Juventus, Man City and the far-reaching impact of a scandal that resulted in relegation

Fabio Capello didn’t stick around.

The Calciopoli trial had not yet delivered a verdict but the writing was on the wall. A break clause in his contract with Juventus gave him a get-out and, on July 4, 2006, he exercised it. Capello was recognised as football’s leading coach at the time. He had won eight league titles in 15 years. His past as a player with Juventus did not, however, make him unconditionally loyal.

When the club were relegated to Serie B for the first time in their history, docked an initial 30 points and stripped of the two championships he’d won (2004-05, 2005-06), Capello was already back in Valdebebas, a second spell with Real Madrid underway. Fabio Cannavaro, the World Cup and soon-to-be Ballon d’Or-winning centre-back, followed him to the Bernabeu along with Emerson, the Brazilian twine running through Capello’s last Scudetti at Roma and Juve.

The scandal, which led to lifetime bans for Juventus’ general manager Luciano Moggi and chief executive Antonio Giraudo, was not about match-fixing, but rather a network of power and influence. It remains a bitterly disputed watershed moment in the history of Italian football, a forever war, which brings us to Juventus’ opponents in the Champions League on Wednesday night, Manchester City.

To paraphrase the opening line from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way), the 115 charges brought by the Premier League against City are different from the allegations the Italian Football Federation made against Juventus and others in 2006.

City welcomed “the review by an independent commission, to impartially consider the comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence” they claim will exonerate them from charges that include a failure to provide accurate details for player and manager payments, breaches of profit and sustainability rules (PSR) and compliance with UEFA’s FFP regulations.

Nevertheless, in the worst-case scenario for City, the outcome might resemble what Juventus reckoned with almost two decades ago. Pep Guardiola has repeatedly addressed the threat of relegation. “I said when all the clubs accused us of doing something wrong and people say: ‘What if we are relegated?’ I will be here. I don’t know the position they are going to bring us, the Conference? (But) next year we will come up and come up and come back to the Premier League.”

Whether Guardiola’s promise is tested by the verdict or not remains to be seen. The Athletic broke the news of his contract extension last month, a testament to his enduring confidence in the club. How the players would react to a still hypothetical relegation is another unknown. As was the case with Capello, who still considers Calciopoli a “comic” injustice. He thought the punishment was “over the top” and continues to recognise the two revoked titles, as the players involved do, as won sul campo (on the pitch). Zlatan Ibrahimovic thought “most of it” was “bullshit”. “Referees giving us preferential treatment?” he sounded off in his book. “Come on! We’d struggled hard out there. We’d risked our necks and didn’t have any damn referees in our pockets — no way!”

Still, it didn’t stop the Swede from wanting out. He looked at Juventus as a “sinking ship” with Lilian Thuram and Gianluca Zambrotta jumping overboard for Barcelona, Cannavaro and Emerson for Real Madrid. “All the rest of us who were still left were ringing our agents, saying: ‘Sell us, sell us. What prospects are out there?’”

Capello’s replacement Didier Deschamps told Ibrahimovic he’d quit if the striker left. “’Okay, pack your bags and I’ll ring for a taxi,’ I said, and he laughed, as if I was joking,” Ibrahimovic recalled. He was 25, a year older than Erling Haaland is now, a player with whom he shared the late Mino Raiola as agent and Ibrahimovic wasn’t prepared to waste one year of his career in the second division and at least two outside the Champions League. “If you offered me €20m (a year — £16.5m/$21.1m at current rates) to stay, I wouldn’t be interested,” Ibrahimovic told Juventus’ incoming CEO Jean-Claude Blanc, who currently sits on the board at Manchester United as part of his remit as head of Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s INEOS Sport.

Ibrahimovic played for Juventus between 2004 and 2006 (PATRICK HERTZOG/AFP via Getty Images)

The rush to judgment on Juventus — the FIGC (Italian Football Federation) took just two months and 12 days to bring proceedings to a close — remains a sore point. By contrast, it is almost two years since the Premier League announced that its investigation into City had escalated into 115 charges. “Timing and rules were not respected,” Capello said in an interview with Corriere della Sera. “Sporting justice wasn’t given the chance to operate correctly.” In a later legal claim, Giraudo felt Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights had been violated as he and his lawyers were given only seven days to prepare their defences, an insufficient time for reading a dossier of more than 7,000 pages.

