Juventus a strong contender for the most disastrous 2022 in Europe

Juventus have had a bad 2022, with allegations of financial misconduct, an early exit from the Champions League and the European Super League floundering.

There are no good times to bury bad news if the bad news is bad enough. Juventus capped off a miserable 2022 with the resignation of the club’s entire board of directors at the end of November, the latest in a steady fine rain of of bad news which has quietly soaked the club since the middle of March.

And with several of their players having had a good World Cup, the question is not whether Juventus can continue their recent trajectory towards some sort of form, but whether they may even need to sell some of these assets – whose values may have risen quite suddenly – to balance the books again.

The beginning of the descent of Juventus over the course of 2022 started in March with their sudden – and fairly unexpected – elimination from the Champions League at the hands of Villarreal. Last season had not started well for them; they were bottom of the table after three matches with just a single point, before an initially slightly faltering return to form saw them lift themselves up to fourth place in the Serie A.

But while there were reasons to believe that Juventus had weaknesses, they’d been unbeaten in Serie A since the end of November going into their return leg against the eventual semi-finalists. They’d sailed through their group stage with five wins out of six. It wasn’t the levels that the club had been reaching a few years ago, but it was a definite improvement on their start.

And the first leg ended in a decent result in the last season before UEFA abolished away goals, a 1-1 draw which gave them a reasonable advantage to take back for the second leg in Turin. But when it hit, it was like a tsunami. Three Villarreal goals in 14 minutes didn’t just knock the wind out of their sails, it knocked the club so badly off-kilter that it becomes difficult to believe that many of their current issues could have stemmed from this moment.

After returning to Serie A with a win against Salernitana, they lost at home to Inter the following week and went on to win just three of their last eight games. Fourth place and another season of Champions League football was ensured. This was deemed a reasonable return on the first season back for head coach Massimiliano Allegri, who’d returned to the club the previous May following the sacking of Andrea Pirlo, who had just failed to win their tenth consecutive Serie A title.

On the pitch, this has been a strange season for the club. A slow start in Serie A saw them win just three of their first nine league games, dropping to eighth place in the table as a result, but this was nothing in comparison with their escapades in the Champions League, in which they won just won of their six group matches and ended up 11 points adrift of group qualifiers Benfica and PSG.

But elimination from the Champions League seems to have had a liberating effect on the team. As their chances of getting through to the knockout stages crumbled before them, their form in the league took a sudden upswing. Juventus won their last six successive games before the World Cup break and are back into third place in Serie A, breathing hot down the necks of second-placed Milan.

And getting knocked out of the Champions League has at least allowed European football to continue for Juventus. There’s no place in the Europa League for teams who get knocked out of the last 16, but there is one for everybody who comes third, and the upshot of all this is that Juventus play Nantes in February. Should the team’s form have continued in the same vein as before the midwinter break-up, they may well be considering the Europa League a reasonable return for this season.

Off the pitch, things haven’t been quite so rosey. The club has come to define itself politically as one of the three continuing to chase for the European Super League but news on this front wasn’t especially encouraging, with an initial judgement finding that UEFA rules are compatible with European competition law.

The opinions of advocate general Athanasios Rantos are non-binding, but a final ruling will be given by a 15-member Grand Chamber of the European Court of Justice in March, and it would be surprising were the final verdict to be much different from this report. Entirely predictably, La Liga jumped straight in, claiming that ‘immediate sanctions’ should be levied against the club. Somewhat more productively, the European Club Association is offering an ‘olive branch’ to allow the club to put the European Super League behind them and rejoin UEFA’s fold.

But even this wasn’t the worst news that the club received in the month leading up to Christmas. At the end of November, the club’s entire board of directors, including president Andrea Agnelli and vice-president Pavel Nedved, resigned from the club, quite suddenly and en masse. This came about after Juventus’ financial statements underwent scrutiny by prosecutors and Italian market regulator Consob over alleged false accounting and market manipulation.

The Turin Public Prosecutor’s Office discovered the existence of hidden agreements between the club and a number of players, guaranteeing them three months’ wages in the early stages of the COVID pandemic, despite publicly stating that these had been waived. It has already been recommended that the matter be put to trial, and it’s also been confirmed that players could also be implicated.

Gianluca Ferrero is Agnelli’s successor as president and Maurizio Scanavino has been named the new chief executive, and the remaining vacant positions will be filled at a shareholders’ meeting on the 18th January, but there has been little indication that the club will be changing course in terms of its policy over the European Super League. Agnelli resigned his senior positions within UEFA to fight this battle, after all. In other news, at the same time as these resignations were announced, it was confirmed that the club had lost an eye-watering £220m for the 2021/22 season – a record-breaking loss in the history of the club.

And this creates associated pressures. Adrien Rabiot had an impressive World Cup with France but his contract with Juventus is up at the end of this season. The club has so far stated that they will be entertaining no offers for Rabiot during the upcoming January transfer window, but would they really be able to resist a mildly insensible offer from a Premier League club?

Rabiot has made no secret of his interest in playing in England before, and with interest in him likely to be coming from more than one club, such a situation cannot be fully ruled out. Would Juventus resist an eight-digit sum just to get an extra six months? Considering their losses last year, would it be wise for them to try to persuade him to stay by offering him Premier League wages? Does wisdom even come into it, when it comes to Juventus?

Of course, Juventus are A Big Club, and Big Clubs always have potential outs. They’re eight points adrift of Serie A leaders Napoli, but while that’s a big gap to make up over the second half of the season, it is possible. Nantes are beatable opponents in the next round of Europe, and the Europa League could be a winnable competition for an in-form Max Allegri team.

It remains possible that likely changes in ownership in England could lead to a European Super League starting to look more like a viable proposition again rather than a continent-wide standing joke. And it remains possible that the Italian legal system could find a way of exonerating Juventus of the serious matters of which they’ve been accused. But with the European Super League continuing to look like yesterday’s news, financial losses building, and a return to the days of successive league titles looking remote, Juventus need a better 2023 than 2022.