Andrea Agnelli’s Juventus Era Is The Classic Rise And Fall Story, So What’s His Legacy?

And just like that, the end arrived, and it was swift.

After 12 years serving as Juventus’ president and residing over a period of unparalleled success in the Italian game, Andrea Agnelli stepped down on a quiet November evening, with the world’s gaze on the 2022 World Cup.

And it wasn’t just Agnelli who resigned, the entire Juventus board resigned en masse, with the exception of current CEO Maurizio Arrivabene, who is only staying on until January when a new board is appointed.

In total, 10 board members have walked, including legendary former player Pavel Nedved, in what is the first major shake up within the club since the Calciopoli summer of 2006.

Juventus have been under investigation for well over a year by the Italian body responsible for overseeing activities in the stock exchange, Consob, for alleged false accounting and providing false information to the market over the last several seasons.

Now, one can put two and two together to get five. “Surely if the entire board has resigned, they’ve found something more sinister than financial doping?” Has been the consensus on social media. No one knows for sure at this stage, but it doesn’t make for a great look from the outside. The club posted astronomical losses of €254m ($263m) in 2021-22, the single greatest loss in Italian football history, but the numbers could prove to be even higher if Juve have to resubmit their financial statements.

Agnelli’s cousin, John Elkann, will now take more control of Juventus, and has already installed Maurizio Scanavino, a 49-year-old general director of Italian publishing group Gedi and someone loyal to Elkann, as general manager of Juve.

But with the Agnelli era now consigned to history, what kind of legacy does he leave?

It can hardly be disputed that Agnelli walks away from Juventus as the most successful president in the club’s history: nine consecutive Scudetti, four consecutive Coppa Italia titles, four domestic doubles, two Champions League final appearances and five consecutive Scudetti for the women’s team.

Off the pitch Agnelli oversaw the final stages of Juve’s move into the new stadium, the building of J Medical, the Continassa training ground and massive sponsorship deals with Adidas and Jeep (albeit Jeep are owned by Exor, the holding company that also controls Juve). On his watch, Juve’s club revenue jumped from €153m ($158m) in 2010/11 to a record high of €459m ($475m) in 2018/19.

In short, Agnelli turned an historical giant that was floundering in middling mediocrity in the late 2000s and early 2010s and restored them to where they ought to be: towards the summit of the European game.

But dig a little deeper and the Agnelli era resembles a good old fashioned rise and fall story. His appointment as Juve president in May 2010 was the first time an Agnelli had held the position since his father Umberto vacated the role in 1962. Yet Agnelli could hardly do any worse than what had come before him. In the post-Calciopoli years, Juve were a club lost. After promotion back to Serie A and a good showing in 2008-09, the club lost steam and made a catalogue of terrible decisions.

Some of Agnelli’s earliest calls were hiring Antonio Conte as coach and giving the green light to sign Andrea Pirlo in the summer of 2011. If Juve were a movie franchise, this was the summer when it got the proverbial reboot. Powered by the maniacal Conte and the genius of Pirlo, Juve won a first league title in six years, seeing off a much better Milan side to the Scudetto.

From there, Agnelli hardly put a foot wrong: he brought debt down and revenue gradually increased, the move to the new stadium turbo boosting the club light years ahead of the rest of Serie A. Even when Conte left abruptly in the summer of 2014, Agnelli hired Max Allegri, and Juve’s dominance of Serie A went into overdrive, with Allegri ostensibly taking the same group of players Conte had complained about the summer before to within 90 minutes of a treble in 2014/15.

Agnelli, together with sporting director Beppe Marotta, earned a reputation for mastering the free agent market: Pirlo, Paul Pogba, Fernando Llorente, Sami Khedira and Dani Alves all arrived over the years. Players like Carlos Tevez and Arturo Vidal were signed for next to nothing. Domestic doubles followed and another appearance in the Champions League final, a second in three years, ended in a 4-1 demolition by Real Madrid.

That final in Cardiff ultimately signalled the end of Agnelli’s rise, but that’s not to say there wasn’t some controversy in the good times. Agnelli was banned by the FIGC for one year due to inadvertently getting mixed up with the Calabrian mafia, the Ndrangheta, in a ticket-touting scheme.

Agnelli had been accused of giving away tickets to a section of the Juve ultras for free in exchange for the age-old Italian custom of ultras creating an atmosphere inside the stadium. He always denied knowledge that one of the Juve ultra members, Raffaello Bucci, was linked to the Ndrangheta. His ban was eventually overturned on appeal and he was fined €100,000 ($103,000).

It was in the second half of the 2010s that Agnelli let the tortoise ‘get away’, as Diego Maradona would say, and the fall began. Juve’s stranglehold on Serie A showed no signs of being broken and Juve’s players were almost winning the league on autopilot. Titles seven, eight and nine followed with Juve playing mediocre football and switching coaches, yet the club were so far ahead of everyone else they could seemingly do as they liked and no one would put up a genuine challenge. And Even when they did, Juve’s mentality often saw them over the line, which was the case in 2017/18 and Napoli falling when it mattered most.

Agnelli felt, and rightly so, that Italy was holding the club back from maximising its true potential. Juve could only go so far while dragging the rest of Serie A behind it, and so in an attempt to generate more cash to compete with the PremierPINC
League, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern and Paris Saint-Germain, he increased ticket prices and signed Cristiano Ronaldo.

The first decision killed any atmosphere inside the stadium, with the raucous noise of the early years diluting into golf claps and a sterile Premier League-vibe setting. The second decision proved damaging on the field.

Ronaldo scored goals for Juve – lots of them – but as was later seen in his second stint at Manchester United, his presence came at a detrimental cost to Juve’s overall play. Juve regressed with each passing season Ronaldo was there and, despite Juve exploiting his presence to renew their sponsorship deal with Adidas, the pandemic blocked other ways for Juve to make the most of possessing arguably the most recognisable athlete in the world.

Marotta’s decision to resign as sporting director shortly after the Ronaldo signing in late 2018 (which has always been denied by everyone involved as an influence), was a major blow to which Juve arguably haven’t recovered from. Agnelli installed Fabio Paratici as Marotta’s replacement, and according to La Gazzetta dello Sport, nearly €500m ($518m) has been spent – or wasted – on failure after failure since.

Agnelli’s pivotal involvement in the creation of the European Super League debacle hardly endeared him across the continent, and his constant refusal to pull Juve out of it, with only they, Madrid and Barcelona remaining, sullying his reputation within the game even further.

Agnelli resigned as chairman of the ECA in 2021 once the Super League was announced, and now with his resignation from Juventus, it remains to be seen what future role he will take up in football, if any. Where Juve go from here remains to be seen, with yet another injection of cash from owners Exor possible.

History will be kind to the Andrea Agnelli era, especially for all of the great decisions in the first half dozen years. The issues that continue to hold Juve back – namely, Serie A’s sad inability to modernise – will plague the next president, too. On this theme Agnelli was undoubtedly correct, but he also facilitated Juve becoming a club that gorged on itself, losing sight of the streamlined way in which they leapt ahead of their main challengers in Serie A in the first place and dominated the league like nobody before.

Juventus may go through a transitional period now but will likely rise again, they’ve done it before. For Agnelli, this could be the end of the road.