Juventus chief Andrea Agnelli is a creeping, crawling, self-serving, protectionist snake. He is a man without a single cell of feeling for sport or sporting integrity. His plan will kill off football
- Andrea Agnelli's proposed plan will destroy the Champions League and football
- His stupidity would kill a sport that belongs to the working men and women
- Agnelli and his allies are frightened little men with plans to make football dull
That Andrea Agnelli is the president of the European Clubs’ Association says all that needs to be known about the creeping, crawling, self-serving, protectionist snakes at the elite end of that organisation. He is a man without a single cell of feeling for sport or sporting integrity.
He has lucked out by birth into control of one of football’s great dynasties — Juventus. And from this position of enormous good fortune, he wants to destroy the greatest club competition in the world and football as it is known and loved.
Not spoil, or harm, or even ruin. Destroy. If the type of structure Agnelli proposes came to pass, the Champions League as a competition of interest would be no more. Domestic football would be as good as finished. His greed, his stupidity, would kill a sport that belongs not to entitled children of trust funds and inheritance, but to the working men and women across Europe and beyond.
Our game, our fun — not his desperate revenue stream. Our sliver of pleasure, not his security blanket, because he has messed up the financial model of his own business in Serie A.
Agnelli is a mediocre mind in a world increasingly full of them, so it stands to reason it is mediocrity he wishes to reward and enshrine.
Agnelli spoke at the Financial Times Business of Football Summit in London last week, when he came up with his plan to preserve bad football.
‘I have great respect for everything Atalanta are doing, but without international history and thanks to just one great season, they had direct access to the primary European club competition,’ said Agnelli.
In other words, the closed shop. That is what he wants for the Champions League. To seal it from meritocracy, the same handful of wealthy elite clubs playing the same repetitive fixtures year after year, regardless of their quality.
Yet their place should be preserved in perpetuity, at the expense of better, smaller clubs, because of a moment in time?
Sure, they win Serie A every year, which is why the league does badly in foreign markets, because who wants to watch that — but beyond? If Agnelli wants to talk contribution to European football, Juventus have no greater pedigree as rulers of it than Nottingham Forest. Two European crowns, the same as Brian Clough. That’s it for Italy’s greatest, richest club.
Juventus haven’t won the Champions League this century or in its modern, 32-club format. There were 24 teams in the competition and only 16 in the group stage when Juventus last won in 1996. It was still the European Cup the time before that, in 1984-85.
Juventus had to overcome the mighty Ilves Tampere of Finland, Grasshoppers Zurich, Sparta Prague and Bordeaux before beating Liverpool in the final.
That aside, their claim to fame is the most losing finals in Champions League and European Cup history — seven, including their last five on the spin.
The biggest club in Spain, Real Madrid, has 13 titles, Bayern Munich have five, Manchester United three — although Liverpool have six — Ajax four. Juventus are eclipsed by their equivalents in every European country and by AC Milan in their own, with seven. No wonder Agnelli wishes to lower the bar of achievement for an entitled few.
It terrifies him to see Atalanta in his own country, or Leicester, Wolves and Sheffield United in this one, on the brink of breaking into his cosy little cartel.
He’s bought Cristiano Ronaldo and still can’t get the lucrative broadcast markets interested in Juventus the way they are in Premier League stragglers. And while Atalanta stuck four past Valencia last month, his own team lost to Lyon, currently the seventh placed team in France.
This is what Agnelli and his allies demand. They want the right to finish above Atalanta and Leicester even when they don’t, the right to be rewarded even when so plainly inferior.
They want the right to kill dreams, to strangle competition. They are frightened little men with plans that would only make football dull and mediocre.
All the wealth ring-fenced for the few, the first day of the season a shrug because nothing can happen and certainly won’t. It is the opposite of what sport should be.
We resist this now, or future generations will watch programmes about what football used to be like in the early 21st century — before Andrea Agnelli and his contemptible type killed our game stone dead.
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