The Reasons Behind Andrea Agnelli’s Sudden Resignation As Juventus President

On the evening of Monday, November 28, as Portugal faced Uruguay in the 2022 FIFA World Cup, all board members of Italy’s Serie A giant Juventus suddenly announced their resignation.

“All the members of the Board of Directors present at the meeting declared to forego their office,” reads the club’s official press release. “Each of the three directors with powers (the Chairman of the Board of Directors Andrea Agnelli, the Vice Chairman Pavel Nedved and the Chief Executive Officer Maurizio Arrivabene) has considered appropriate to forego the powers granted to them.”

This marks the end of a 12-year tenure for iconic president Andrea Agnelli, who was the fourth in his family line to hold the highest office at Juventus, the Serie A club that boasts the most league titles (36) in Italian soccer.

As the Associated Press recently reported, investigations into Juventus’s financial activity have been underway for over a year.

Marco Bellinazzo, one of the major experts at the intersection of soccer and finance in Italy and author of the book Le Nuove Guerre del Calcio (“The New Football Wars”), shed light on the reasons behind this seemingly abrupt decision.

“This is an offshoot of the investigation by Turin’s Public Prosecutor’s Office, which had questioned Juventus’s financial statements over the last three years, based on the fictional plusvalenze and, especially, on the salary maneuver”, Bellinazzo told me in an interview this morning.

“In the document released by Juventus, the plusvalenze topic is not mentioned because it’s an allegation that is rarely backed up,” he continued.

Instead, in the four-page public statement posted last night by Juventus, the focus is mainly on salaries.

Bellinazzo explains that the issue dates back to the spring of 2020, when Juventus announced savings for almost €90 million as a result of the players’ decision to temporarily forego compensation for four months in light of the Covid-19 pandemic putting the Italian league on hiatus. This deal was renegotiated when Serie A resumed action in the summer.

“According to the Prosecutor’s Office, a large part of those emoluments – about three monthly installments – were paid under various forms, and they should have been recorded differently from what Juventus did,” Bellinazzo said.

“In their public statement, Juventus have acknowledged the majority of these remarks and, following directions by Consob (the authority that supervises Italy’s financial markets), they have revisited their financial statements for 2020 and 2021 and will revisit the one relative to 2022, which will have to be approved in a January 2023 meeting.”

Juventus officials might face trials in the future, which is why they opted for resignation as the best course of action at this time.

“The Board of Directors’ members, given the centrality and the relevance of the pending legal and technical/accounting matters, considered in the best interest of the Company that Juventus provided itself with a new Board of Directors to address these matters,” reads the official statement by Juventus.

Amid resignations by all board members, Maurizio Scanavino, the CEO of Italian media conglomerate GEDI, has been appointed as the club’s new general manager.

The news, which came to the surprise of the entire Italian soccer community, contributes to escalating tensions around a club that recently suffered the largest loss ever in Serie A history.