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From the archive:‘I feel like I’m selling my soul’: inside the crisis at Juventus
00:44:43
This week, from 2023: a series of financial scandals have rocked Italy’s most glamorous club. But is the trouble at Juventus symptomatic of a deeper rot in world football? By Tobias Jones. Read by Daniel Alexander
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Guardian Narrator
This is the Guardian.
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Guardian Narrator
The guardian archive long read.
- [01:21]
Tobias Jones
Hello, I'm Tobias Jones, an author and journalist living in Italy. I wrote I Feel Like I'm Selling My Soul Inside the Crisis at Juventus, published in 2023. This is the story of why Juventus, Italy's biggest football club, was docked 15 points in the 2223 Serie A season for, as the prosecutor said, repeated violations of the principle of truth. The club was shown to be incessantly trading players at inflated prices to cover up losses of hundreds of millions of euros. So I was drawn to this story because as well as loving football, especially Italian football, I'm particularly interested in what happens in the murky background of that glamorous sport. And one of the key tenets of journalism is follow the money. And following the money in Italian football takes you to some very surprising places. It was shown that Juventus was spending 92% of its revenue stream on players wages, and they were buying and selling players not according to whether they were good footballers, but according to how much capital gains they could put into their accounts. So this was a story that was a window into a league, Serie A, that used to be the richest league in the world and which is now outdated and indebted. So it's a sort of riches to rags story. So in the aftermath of this article, one of the protagonists, Fabio Paratici, who'd gone to Tottenham Hotspur, had to resign. Andrea Agnelli, the famous owner of Juventus, has sort of disappeared from public view and Juventus has really failed to win any big trophy since. But it's more than about Juventus and Serie A really. It's about how a billion pound industry should be regulated and overseen. Recently in the Premier League, clubs like Manchester City and Chelsea have been shown or suspected of repeated financial violations. And everyone knows that the incessant churn of players is what football is actually about. So the article in a way begs the question of whether football is about belonging or about rootlessness, about whether players represent teams or represent investments.
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Guardian Narrator
Just a warning, there is a little bit of bad language in this article. Welcome to the Guardian long read showcasing the best long form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking. For the text version of this and all our longreads go to theguardian.com longread. I feel like I'm selling my soul inside the crisis at juventus by tobias jones. On the 20th of January this year, the Italian Football association shocked fans throughout the world by docking 15 points from its most iconic club, Juventus. In the middle of the season, Juventus suddenly dropped seven places in the Serie A table. The club was accused of falsely inflating the value of players in transfer dealings and in a separate case of lying to shareholders. The Italian football association FEGCH accused Juventus of repeated violations of the principle of truth in a country renowned for provincialism. Juventus is a uniquely national team based in the northern city of Turin. It has about 8 million supporters, far more than its nearest rivals Milan and Inter. But in the wake of repeated scandals, the club has also become a symbol for the downfall of Italian food football. At the centre of the club's current crisis were a series of suspicious transfer deals. In 2021, the regulatory body overseeing Italian football had raised concerns with the Fegchi about 62 player transfers between clubs in Italy and abroad, 42 of those involved Juventus. The club is accused of having relied on a system whereby two clubs swapped players for exactly the same amount and improved their balance sheets without actually spending or banking any money. The value of the players being exchanged was allegedly inflated by both sides of the deal to show plus Valencia or capital gains, the profit on the sale of an asset. The points deduction, which Juventus immediately challenged, was just the latest crisis to hit the club. Two months earlier, the entire board of directors, including the chairman Andrea Agnelli and the former player Pavel Nedved, had resigned because criminal charges were pending. There are now two ongoing cases involving Juventus, one overseen by the sporting magistrateur regarding capital gains, the other a criminal case in which Juventus is accused of false accounting, market manipulation, obstructing inspectors and fraudulent financial statements. Meanwhile, a wider challenge looms. In 2022, Juventus revenues slumped 8% while its operating costs increased 7.6%. In the past five years, the club has asked shareholders for cash injections of 700 million euros to cover losses of 612.9 million euros. It's as if there's been a sinkhole, giovanni Cobboligli, chair of Juventus between 2006 and 2009, told There has been this continuous chasing of revenues when what they should have been doing was limiting the disproportionate and senseless costs. The Plus Walense scandal didn't involve Juventus alone. The 70 million euro transfer from Lille to Napoli of Victor Osimhen, the star of this season Serie A, is also mired in controversy. The four minor Napoli players traded for Osimhen are alleged to have been massively overvalued at 19.8 million euros in order to offset the cost. 