Capello thought Guido Rossi, the special commissioner appointed by the FIGC to lead the case, “acted too hastily”. For a summer, Guido became the most famous Rossi in Italy, only far more controversial than Paolo, the 1982 World Cup winner. He still is on the internet forums and threads that won’t move on from Calciopoli.

Rossi’s suitability for the role of special commissioner, given his past on Inter’s board between 1995 and 1999, was debated at the time and has been ever since. It has nourished conspiracy theories. In what felt like the latest in an ever-increasing series of echoes of mid-2000s Serie A in contemporary Premier League life, English football got a slight taste for the kind of frenzy this produced when City fans found out that Murray Rosen KC, the lawyer overseeing the Premier League panel looking into the club’s alleged breaches, is an Arsenal supporter.

Del Piero celebrates after Juventus won Serie A in 2004-2005, a trophy that was later stripped from them (Giuseppe Cacace/Getty Images)

Amid signalling from UEFA that they would like everything wrapped up by July 28 so the governing body and competition promoter knew the identity of the Italian teams participating in their competitions the following season, Juventus’ initial relegation and 30-point deduction was confirmed earlier that week, only the penalty was reduced, on appeal, to 17 points and would, in October, be commuted to nine.

More poisonous was the decision to leave one of Juventus’ two revoked titles unassigned and award the other from 2005-06 to Inter. “A lot of time has passed since Calciopoli,” Giorgio Chiellini reflected in his memoir. “I can only reiterate that those two titles were won on the pitch, simply because we were better, even if laying claim to them now is a losing battle. I am convinced that not even Inter, who finished third that (2005-06) season, feel it as one of their own; it was a mistake to assign it over the table, it would have been better not to give it to anyone.”

That the Italian sporting justice system did so set a precedent. Jose Mourinho has had two spells in Italy; one with Inter, the other with Roma. He likes to hit a nerve. Upon inheriting an Inter team that found its principal rivals defanged by Calciopoli, Mourinho brought up the scandal when it suited him and joked that the penalty area was bigger for Juventus than everyone else in Italy. One of the most iconic moments in Inter’s treble-winning season in 2010 came when he made a famous handcuff gesture during a 0-0 draw with Samp to suggest the establishment was doing everything — his team were down to nine men at the time — to stop them.

Mourinho’s handcuff gesture during a game against Sampdoria in 2010 (Valerio Pennicino/Getty Images)

It has hardly come as a surprise, then, to hear Mourinho bring up City’s 115 charges, as he did, in defence of his record at Man United when his old club travelled to Istanbul to play his latest team, Fenerbahce, during the autumn. “As you know, we won the Europa League (in 2017) and we finished second in the Premier League (in 2018),” Mourinho said. “I think we still have a chance to win that league because maybe they punish Man City with points and maybe we win that league and then they have to pay me the bonus and give me the medal.”

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Only last week, Mourinho couldn’t resist another comment on the back of City losing to Liverpool at Anfield, the chants of sacked in the morning and Guardiola gesturing six to signify the number of Premier Leagues he has won in England. “Guardiola won six trophies and I won three, but I won fairly and cleanly. If I lost, I want to congratulate my opponent for being better than me. I don’t want to win by dealing with 150 lawsuits.” Whether this is the continued Mourinho-ification of the Premier League discourse from afar or something new — the Serie A-fication of it — is blurry.

Upon relegation in 2006, Juventus fell from third in the Deloitte Money League (where they narrowly trailed Real Madrid and Barcelona) to 12th. Revenue fell by €106million (42 per cent) as commercial partners like Nike renegotiated their contracts to reflect Juventus’ fall in status. Never outside the top five in Deloitte’s rankings up until then, Juventus have never been back.

Some of that is systemic. Domestic TV rights in Italy went from being negotiated on an individual basis, guaranteeing the big clubs huge chunks of broadcast revenue, to a collective bargaining process. The league wasn’t as commercially-minded as the Premier League and didn’t sell itself abroad as aggressively, which is one of the explanations for the wealth chasm between England and not only Italy but the rest of Europe.

