European Super League founder Andrea Agnelli: visionary or out of touch?
By James Horncastle 6h ago
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Sergio Marchionne, the late and great former CEO of Fiat Chrysler, used to say: “In big business, who commands is alone.”
Juventus’ president Andrea Agnelli will be aware of that line. His father Umberto appointed Marchionne to turn the car giant around in 2003 and not only did he save it, but he also transformed Fiat’s fortunes and took the business into a whole new era.
Agnelli presumably hopes to do the same with the football industry. For a long time, it felt like he was the only one who thought the format and governance of European football needed a change. He has often cut a solitary figure while advocating for reform of the sport over the last five years. But evidently, the public silence of his peers did not reflect isolation in private.
As chairman of the European Club Association (ECA),
a position he resigned from on Sunday night, Agnelli has been the public face and lightning rod for a challenge to the football pyramid at a time when likeminded owners felt more comfortable staying in the shadows and keeping their counsel while pushing for a reorganisation of that now feels like a daring and provocative revolution.
What’s surprising is Agnelli is not a football parvenu like some of the other investors behind clubs in the Super League. Juventus has been in the Agnelli family’s hands for almost 100 years. The centenary of their involvement with the Old Lady comes in 2023. Agnelli grew up around the club. Look back through the footage of Juventus’ games’ in the 1990s and you’ll catch a glimpse of him in his early 20s hanging around the team. He’s woven into the fabric of the club and should know football inside out.
As a fan, some would argue he should know better. After all, Agnelli is not an absentee administrator out of touch with the club he runs or the sport he works in. He’s in the office every day and followed in his father’s footsteps in becoming president. Football has been his calling. You might say it has been the making of him.
As was the case with Umberto he is not the scion of the family. Andrea’s uncle Gianni was the most prominent Agnelli and while he carries the famous name, it’s his cousin John Elkann who chairs Exor, the family holding company with assets worth €172.6 billion. Compared with Ferrari and the recently founded Stellantis — a cross-border merger between Fiat and the PSA Group, the French car manufacturer behind Peugeot and Citreon — Juventus are by no means the biggest asset on Exor’s portfolio. To give an example, Ferrari brought in revenues of €3.7 billion in 2019. By the same token, Juventus raised a little over €600 million. Obviously, in brand terms, there is immense cultural capital and sentimental significance tied up in owning and running one of the biggest clubs in the most followed sport in the world.
As the fourth Agnelli to serve as president of Juventus, Andrea is honouring a family tradition. The role he performs for Elkann and Exor, however, isn’t too dissimilar to what Ed Woodward does for
the Glazers at Manchester United or Marina Granovskaia for Roman Abramovich at Chelsea. It’s a duty he has carried out to great effect.
For all the schadenfreude apportioned to Agnelli since a remark he made about Atalanta went viral, the work he has done in re-establishing his club as a force again is extraordinary, even taking into account their recent embarrassing Champions League exits at the hands of Ajax and
Porto.
People forget what a state Juventus were in before he ascended to the presidency in 2010. The Calciopoli match-fixing scandal four years earlier had culminated in the first and only relegation in the club’s history. The Old Lady had to relinquish her place on the podium of the Deloitte Football Money League and she hasn’t been back since. At the time, the revenue Juventus were making contracted from €251.2 million to €145.2 million, with broadcast and commercial contracts having to undergo renegotiation after an infamous demotion. Players such as Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Lilian Thuram, Ballon d’Or winner Fabio Cannavaro, Patrick Vieira and Gianluca Zambrotta left.
Juventus did instantly bounce back up with Gianluigi Buffon, Alessandro Del Piero, Giorgio Chiellini and Pavel Nedved still in their ranks, but glory was not instantly restored: the brand was hurt and economic cost severe. The club missed out on the Champions League four times in six seasons at a time when regular involvement in that competition was becoming more lucrative than ever.
The gap between Juventus and their continental peers widened and appeared set in stone. It has been something Agnelli has been working to bridge ever since he became president in 2010. Whatever you make of him, the success of the past nine years is astonishing and should not be taken for granted. After all, Agnelli inherited a team that finished seventh and it was no quick fix. A year later they were exactly where he found them. Seventh again. His first managerial appointment Gigi Delneri did not work out and signings like Milos Krasic and Jorge Martinez (remember them?) flopped.