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. One Juventus executive recorded by investigators looking into the club's murky finances. I feel as if I'm selling my Soul. 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. Now it has become the poor relation of the other major European leagues, with many clubs sinking into the quicksand of debt. According to the latest report from the FAEGG, the accumulated debts of Italian football currently stand at 5.3 billion euros. In mid April, Juventus 15 point deduction was rescinded pending a retrial and the club sprang back up the table to third place. But that judgment only added to the sense that Serie A is a creaking product, with the position of the league's most famous club dependent on legal, not sporting, results. The Juventus scandals are a window into not just the wider crises in Italian football, but the rot at the heart of the sport. To Italians, Juventus has long evoked both aristocratic glamour and a reputation for chicanery. It was founded in 1897 by a group of rich kids from Turin who gave the club its fancy Latin name, meaning youth and a kit that featured pink shirts with black bow ties. It was seen as the theme of the upper classes, whereas the workers tended to support the city's other club, Torino. This image was sealed when Juventus was acquired in 1923 by Giovanni Agnelli, a businessman who had made a fortune through armament, aviation, shipping, ball bearings, textiles, cement, steel and retail stores. By then, Juventus had swapped its pink shirts for its iconic vertical black and white Stripes. There were links between the textile industries of Nottingham and Turin, and when players wrote to order a new kit from England, they received the Notts county strip with black and white stripes. For the past century, the story of Juventus has also been the story of the Agnellis. They have often been described as the Italian version of the Kennedy clan, a royal family within a republic whose name evokes mystique and tragedy. Edoardo Agnelli, who Giovanni had installed as Juve chair, was killed in a plane accident in 1935. His wife, mother to his seven children, died in a car crash in 1945. One of the couple's sons died in a psychiatric unit in 1965. A grandchild died of cancer, aged 33. Another killed himself in 2000. There was romance and success too. Gianni Agnelli, Giovanni's grandson, became Juventus chairman in 1947. He was described by Vanity Fair as the godfather of style and an international playboy who hung out with Prince Rainier of Monaco, Errol Flynn and Rita Hayworth. He also had an affair with Winston Churchill's daughter in law, Pamela. The family's company, fiat, dominated the industrial landscape of post war Italy. And those who supported Juventus felt they were touched by that cosmopolitan Agnelli gold dust. It wasn't just the team of the bosses, but of those who aspired to be like them. To its detractors, the club's unofficial motto sums up its dubious mentality. Winning is not important, it's the only thing that matters. The slogan was coined by Giampiero Bonnyperti, a former Juve player who went on to become chairman. Between 1946 and 1961, Boniperti scored 178 goals for Juventus. But because of the Italy wide cap on salary, his pay packet didn't reflect his true value. To circumvent the regulations, Gianni Agnelli offered to give Bonniperti, the son of farmers, a cow for every goal he scored. One day, the farmer who sold the cows to Agnelli phoned him to complain. Bonnie always chose a cow that was in calf. Typical Juventus. There have been many other crises and scandals. In 2004, the Club Doctor was found guilty of having supplied performance enhancing drugs to players during the late 1990s, years in which the club was spectacularly successful. The conviction was overturned on appeal. In 2006, it was revealed that Juventus was the ringleader in a system of influencing referees that involved several top teams, a scandal known as Calciopoli. The club was duly relegated to Serie B. Ten years later, the suicide of the club's supporter liaison officer, Ciccio Bucci, led to an investigation that revealed Juventus had been supplying tickets to hardcore fans or ultras despite their links to organized crime. Italy is divided between those who see Juventus as arch cheaters and and those who believe the club is always singled out by resentful and biased magistrates. As Herbie Sykes writes in his book Juve, Italian football is essentially binary, so there's a Juventus version and an anti Juventus version. The debate was precisely summarized by an exchange I overheard in a bar in