Things would have been worse for Juventus had Blanc not followed through on existing plans to build a new stadium on the site of the old Stadio Delle Alpi, which became a major revenue driver in the context of Italian football where the infrastructures of Juventus’ rivals are old and council-owned. That they came back shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Juventus’ Allianz Stadium (Daniele Badolato – Juventus FC/Juventus FC via Getty Images)

It took time (and the rise of Andrea Agnelli to the chairmanship) for the Bianconeri to reassert themselves as Italy’s most successful domestic team. Once they did, the sense of revenge within an Old Lady scorned was so strong it gives a sense to the relentless drive behind a record nine consecutive league titles. Juventus were making up for seasons and titles lost. 

Returning to the subject of a hypothetical relegation, Guardiola recently said: “Seventy-five per cent of the (Premier League) clubs want it, because I know what they do behind the scenes and this sort of stuff.” Were it to come to pass, it would interesting to see how City’s global and regional partners might react bearing in mind, as detailed in this special report by The Athletic in 2022, the extent to which the club are still dependent on sponsors with business links to the country of their principal owners, Abu Dhabi. Juventus’ majority shareholders, EXOR, the holding company of the Agnelli family, has broad shoulders with a market cap of more than €20billion. Often likened to Italy’s Kennedys, the Agnellis are not, however, a royal family running a gulf state.  

The decision of the independent panel, when it comes, will be pored over and scrutinised like no other in Premier League history. Bouncing back from relegation at the first attempt and returning to the Champions League after their first season in Serie A did not mean bygones were bygones. When Andrea Agnelli, the cousin of EXOR chairman and family scion John Elkann, became president of Juventus in 2010, he left the distinct impression the club hadn’t defended itself hard enough during the Calciopoli hearings. He proudly recognised the two revoked titles in their roll of honour and in displays at the Allianz Stadium.

Former Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli (Daniele Badolato – Juventus FC/Getty Images)

As anyone who studied Juventus’ accounts, specifically item 54 (the ‘Relevant Pending Disputes’ section) during Agnelli’s 12-year tenure knows, Juventus filed an appeal in November 2011 before the Lazio Regional Administrative Court requesting that the (FIGC) be ordered to pay compensation for “the damage suffered due to the illegitimate exercise of administrative activity and the failure to exercise mandatory activity, in relation to the administrative measures adopted by the FIGC relating to the awarding of the title “Italian Champion” to F.C. Internazionale Milano S.p.A. for the 2005/2006 football championship.”

Juventus wanted Inter stripped of the 2005-06 title, the Scudetto from that year to go unassigned like the 2004-05 one, and “the equivalent of the payment of €443,725,200.00, plus legal interest from the date of the claim up until the final balance” in damages. That pursuit only ended, under a new Juventus board, in October 2023.

By that time, Agnelli had left the club. He formalised his resignation at a shareholders assembly in spring 2023 (he and the entire board had announced they would step down in late 2022), amid an investigation into cross-party-transactions (player trading commonly regarded as swap deals) and the way the club structured wage payments during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The federal prosecutor of the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) had lost an initial case into player trading and failed in an appeal but then, in early 2023, it got the appeal revoked on the grounds of new evidence gathered in a separate criminal case into the financial affairs of a club listed on the Milan stock exchange. Juventus denied any wrongdoing but were deducted 15 points, which was later suspended and then reduced to 10 in May 2023, resulting in them finishing seventh in Serie A that season. Agnelli was given a two-year ban from Italian football, and there was a 30-month ban for Fabio Paratici, the club’s former sporting director, who at that point was managing director of football at Tottenham. The hearings into the criminal case that sparked the re-opening of the sporting case have only now started to get underway in Rome.

At the assembly in which Agnelli left his position (in early 2023), the former general manager Moggi sensationally appeared waving a USB stick. “If it’s true they have reopened the plusvalenze case because they think they have found new elements,” he said, “it is equally true that we should reopen Calciopoli, a wound that still does not heal for either us or Juventus.”

Moggi’s gift — he wrapped the USB up and stuck a bow on it — came while Giraudo, another member of the triad of executives who ran Juventus between 1994 and 2006 (the other member was Roberto Bettega) was going from the European Court of Human Rights to the Lazio Regional Administrative Court to challenge the Italian sporting justice system’s status and compatibility with EU law (that was deemed inadmissible due to lack of jurisdiction).

The hatchet, if buried, is never in anything other than a shallow grave when it comes to Calciopoli. Closure has been fleeting, illusory. The Premier League and City must hope, whatever the independent panel decides, that this is nipped in the bud once and for all and doesn’t have a similarly long and poisonous tail.

(Photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)