros, according to the Calcio e Finanza site. The club, in the red for the past five years, had recorded losses of 255 million euros last season: a record deficit in Italian football.