January on the day the points deduction was announced. It wasn't only Juventus, said a fan, referring to the plusvalense scandal. No, his friend replied, but it is always Juventus. After the cachopori scandal in 2006, Juventus fought their way back to Serie A. In May 2010, Andrea Agnelli, grandson of Eduardo, became chairman, and he slowly took the club back to the summit of Italian football. Key to the club's resurgence was Agnelli's decision to hire Beppe Marotta as CEO and sporting director. Marotta arrived from stints at smaller Serie A clubs where he'd gained a reputation for brilliance in the transfer market and in managing the interpersonal dressing room dynamics on which successful squads are built. Soon afterwards, Antonio Conte became manager, and under his guidance, followed by that of Max Allegri, sporting triumphs ensued. Starting in the 201112 season, Juventus won Serie A nine times in a row. Agnelli appeared even more successful on the financial side. A new stadium had been opened in 2011, with naming rights sold for 75 million euros before construction had even begun in 2008. In 2017, naming rights were sold again to the German finance giant Allianz. Agnelli believed that the club could bring in fresh sources of revenue if it reinvented itself as a lifestyle brand whose signature would be the letter J. Near the stadium, the club built the J Museum, the J Medical, and began further development under the J Village Property Fund, which oversaw a JJ Hotel, the JTC, a training center and so on. In 2012, Jeep became the club's most important sponsor. In 2017, the club unveiled a distinctive new two black lines on a white background forming a stylized J. During those heady years, supermarkets, school playgrounds and sports centers were full of J slippers, J backpacks and J shorts. Agnelli was also a rising political power in European football. In 2017, he became president of the European Club association, an organization representing 234 member clubs across the continent. Among other things, the ECA was in constant negotiation with UEFA, the governing body of football in Europe, to wring out more cash for clubs involved in the Champions League. As Agnelli talked with his UEFA counterpart, the Slovenian Alexander Ceffarin, the two developed a friendship. They became so close that Agnelli asked Jefferin to be godfather at his daughter's baptism in the Vatican. But in the summer of 2018, Agnelli made a decision that would have catastrophic consequences for the finances of his club. In April, Juventus had lost at home to Real Madrid in the Champions League. Cristiano Ronaldo had scored two goals, one an overhead kick so gravity defying it was applauded by the entire stadium. Juve had reached the Champions league final in 2015 and 2017, and Agnelli was fixated on winning it. He decided the only way was to bring Ronaldo to Juventus. He convinced himself that investing 116 million euros to buy Ronaldo made both sporting and financial sense. Marotta, the man responsible for the club's transfer policy, fiercely disagreed. He was wary of wages getting out of control and feared Ronaldo's domineering personality would upset the dynamic in the changing room. Agneli got his way. In July 2018, Ronaldo arrived at Juventus, and a few months later, Marotta left. Ronaldo's time at Juventus wasn't unsuccessful. He scored 101 goals and 134 appearances, winning Serie A twice. But the Champions League remained elusive, and the financial effect on the club was devastating. It was a huge error, korpori Gigli told me, an example of a system being dragged by money in order to chase sporting results which are always subject to chance. That was the sliding doors moment, says an executive of an Italian football club who asked to remain anonymous. There was an inflationary effect on the wages. Ronaldo's gross salary cost Juventus 54.24 million euros a year, a sum that surpassed the entire wage bill of many smaller Serie A club where players earn 1 to 2 million euros a year. The effect was exactly as Marotta had predicted. According to a report by Deloitte, the percentage of Juve's revenue spent on wages shot up from 66% in 2018 to 84% in 2022. Another estimate from the influential football and finance site Swiss Ramble, suggest that by different calculations, that ratio is now as high as 92%. The biggest problem in football finances, says Roger Mitchell, founding CEO of the Scottish Professional Football League and now a sports brand consultant based in Italy, isn't the top line. It's the cost line, the player wages line, and 92% is at least 20% higher than where it should be. With revenues bound to fluctuate according to results and qualification for lucrative competitions like the Champions League, such a high wage bill was an obvious hostage to fortune. And when the pandemic arrived, Juventus was especially vulnerable. The pandemic was a tragedy for everyone, alessio Secko, a former Juventus sporting director, told me. But for those who had toyed a little with fate, it created enormous difficulties. The knots, he said, using a phrase that implies chickens coming home to roost, came to the comb. Thanks for listening to the Guardian Long read. The story continues right after this.
