Juventus have landed itself in some major legal trouble. The team that won the Serie A title nine times in a row from 2011 to 2020 are now at risk of being relegated to the Serie B. Their downfall has been shocking and also years in the making.
They might’ve dominated the Italian league for almost the entirety of the last decade, but things weren’t so pretty behind-the-scenes.
Juve earned the reputation of being really smart financially, buying quality players as free agents and rarely spending major fees on new signings.
But with the greed of winning more titles and signing top-quality players came at a price. Towards the end of their domination in the Serie A title wins over the last decade, they became quite desperate and started to sign players at high fees and major wages too.
In the summer transfer window of 2022, they spent over €150m just in transfer fees – despite signing multiple players on loan with an obligation to buy later on.
Juventus don’t really have the commercial revenue akin to the likes of Real Madrid, Manchester United or Bayern Munich – so they had to incur some losses to do so.
It appears that they went a little bit overboard with their losses. Last month, Juventus’ entire board of directors resigned from their positions in a truly astounding move – which included the likes of president Andrea Agnelli, vice-president Pavel Nedved and more backing away from their positions.
The reason is that they were being investigated by the Italian authorities for being involved in illegal financial activities. Juventus recorded insane losses of over €250m for the 2021-22 season, putting even more pressure on their management.
Since then, it has also been discovered that the management is also being investigated for illegal payments made to their players at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
This was done to avoid putting that added amount to their financial statement and help lower their losses for that season.
It seems that Agnelli convinced the players to publicly announce that they will forgo four months of their salary during the lockdown period in 2020, but continued paying them under the table without any official records for it.
The players ended up only forgoing one month’s of salary and received three months’ wages without any public record of that. This was discovered by the authorities after looking into the Juventus squad’s WhatsApp chat history during that period.
Apparently, then-captain Giorgio Chiellini assured his side that they’ll get three months of the salaries they publicly vowed to forgo under the table from the management.
As per Corriere Dello Sport, Juventus players from that period also played active parts in helping the investigators get proof of this.
One of them is Netherlands’ defender Matthijs de Ligt. The Dutchman joined Bayern Munich earlier in the summer but was a Juventus player during the 2020 Covid period.
Apparently, it was him that had saved his former teammates’ group’s WhatsApp history and taken screenshots of the chats where the players are assured that they’ll receive three months’ wages illegally.
Along with him, Mattia De Sciglio – who currently plays for Juventus – also gave evidence of the WhatsApp chat history. Well, it appears that De Ligt and De Sciglio both truly hate Juventus or at least how they constantly committed illegal activities during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The future isn’t looking so good for Bianconeri. If they are truly caught red-handed in being guilty of the major financial frauds committed over the last few years, they could actually be relegated to Serie B – which could be a repeat of the 2006 Calciopoli scandal that saw them dropped to the second division.
