The Other Juve related news discussion thread

Good luck with that, transfer fees are dictated by the clubs so I don't see this investigation going anywhere.

 

It's Juve, Napoli, Roma, Atalanta, Genoa and Sampdoria that are also being investigated.

Also, they can't do shit, there's no set valuation of players method. A club will pay what they think a player is worth. This is just the Italian bureaucracy needing to look like it's doing something again.

It's also why Serie A is becoming a joke. The Saudi's said it best when they were looking at a team to buy (and chose Newcastle) "We talked to Inter Milan, AC [Milan], but the problem was the structure of the league was a mess."

 

Its ********ing hilarious is what it is.

This is how the investigation will go: "So, did you value x player at x value?"
"Yes"
"Oh, and this is reflected in your accounts?"
"Yes"
"Well, we don't like it"
"Tough shit"

The end.

 

Anyone watch All or Northing Juventus yet? I watched all 8 episodes. It was ok, nothing great. They focused on Bonucci and Chiellini WAAAAY too much.

Also, seeing Pirlo work behind the scenes, it was clear that the team wasn't good enough for him. Now, not sure if he deserved the boot or not, especially with the way this season is going.

 

Not gonna happen

 

He won two trophies and finished in 4th. Juve will be lucky to finish in the EL places with the way they're going, much less winning two trophies.

 

They just weren't good enough, like now. Not performing well. You can see he would set up a certain system and players would just go off and do their own thing, and he'd call them out on it too.

Bonucci liked to talk like he was the big man dispensing sage advice that everyone should follow and then he goes and does opposite of what he said. I dislike him even more after watching the series.

 

I would still recommend it, I knew what the results were so I knew what was coming. I liked seeing how some people reacted to it.

 

And with basically the same team they're doing much worse. Watching AoN has changed my perception of Pirlo. I think he should have been given another chance.

 

Fresh from my in box, here is NY Times soccer correspondent Rory Smith on Juve:




December 3, 2021


The Demise of the Old Lady





From the Super League to financial regulators to mounting losses, the news just keeps getting worse at Juventus.Isabella Bonotto/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images



By Rory Smith


Perhaps the best measure of how concerned Juventus is by image — of how central to the club’s identity is the way that identity is projected and perceived — is that it may well be the only team in world soccer to have its own, custom-designed font.

It was commissioned in 2017, presumably after a raft of meetings that featured intense, sincere discussions about what typeface best conveyed the team’s values and mission. The font appears in all of the club’s marketing campaigns. It is deployed on all its social media pronouncements. It adorns the Juventus offices in Turin and Milan.


Using the font is important to Juventus executives: uniformity of iconography, they believe, is crucial in helping build the club’s brand, in expressing to current fans and prospective ones and, where none can be found, putative customers, quite what Juventus stands for. Everything the club publishes has to have that distinctive, recognizable Juventus look. Image comes first.

All of which makes the events of the last few months — perhaps longer — difficult to understand. First, there is the ongoing and now faintly masochistic devotion of Andrea Agnelli, the club’s president, to a Super League project that has not only cost him friendships and positions of power, but that has been met with pretty much universal opprobrium from fans. Continued commitment to it is not, as they say, a good look.





Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


And then, more serious still, there is the investigation by Italy’s financial authorities into six current and former executives — including Agnelli and Pavel Nedved, the club’s vice president — into Juventus’s transfer dealings. The authorities are said to be considering various charges of false accounting and reporting. The police have already raided the club’s training facility and its offices. That is not great for the image, either.


It would be easy, then, to see more than a little hubris in Juventus’s on-field travails this season. There is a scene in the first episode of the club’s edition of the “All Or Nothing” documentary series — which started airing on Amazon Prime late last month, and over which the team’s executives hung like hawks, every step of the way — in which Agnelli gathers the members of the playing squad and lets them know, in no uncertain terms, the expectations.