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- [22:13]
Guardian Narrator
Welcome back to the Guardian Long read. In November 2018, Marotta's protege had taken over as the club sporting director. Fabio Paratici had been an itinerant player in the lower leagues, starting out in the Piacenza youth team and eventually playing for 12 different clubs. He was a man who had endured adversity. In 1994 he suffered career threatening injuries in a car crash, but he recovered and continued to play for another decade. But it was only after his playing career ended that Paratici's football career took off. His luck turned in 2004 when he was appointed by Marotta to be head scout at Sampdoria. Surrounding himself with dozens of TVs that showed games from around the world, Paratici built a youth team that won the triple in the 2007, 08 season. The youth team Scudetto, the Italian cup and the Super Cup. In 2010, he moved to Juventus with Marotta, and when his mentor left in 2018, Paratici was the obvious successor. He was very charismatic, a Juventus insider told me. Very sociable. He was a fun guy, smiling all the time. You could tell he enjoyed the high life, being part of the glitterati, surrounded by beautiful women. The good times came to an end in the spring of 2020 when Covid struck. Between March 9, 2020 and June 20, there were no matches in Serie A, meaning no match their revenue through ticket sales. Even worse, from a financial point of view, broadcasters began demanding renegotiations or rebates on TV deals. With Juventus wages now devouring so much of the club's dwindling revenue, Baratici asked players to take a pay cut. On March 28, 2020, Juventus formally announced that its playing staff had renounced four months of wages, implying a saving for the publicly quoted company of around 90 million euros. But before the announcement was made, the club and its captain, Giorgio Chiellini, secretly signed an agreement whereby the club promised to pay in full three of those four months at a future date. In a bilingual message to the players WhatsApp chat, Chiellini explained this smoke and mirrors trick to his Juventus will make a press release where it will say that we are waiving four months salary to help the club. I reiterate to communicate only this in the press for stock market legislative reasons. You are asked not to speak in interviews about the details of this private agreement. Now that Covid had created a hole in the Juventus accounts, Paratici began systematically using player exchanges to increase the revenues of the company without actually receiving any money. An accounting technique called plusvarenze introciate exchanged or crossed capital gains. The system worked because, as with modern art, it's notoriously difficult to put an accurate figure on the value of a football player. If two clubs could agree to sell to each other, players that were officially on the balance sheet worth 1 million euros for 10 times that amount, for 10 million euros each, could record a capital gain of 9 million euros and add to their books a new asset reportedly worth 10 million euros. It might have been questionable, but it wasn't illegal. Who was to say that a young player hadn't increased in value tenfold? After all, the market undervalues emerging players all the time. Plus Valence was not new. It had been a common practice throughout Italian football prior to Covid. In his book Il Calcio del the Football of the Future, Carlo Diana, a former Juventus marketing manager, writes of Italian football being close to declaring bankruptcy and describes how the industry has been sustaining itself for years thanks only to plusvalense. The pressure to disguise losses through inflated capital gains seems to have come from the very top. In an email to Paratici and other colleagues on February 22, 2020, Andrea Agnelli urged his staff to contain losses through corrective actions. But after the COVID crisis, Paratici began incessantly swapping players with other clubs for allegedly inflated amounts. In the transfer window of the summer of 2020, the Bosnian midfielder Mirlempjanic moved from Juventus to Barcelona for 60 million euros, while the Brazilian midfielder Arthur Melody moved the other way for 72 million euros. Both figures seemed to hugely overestimate the player's value. These kinds of deals, of which there were many more, seemed to be win win. As Paratici said in a wiretapped phone call to the director general of Pisa in September 2021, if all goes well, there will be loads of money for everyone. The practice had become so embedded that in wiretapped conversations, Juventus directors began asking their auditors advice about how to supercazolare befaddle inspectors at the national Italian stock exchange. The transfers often seem to have nothing to do with football. In some cases, Juventus are accused of having decided the value of capital gains required and only then chosen which player suited the sum. In the words of the Feegch's initial judgment, Juventus systematically planned the realization of capital gains regardless of the identity of the subject, to be exchanged, often indicated with a simple X in place of the name of the Juventus player to be sold. The judgment also recorded surprise that almost everyone at the club appears to have known about the practice. In May 2021, the Public Prosecutor in Turin opened a secret investigation known as Prisma into the club's finances. The investigation discovered that Juventus had undisclosed debts to various clubs players and agents. One club executive admitted to investigators, there is 7 million euros in debt with Atalanta that has never been entered in the balance sheet. One agent was owed €400,000. The club's debts to players who were owed months of salary became a form of credit bondage whereby the money owed could be used as an incentive to stay, with unpaid salaries being rewritten as a loyalty bonus. A secret document was unearthed in which Paratici in July 2021 had written an IOU to Ronaldo