Now it has become the poor relation of the other major European leagues, with many clubs sinking into the quicksand of debt. In the 1980s and 90s, Serie A was the richest and most glamorous league in the world, where players received the best salaries and fans enjoyed the best football. One Juventus executive, recorded by investigators looking into the club’s murky finances, said: “I feel as if I’m selling my soul.” Yet while Juventus wasn’t the only club moving players around like chess pieces merely for accounting purposes, the allegations, if proven, would show that the club took the practice to new levels. The €70m transfer from Lille to Napoli of Victor Osimhen, the star of this season’s Serie A, is also mired in controversy: the four minor Napoli players traded for Osimhen are alleged to have been massively overvalued at €19.8m in order to offset the cost. The plusvalenze scandal didn’t involve Juventus alone. “There has been this continuous chasing of revenues when what they should have been doing was limiting the disproportionate and senseless costs.” “It’s as if there’s been a sinkhole,” Giovanni Cobolli Gigli – chair of Juventus between 20 – told me.
In the past five years, the club has asked shareholders for cash injections of €700m (£619m) to cover losses of €612.9m. In 2022, Juventus’s revenues slumped 8%, while its operating costs increased 7.6%. There are now two on-going cases involving Juventus: one overseen by the sporting magistrature regarding capital gains, the other a criminal case in which Juventus is accused of false accounting, market manipulation, obstructing inspectors and fraudulent financial statements. Two months earlier, the entire board of directors, including the chairman, Andrea Agnelli, and the former player Pavel Nedvěd, had resigned because criminal charges were pending. The points deduction, which Juventus immediately challenged, was just the latest crisis to hit the club. The value of the players being exchanged was allegedly inflated by both sides of the deal to show “ plusvalenze” or capital gains (the profit on the sale of an asset). The club is accused of having relied on a system whereby two clubs swapped players for exactly the same amount and magically improved their balance sheets – without actually spending or banking any money. In 2021, the regulatory body overseeing Italian football had raised concerns with the FIGC about 62 player transfers between clubs in Italy and abroad 42 of those involved Juventus. At the centre of the club’s current crisis were a series of suspicious transfer deals.
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