Serie A – After 12 years of presidency, Andrea Agnelli resigns from Juventus

It’s a real earthquake in the middle of the World Cup in Qatar. This Monday, all the members of the board of directors of Juventus Turin, including its president Andrea Agnelli, presented their resignation, announced Monday the Italian club, immersed in sporting, financial and legal problems. General manager Maurizio Arrivabene has been tasked with staying in place and handling day-to-day business until a new board is formed, the club said in a statement.

The next general meeting is scheduled for January 18. The council, which includes Andrea Agnelli and its vice-president Pavel Nedved, resigned in “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-sales 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. Juve explained on Monday that they have “again considered the objections of the public prosecutor“of the court of Turin, and decided”to adopt legitimate alternative accounting methodologies” regarding salary supplements.

“These revisions to estimates and recruitments therefore lead to adjustments to the estimates of attributable expenses” between 2020 and 2022, the effects of which are “materially nil on cash flow and net financial debt, both for prior years and for the year ended and future years“, said the club.

255 million euros in losses

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. 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.