for a figure believed to be 19.9 million euros for another round of secretive salary payments during the 202021 season. In response to a list of questions put to Juventus for this article, the club said that it would not be possible to interview Agnelli and sent over links to its press releases on these matters. In a press release dated April 12, 2023, Juventus announced that the company believes that it has correctly applied the relevant international accounting standards and that it has acted in full compliance with the principle of fair play. By 2021, it was clear that Juventus was struggling to keep afloat. For years, the club had enjoyed cheap credit as interest rates were near zero. But as inflation and borrowing costs rose, the debt ridden club found itself in ever greater difficulty. There was, thought Agnelli, a quick fix. If Juventus and other European so called superclubs could create a Super League, revenue might not only increase but actually be guaranteed. Instead of the exciting jeopardy of Champions League qualification in a putative European Super League, the 12 founding members, including six from England, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester City, Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea, would never be knocked out. With a 3.5 billion euro loan from JP Morgan to be shared among the clubs, the plan would have instantly blown away Juve's cash flow problems. News of the super league broke in April 2021 and it quickly became a PR disaster for Agnelli, Juventus and just about everyone else involved. The secrecy of the plan made it seem sneaky, and the closed shop nature of competition, albeit with six additional places up for grabs each year, made the clubs appear arrogant. When you're making change in sport, says Roger Mitchell, the trick is humility. You need to say you respect the past and so on. But with the Super League, the comms were horrible. Since the proposed Super League would have ended outright UEFA's iconic competition, the Champions League. It was a direct assault on UEFA, and Schefferin felt personally wounded by his friend's betrayal. In a hastily arranged press conference in April 2021, Jefferin denounced the disgraceful self serving proposal and talked about the club's greed, selfishness and narcissism. He compared Agnelli to a snake and later a vampire. The very public spat between UEFA and the Super League became a personal battle between their respective figureheads, Ceffarin and Agnelli. The former had been brought up in humble surroundings in Slovenia. A lean strategist, Cafferin easily outmaneuvered Agnelli, playing the part of the common man to perfection. We will not allow them to take football away from us, he said, encouraging fan protests across the continent. By contrast, Agnelli appeared privileged and elitist. He looked like a trust fund baby, says Mitchell. Within days of its midnight launch, the Super League brand had become toxic. Wavering clubs Paris St Germain and Bayern Munich backed UEFA, and the English clubs began hastily withdrawing and apologizing to their fans. For years, Agnelli had exuded an aura of patrician professionalism, but now he appeared incompetent. A spray painted picture of him stabbing and deflating a football in Rome was widely shared on social media. To his critics, he was the man who wanted to kill the sport. For those who had worked at Juventus, the Super League fiasco was no surprise. According to various sources who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, the workplace was always dysfunctional. Agnelli thinks he's a visionary, one former executive told me. But he's a sociopath, a complete control freak. With the prospect of super league cash gone, Agnelli was desperately trying to find ways to generate income. In September 2021, he hosted a power lunch for the bosses of the Fagg Serie A and of various other clubs in an attempt to persuade them to create a media company to handle the broadcast rights for Serie A. I hope something emerges from this, he confided to the director general of Atalanta after the meeting in a wiretapped conversation. Otherwise, I don't know what to do. We're slowly going to crash. Shortly afterwards, the club was forced to return to shareholders for a recapitalization, having already sought a cash injection of 298 million euros in December 2019. In December 2021, they raised a further 400 million euros from shareholders. There was also increasing disquiet within the club about Plus Wallense. One executive was recorded by investigators. I swear I've had evenings in which I go home and I feel sick just thinking about it. The practice of buying and selling players purely for bookkeeping reasons was taking its toll on the team, too. The team's manager, Max Allegri, was furious at the incessant churn. Last year's transfers were only about Plusvarense, and so it was a fucked up market, he complained in a wiretapped conversation with Fabio Paratici. There's no reasoning, one executive said to a colleague in another recording. For as long as Marotta was there, he could put brakes on him. But once he left, Fabio had carte blanche. He could wake up in the morning and sign 20 million euros without anyone saying anything. Paratici, who declined to be interviewed for this article, eventually left Juventus in May 2021. In the immediate aftermath of Agnelli's resignation last November, Juventus announced that it had revised its accounts, admitting that it had underestimated losses for the 202021 year by 21 million euros, bringing its official losses to 226.8 million euros. The financial statements of Juventus, the FEGC wrote in his ruling against the club in January, are simply not reliable. Agnelli was banned from involvement in Italian football for two years. Paratici, the man at the center of the scandal, was banned for two and a half. FIFA, the governing body of global football, has since extended that ban worldwide after losing his appeal. Earlier this month, Paratici resigned from his role