With an expletive or two thrown in, he tells the players that the previous season was not up to scratch. The year in question was the one before last, the one in which Maurizio Sarri led Juventus to a ninth straight Serie A title. The coach, an unlikely appointment who turned into an unpopular incumbent, had gone; Agnelli would not, he said, tolerate a repeat.




The Juventus president Andrea Agnelli, right, and vice president Pavel Nedved are said be to be under investigation for the club's transfer dealings.Massimo Rana/EPA, via Shutterstock

In comparison, of course, that year under Sarri would come to be seen as the last chapter of the golden era. Under his replacement, the novice Andrea Pirlo, Juventus barely scraped into the Champions League — relying on Napoli’s stumbling at home on the final day to make it — and then, over the course of the summer, discovered that Cristiano Ronaldo, the player it had brought in to turn domestic hegemony into continental success, no longer wanted to stick around.


If that seemed like the nadir, it was not. After the failed experiments with Sarri and Pirlo, Juventus restored Massimiliano Allegri as coach this summer. His task was to prioritize “results,” as he has put it, over the pursuit of style that had captivated the club when it decided, a couple of years ago, that it had outgrown Sarri. Juventus had realized, it seemed, that the fact of winning was more central to its identity than the nature of it.

Things are not, though, quite so simple. Allegri’s team has lost five games in Serie A already this season. Relative minnows, like Sassuolo, and actual minnows, like Empoli, have returned from Juventus’s Allianz Stadium with victories. Last weekend, Atalanta won in Turin for the first time in more than 30 years.


Juventus sits seventh in Serie A, 12 points behind Napoli, the early leader. Allegri has already stated his belief that finishing fourth, and securing yet another season in the Champions League, may be the limit of this team’s ambitions. Even that relatively meager target is by no means guaranteed.



Juventus fans are not used to watching a seventh-place team.Massimo Pinca/Reuters


The cause of that decline can be traced to the same root as the demise in Juventus’s image. There is a tendency, in soccer, to believe nobody is capable of doing two things at once: A player taking an interest in off-field activities — whether that is being on TikTok, running a fashion label, feeding hungry children — will, at some point, invariably be told to concentrate on their performances; a club that takes care of its brand identity will be told to focus, instead, on signing players.

It is a false dichotomy, of course. Players can run a business, campaign or social media account and still remember how to mark opponents on corners. Clubs employ hundreds of people, not all of whom are devoted to tactics, nutrition or being a right back.


Where the two threads of Juventus’s struggles entwine is in the rationale behind them. Agnelli favors a Super League because it solves his club’s immediate financial problems. The plusvalenza system that the team’s executives are accused of manipulating offers the same, short-term hit: It makes sure this year’s books look good, with little or no thought to what happens later.



Manager Massimiliano Allegri is already setting limits on what his team can achieve this season.Ciro De Luca/Reuters


That is precisely how Juventus has been run, too. In 2017, after a second defeat in the Champions League final in three years, Agnelli became obsessed with winning instantly. The painstaking, intelligent work that had returned the club to the pinnacle in both Italy and Europe was out; signing players to triumph immediately became the order of the day. A year later, the approach reached its apogee when Ronaldo arrived in Turin.

Now Juventus is paying for that impatience. Ronaldo may be gone, but there are countless others — all on hefty contracts, all eating up the club’s pandemic-ravaged finances, all too costly to be easily offloaded — who remain: Aaron Ramsey and Alex Sandro and Adrien Rabiot.


Allegri has at his disposal the sketch outline of a young, competitive team: Matthijs de Ligt, Rodrigo Bentancur, Manuel Locatelli, Dejan Kulusevski and Federico Chiesa. The club’s decision to establish an under-23 team in Italy’s third tier was made with the future in mind, too.

But none of it can come to fruition while the squad, and the balance sheet, is filled by the underperforming and the overpaid. Juventus has thought for too long about the now, and too little about what comes next. And it is that, ultimately, which will do the damage to its image, to how it is perceived, and how it perceives itself. What matters, after all, is the story a club tells, not how it is written.