Juventus couldn’t appeal to top players — Antonio Di Natale turned them down. Agnelli ended up taking a chance on former captain Antonio Conte, who had repeated the trick of getting a side from Serie B promoted after his one and only spell managing in the top flight, with Atalanta, ended with his dismissal just three months in. Conte’s arrival, the signing of Andrea Pirlo from AC Milan on a free transfer, and the inauguration of their new Allianz Stadium unexpectedly restored Juventus to the top of the Italian game where they have been for almost a decade. At times they have made it look easy when easy it ain’t, as the last couple of seasons demonstrate.
The position of dominance Juventus established for themselves was earned. They capitalised on the Milan clubs entering long periods of decline, started to go deep in the Champions League when Serie A only had a couple of automatic places and made hardly any mistakes. An undefeated season, a 102-point campaign, a first Coppa Italia in two decades, two Champions League finals in four years, a series of tricky rebuilds and the transformation of the club from stepping stone for Paul Pogba to a destination for Cristiano Ronaldo. Juventus became relevant and credible again under Agnelli. For all the cachet of his name, it’s this record that gave his opinion weight and secured him more influence within the game.
Juventus’ revenues climbed almost 200 per cent with him at the helm but they were still around half what Barcelona were making in 2018-19. Reaching those Champions League finals in Berlin in 2015 and Cardiff in 2017 where Lionel Messi, Neymar and Luis Suarez then Ronaldo, Gareth Bale and Karim Benzema vanquished them was an overachievement. Juventus had to fight tooth and nail to stay in the Deloitte Money League top 10.
In the past, Agnelli has said Juventus straddle the first- and second-class carriages of European football’s bullet train. They do not have Premier League TV contracts or state wealth behind them. Agnelli has had to take risks and innovate. The logo change, a pivot to a lifestyle and entertainment brand and the signing of one of the most famous people in the world who just so happens to have won the Ballon d’Or five times was the next phase of Juventus’ growth strategy. “We’ve got to become more mainstream, more pop,” Agnelli said at the launch of the new crest.
“We have new targets who are not your classic football fan: millennials, women and kids. We have to ask ourselves what is the little girl in Shanghai and the millennial in Mexico City thinking?” This has guided his approach to the reform of European football too. Juventus’ motto Live Ahead is evocative of Agnelli’s constant preoccupation with the future and what Generation Z are interested in. With so many things competing for their attention, how can you capture their imagination? Is it football as we know it? Evidently, he doesn’t think so. Is it the same teams playing over and over again ad nauseam with no jeopardy? Apparently.
“What will football be like in 2040?” Agnelli asked in an op-ed published at the start of the year. Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, liked to say “change before you have to”. It’s a line Agnelli is particularly fond of and one he applies to football. He was advocating for the sport to reform itself even before COVID-19 hit. But the pandemic has forced an acceleration. Rather than change before you have to, the time to change is seemingly now upon the clubs at the top of the game. They can’t afford to wait any longer.
For all the discourse about greed and the rich getting richer, the 12 signatories to the Super League lost £1.2 billion before player sales last season. The founders’ fee offers much-needed liquidity at a time of crisis and the clubs now have more control over their own destinies. Let’s see what they do with it because from now on they’re on their own. The title of the article that Agnelli wrote — “how to govern the best show on earth” — is key to understanding the events of the last few days. It underlines how important governance and decision-making power is to the elite.
“The organisers/regulators are neither the protagonists (the players) or the investors (the owners),” Agnelli wrote for online Italian newspaper Linkiesta. “But they manage the game, cash the money and make decisions. When growth is constant the structural problems are hidden, when disruption happens, change is unavoidable.” That change has now happened. But is it the change fans really want to see? Judging by the hostile reaction, the answer is an emphatic “no”.
Agnelli’s uncle, Gianni, used to say: “I love the future and I like young people. My life has always been a bet on the future.” His nephew and the other clubs involved in the Super League are taking a huge gamble. Whether it pays off remains to be seen.
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