Andrea Agnelli and John Elkann, how the showdown at Juventus-Corriere.it was born

At a certain point, Andrea Agnelli no longer had any alternatives: “If you bring this budget to the assembly, we have to go to the prosecutor’s office”, the mayors of Juve essentially said, took office just over a year ago, at the insistence of management. Professionals (three) of a certain level, such as Maria Cristina Zoppo, equity partner of Bdo-Tax and member of the management control committee on the board of Intesa Sanpaolo. Shortly before, Monday for lunch and already on the weekend, the Juventus president had confronted, sincerely and roughly, with his cousin, John Elkann, CEO of Exor, the family holding company that controls the club. Moral: the accounting and judicial situation was no longer sustainable.

We are not
Lambs Knives
of a book that has just come out, but business is business. In fact, on Tuesday afternoon, the words of the majority shareholder arrived: “The resignations of the directors represent an act of responsibility, which puts the company’s interest first”. Everything has its time, from justice (impending) to business (even more): today a conference call with Exor’s analysts and institutional investors is on the menu, and Juventus affairs have recently been troubling the empire. Despite the (listed) club being worth around 700 million euros, 2 percent of Exor’s net asset value, out of 31 billion.

As a manager hissed under the Calciopoli storm, “Juve is the sign of the club”: everyone knows it, all over the world. And from a prodigious cycle, the Agnelli management had taken a disastrous alley, between the field and, above all, the budget, with a red that reached 254 million. Despite capital increases of 700 million in three years. Thus, Elkann said stop, leaving three lines of the press release to the now outgoing president: «I want to thank my cousin Andrea for giving us extraordinary emotions, which we will never forget. In these 12 years we have won a lot. The credit goes above all to him, as well as to the women and men who have achieved memorable goals under his guidance ».

Agnelli did not hide the fact that two lines of action collided in the email to employees and players, taken by surprise, some at the World Cup and some in the Maldives: «The compactness has failed». After that, it would be wrong to reduce everything to rarefied elective affinities, or to Duelists to Ridley Scott(not since yesterday), if the point is also another:
where is the reason between what Consob and the Prosecutor’s Office claim, and what Juve has done
. When in doubt, the property prepares for battle, albeit with a different approach to the confrontation invoked by Agnelli and put on paper just a week earlier: «The new council will be made up of highly professional figures from a technical and legal point of view – explains Elkann – who will have the task of facing and resolving the legal and corporate issues that are on the table today. I trust that the club will be able to demonstrate that it has always acted correctly.”

In addition to the form, there is the substance of certain things: the Super League launch, Suarez’s exam,
the previously coveted and now suspected capital gains. Blows to the image, not just the piggy bank. It remains who governs on the lawn: «Allegri remains the point of reference in the sports area: we’re counting on him and the whole team to keep winning, as they’ve shown they can do in the last few days, keeping our goals high on the pitch». What this company was no longer able to do for the property. And now, Elkann concludes, “we have the opportunity to build an extraordinary future”. With one Lamb less.