‘Judas, Judas, Judas’: The fallout in Serie A from Agnelli’s Super League plans
By James Horncastle Apr 21, 2021
This year marks the 30th anniversary of Sampdoria’s one and only scudetto. Repeating that achievement seems harder than ever now irrespective of the team’s current coach Claudio Ranieri knowing a thing or two about upsetting the odds. As the uproar around the
Super League reached fever pitch, the 69-year-old still represents a dream. “The first thing that came to mind when I was reading about what these European clubs are up to is what Leicester City achieved. Regardless of my part in that success, this is what makes the game beautiful. This is the essence of sport when small teams can compete with the giants. What they’re trying to do is wrong.”
Ranieri was not some solitary reaper, ploughing a lonely furrow.
Verona’s Ivan Juric may not have been able to mount a title challenge to emulate the fairytale of 1985 when his club unexpectedly won Serie A, but he has made a routine of giving the top sides a bloody nose at the Bentegodi. Juventus lost there last year for instance. “I hope it’s sunk,” he said of the Super League. “It will sap emotion out of cities. I’m speechless.” Down in Bologna, his colleague Sinisa Mihajlovic called the whole thing awful. “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” he scoffed. “They’re going to get €350 million right away? They like winning easy and should go and form a league of their own. What are we going to do about it? Bologna might get €30 million and they’re taking €300 million. The gap just gets bigger.”
More withering was Sassuolo’s Roberto De Zerbi, who was so angry about a “coup d’etat” happening in his game that he stopped training and told his players and the club’s chief executive Giovanni Carnevali that if it were down to him they wouldn’t fulfil their fixture against AC Milan on Wednesday.
“It’s almost like you’re not allowed to dream a better future for yourself because of where you come from,” he said. “Like the son of a factory worker not being able to dream about one day becoming a surgeon, a lawyer or a doctor. It annoys me. In my own experience, it’s as if someone in the schoolyard came up to me and said: ‘That’s my ball’, picked it up and took it away.”
The other owners were not taking the Super League announcement lying down either. At a
Serie A meeting on Monday, Juventus president Andrea Agnelli was reportedly interrupted by cries of “
Judas, Judas, Judas” and there were calls for Inter’s chief executive Giuseppe Marotta to resign from his position as the new federal adviser to the league at the Italian Football Federation’s elective assembly.
Roma released a statement saying “some things are more important than money” and came out “strongly opposed” to the Super League “as it flies in the face of the spirit of the game we love”. Parma’s new owner Kyle Krause reminded everyone why he invested in the league.
Torino’s president Urbano Cairo made the most noise but that came as no surprise. The media mogul isn’t short of soapboxes as the majority shareholder of RCS Media Group, which publishes La Gazzetta dello Sport and Il Corriere della Sera in Italy and Marca and El Mundo in Spain. Gazzetta’s front page on Monday called on everyone to “Stop them!” and Cairo was even name-checked by Florentino Perez in his El Chiringuito interview when asked what he made of the Super League’s negative coverage.
“This Super League is an attack on the health and collective interest of the Italian game,” said Cairo, who is reportedly in talks with Serie A’s new principal domestic broadcast partner DAZN about setting up a couple of digital terrestrial channels to support the streaming platform’s offering.
His papers weren’t alone in taking a stand. “Are you mad?” Tuttosport asked before celebrating the news with the front-page headline “They caved!” Interviews with Agnelli in La Repubblica and Perez in La Stampa — papers that EXOR, the Agnelli family holding company have stakes in — came too late on Wednesday to explain the motives behind the Super League and offer their side of the story.
A banner outside Juventus’ Allianz Stadium read: “Our history must not be dragged through the mud, traded on and commercialised. We are Juventus FC. No to the Super League. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”
A group of famous Inter fans started a petition on change.org appealing to legendary captain and vice-president Javier Zanetti to make the club see sense. The ultras who stand in San Siro’s Curva Nord issued a communique to say: “Football, at least as we see it, is ‘
Unbelievable at the Cibali‘” — the game Inter lost in Catania on the final day of the season in 1961 that cost them the title.
“We’re not interested in Inter-Bayern, Inter-Real Madrid and Inter-City without the away days in Prague, Warsaw or even the 24 hours to Benevento and back in the car. Football does not belong to the Super League, it belongs to the people. Otherwise, we’d get behind that NBA crap.”
Milan’s hardcore who bounce up and down at the opposite end of the Meazza took issue with any notion of fans being at the heart of the Super League project. “Now that the money’s running out, fight amongst yourselves, but don’t dare do it in the name of the supporters.”
Or the players.
Robin Gosens, the prolific wing-back whose Atalanta side beat Juventus at the weekend and was the last Italian team standing in the Champions League last season, said: “It’s a big disaster for football. I’m shocked by the fact it’s becoming reality. The fact that an underdog can win has always been at the foundation of football. If Arsenal and Tottenham always qualify without any sporting merit there will be no values left in football.”
Ultimately the pressure told and
“the blood pact” between the founders — as Agnelli called it — broke down. Inter were the first Italian team to follow the Premier League six out of the Super League, Juventus had to concede “there are limited chances that the project be completed in the form originally conceived” and Milan announced the club had listened to “the voices and the concerns of fans around the world”.
Among those kept in the dark was Milan’s technical director, Paolo Maldini. “I’d like to clarify that I was never involved in the discussions about the Super League. I found out on Sunday night like all of you did. This was something decided at a higher level than my own. I felt a bit of confusion.”
It was a stunning turnaround. Less than 24 hours earlier Milan’s CEO Ivan Gazidis had said in a letter to the club’s sponsors: “We are confident that this new 20-team competition will capture the imagination of billions of fans around the world.” Agnelli too believed the project had “a 100 per cent chance of success” and although he expected “a similar reaction” to the one the project received his only concern was “the populism that gets in the way of dialogue on this initiative”.
The three Italian rebels experienced mixed results on Wednesday night, with Milan losing 2-1 to Sassuolo, Inter drawing 1-1 with Spezia and Juventus defeating Parma 3-1.
What next? Rather than go back over the clash between UEFA and the “dirty dozen”, we’re going to focus here on Italian football because, frankly, the outlook is bleak. Serie A may have agreed a €2.5 billion deal with DAZN but the technical glitches experienced during the recent game between Inter and Cagliari have cast fresh doubt on their ability to deliver a more comprehensive service. The talks with private equity groups over a €1.6 billion investment in a 10 per cent stake in a new media company that would have marketed and commercialised the league, turning more eyeballs on Serie A games, didn’t go anywhere.
The breathing space and finance to plan and rationalise the football system is yet to be found. Fans aren’t able to go to games and most Italian clubs don’t own their grounds anyway. The TV money has mostly saturated and while Juventus, AC Milan and Inter won’t expect any sympathy at the moment, these guys do a lot to add value and fund the football pyramid through simple trickle-down economics. “We brought Cristiano (Ronaldo) to Italy,” Agnelli explained to Corriere dello Sport, “and his presence alone has brought €4 million in gate receipts to other clubs.”
If the top clubs are making money, everyone’s making money. Cagliari got €40 million for Nicolo Barella, Brescia were able to structure a deal that, if made permanent, might fetch them €35 million for Sandro Tonali, Genoa can bank on €18 million for Nicolo Rovella. But what happens when the music stops and the euros aren’t flowing like they were before? The Super League provided a solution to a liquidity crisis but it wasn’t the answer anyone outside the 12 founders wanted to hear.
Where Serie A turns next remains to be seen. Today fans are celebrating getting their ball back and what competitive balance remains. The future, however, at least in terms of the sustainability of the football system, is still uncertain.
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