as managing director of football at Tottenham Hotspur, the club he joined in summer of 2021. Juventus has announced that the company trusts it will be in a position to demonstrate the correctness of its conduct at the plus Walense retrial, which will take place at the end of May. There is no possibility that Juventus will go bust. 63.8% of its shares are held by the financial giant Xor, which is owned by the Agnelli family and which enjoyed a net income in 2022 of 6.2 billion euros. But the crisis is likely to become even more acute in the coming months. The next hearing into the criminal case will take place on May 10, and UEFA might also intervene with powers to impose transfer embargoes, financial penalties or even exclusion from UEFA competitions. Those who defend Juventus point out that it is subject to far more scrutiny, not just because it is the country's most famous club, but because as one of only two publicly listed companies in Serie A, the other being Lazio, it is subject to different rules and increased scrutiny. It's a real encumbrance to have to work in a publicly traded club, said Secko. All the other football clubs that are not publicly listed companies have a greater freedom of action and a big advantage compared to those that are. Most observers feel it's inevitable that Juventus will be delisted in the coming months to avoid such restrictions and burdens. But buying out all other shareholders is likely to be an extremely expensive operation for Xor. In February, Juventus supporters complaining of buyers were given extra ammunition when footage emerged from 2019 in which Ciro Santoriello, who would go on to become one of the Prisma investigators, joked about being a Napoli fan who hates Juventus. If the system wants to bring down a protagonist, it can always create a scandal, carlo Diana, the former Juventus marketing manager, told me. Many Juventus insiders believe that although he came up with the wrong answers, Andrea Agnelli was actually asking the right how can Italian football increase revenue to make it competitive once more? Juve's crisis lays bare the financial predicament in which most Italian football clubs now find themselves. There is a vicious circle of low investment, which makes it hard to attract or retain the very best players, which makes it impossible to sell media rights at top rates, which means there is low investment and on and on. The product just looks awful, says Mitchell. The stadiums are dreadful. The empty stands look horrible. The football is two gears slower than in Spain or England. A law that limits the sale of broadcast rights to short term deals means that investors have no incentive to nurture the long term development of the product. The collapse of TV rights sales has brought many Italian clubs to the brink of bankruptcy. In the 2021-24 cycle, the foreign rights to Serie A were sold for $658 million, compared with in the 2022-25 period, the Premier League's $6.55 billion, or for the 2018-24 period, La Liga's 4.48 billion euros. With current income from foreign media rights now so low, Serie A clubs are exploring selling a share of future revenues to investors. In June 2022, Barcelona, another club caught up in the spending arms race at now 1.1 billion euros in debt, sold 25% of the club's TV rights until 2047 to an investment firm. Football finance experts are aghast at the prospect, likening the move to taking out a second mortgage. It's always jam today, pay tomorrow, says Mitchell. Like many others, he uses the language of addiction to describe clubs desperate search for cash. These deals, he wrote recently on his Consultancy Business website, are like giving a junkie 10 bags of cash with the request that they go and get a hot meal. You know what is really going to happen. Rather than investing in infrastructure, the money will go on players and agents. In the never ending quest for sporting success, the former Juventus sporting director points to subtle, almost anthropological reasons for the current crisis. Football in Italy, he says, has always been a party, something that allowed you to escape the conditions of your life. Football was outside all the stipulations for other activities. It was never given to accounting rigor. It wasn't even a business. Deals are still done in a hotel or a restaurant, and that's part of the conviviality that is in Italian's nature. Until very recently, football teams in Italy were consciously unbusinesslike. They were loss making clubs subsidized by a local entrepreneur or in Juventus case, a global one. The Juventus crisis illustrates the fraught and evolving relationship between sport and finance. It was once a point of principle that all sport was amateur, more Corinthian than capitalist, as Mitchell says. Precisely what made sport appealing its ludic scorn for worldly concerns, its relishing of risk and uncertainty and underdog surprises rendered it unappealing to investors who demand predictable returns. The traditional European model embodied by the Agnellis was patrician largesse. When winning championships was the only thing that matters, no one cared how much money they lost. The most generous interpretation of Andrea Agnelli's downfall is that despite his best efforts, he remained an amateur in a sport that is now peopled by prose. A less generous one is that, like a profligate aristocrat, he never learned to cut his coat according to his cloth. And when he realized the scale of the problem he faced, his solutions only led his club further into the mire. Thanks again for listening to the Guardian long read. That was I Feel Like I'm Selling My Soul Inside the Crisis at Juventus by Tobias Jones, read by Daniel d' Alessandro and produced by Jack Claramont and Nicola Alexandru. The executive producer was Eli Burey.
- [45:53]
Tobias Jones
For more Guardian long reads in text
- [45:56]
Guardian Narrator
and a selection in audio, go to theguardian.com longread. This is the Guardian.
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