Juve, goodbye to the Super League: Elkann’s club finally closes with the past

It was a complicated, painful, bumpy journey. Controversial, above all. It took two years, indeed more, and new managers, who arrived from worlds unrelated to football. Finally, yesterday evening, the surrender was signed: Juve contacted Real and Barcelona – the other survivors – to discuss the Juventus club’s exit from the Superlega project. A wrong project for many reasons, above all because it is based on unsportsmanlike criteria: I participate in the richest tournament in the world because it’s me, if you are better and you finish ahead of me in the league it doesn’t count, you still stay out. A punch to meritocracy, loyalty, history. An idea so unhealthy that it was abandoned in great haste by nine out of twelve clubs (Inter first, Milan immediately after). La Gazzetta dello Sport condemned it and fought it from the first day, indeed from the first minute. However, the fact that Juve are now abandoning him, albeit belatedly, is not our success: sport has simply won.

The signal

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The decision of the new Juve to withdraw from the Superlega is a sign – another – of a break with the past. It was Andrea Agnelli who plunged into this adventurous project, from which he did not back down even when it became clear to everyone that he had no prospects of success. The Juventus club, Real, Barcelona: three clubs against the rest of Europe, alone, as if they lived in another world. With the Juventus top management skipped due to the criminal and sporting trials that involved them, their successors needed time to understand which was the right line to follow. They took their time, studied a reality they had never experienced up close (the new establishment is made up of economists and jurists rather than sportsmen). So the decisive indication came from John Elkann: enough with the Super League.

the consequences

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Juve’s decision also has a political implication. The Juventus club has two open fronts with Uefa: in addition to the Superlega, there is the proceeding for capital gains and salary maneuvers (a chapter that has just ended with our home sports justice with ten penalty points and a fine). The risk is that, on an international level, the Turin club will be excluded from the cups for one or more seasons; judgment is expected within a few weeks. Even if the two issues are not directly linked, because the bodies called upon to deal with them are different, it is clear that having good relations with UEFA can create a better climate around Juve in Nyon. Ceferin expected the Juventus club to take a concrete and public step towards him on the Superlega, in short, he wanted the new managers to give a clear signal of discontinuity with respect to the Agnelli management (by whom he also felt betrayed due to the personal relationship that bound him to him). Now that Juve’s move has arrived, everything should be easier.

détente and threats

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In the note released yesterday, Juve clarifies that the renunciation of the Superlega is not due “to alleged threats of possible sanctions by UEFA”. A22 Sports, which manages the project of the three clubs, claims instead to have proof of those threats. A very thorny story. Certainly the proceeding against the Juventus club for capital gains and wage maneuvers will take place in a different atmosphere now. This doesn’t mean that Juve won’t be condemned and punished: there’s no certainty about the verdict, obviously. But there will not even be the afterthought that a possible negative sentence is due to events extraneous to those at the center of the trial. Like, for example, at the Super League.