The demise of Juventus: It all started with the arrival of Ronaldo

English poet John Keats wrote that victories always have many fathers, but that defeats are orphans. Even after 200 years, that remark has not lost even a part of its relevance. The decade of Juventus' triumph has as many fathers as you want: from coaches to players, from presidents to managers. The year of defeat and fall is an orphan, without a father and mother, and no one wants to take responsibility. At best, everyone is guilty, and when everyone is guilty, it means that no one is.

It would be easy to put all the blame on Andrea Pirlo. But that would be as banal as Murphy's rule: Article 1. The boss is always right; Article 2. If the boss is not right, go back to the first article. Pirlo’s guilt is marginal and he is the last in the hierarchy of those who caused the fall of the Old Lady. Those who chose him are much more to blame than him, as well as those who created the current park of Juventus players.

Zidane preparing for a ‘smooth divorce’ with Real Madrid as Juventus call him to return

It sounds paradoxical, but the fall of Juventus began with the arrival of Cristiano Ronaldo, who was believed to be a qualitative leap in the development of the Old Lady. Juventus president Andrea Agnelli led the entire operation in secret, together with Fabio Paratici. It is not known for sure whether the then general manager of Juventus, Beppe Marotta, was familiar with the whole business, but it is undeniable that no one consulted him and that this was the beginning of the end of relations between Marotta and Agnelli and Marotta and Paratici.

Hiring Cristiano Ronaldo was a gamble, like trying to "get out" at the card table with duplicate stakes. Juventus' financial balance was already in a big deficit three years ago, when John Elkann made it clear that the family business would not cover debts or finance the recovery. That explains why Marotta was kept on the sidelines in Ronaldo's transfer operation. Agnelli’s calculation was very bold, but with too many unknowns. Apart from strengthening the Juventus brand on the planetary level with the help of Ronaldo's popularity, Bianconeri’s president was convinced that the CR7 is a missing puzzle for the Champions League trophy, which the Old Lady has been waiting for since 1996.

Juve will not be allowed to play Serie A next season?

Ronaldo's whopping salary of over 30 million euros and a series of other benefits, with 100 million euros paid for the transfer to Real Madrid, burdened Juventus' balance sheet with over 350 million euros in four years. Shortly, Juve was doomed to win not one, but at least two Champions Leagues to cover a hole in the balance sheet created by Ronaldo’s transfer.

At the same time, Paratici is applying the strategy on which Adriano Galliani got burned in Milan: with Elkann’s ’tap’ closed, Juve had to auto-finance the reinforcement campaign. Like Galliani, Paratici also fell into the seductive trap of taking players at the end of their contracts, without euros in compensation, but with fabulous salaries: Adrien Rabiot, Matthijs De Ligt, Aaron Ramsey.

When other players see their wages, they all come knocking on the door, asking for raises. Juventus management is making another wrong move, extending million-euro contracts to players who have already gone deep into the fourth decade of life: Sami Kedira, Mario Mandžukić and Gonzalo Higuain are the best examples. It’s easy to be a general after the battle, but a number of thinking heads in Italy warned in late autumn 2018 that the departure of Marotta marked the end of Bianconeri's triumphant period and that the only question is how long Juve will roll by inertia.

Shameless Pirlo suddenly remembers he wanted a different team

Beppe Marotta was not only the oldest - by age he could be the father of almost all members of the Angelli / Nedved / Paratici triumvirate - but also the voice of reason, order and business liturgy by which the Old Lady was recognizable. Without him, the triumvirate lost the compass, the fulcrum, and most importantly, they lost the person in front of whom every football player stood calmly and in his place. But triumvirates are not good for Juventus. They start with fanfare and end miserably. Just remember the last triumvirate: Luciano Moggi - Antonio Giraudo - Roberto Bettega, because of whom Juve ended up in Serie B for the first time in history. Agnelli, Nedved and Paratici were victims of their own success. They underestimated the role of Marota, and overestimated their own.

If Marotta was an indirect victim of bringing Ronaldo, coach Massimiliano Allegri was direct. Today, a few people remember the arrogant and underestimating gesture of the Portuguese towards Allegri after being relegated from the Champions League against Ajax. The ones who are familiar with the situation in Continassa claim that it was a turning point for Fabio Paratici and Pavel Nedved to go on the offensive to "drive away" Allegri a year before the expiration of his contract.

Agnelli did not give in easily to the pressure of his two associates. Allegri was brought by Marotta, but the president of Juve became attached to him because he gave him great satisfaction after a turbulent parting with Antonio Conte. Also, the dismissal of Allegri, who won five consecutive titles, led Juve to the Champions League final twice, had no sports, economic or strategic meaning.

Gianni Agnelli (©Reuters/Gallo))

Andrea is Agnelli by surname, but he has neither the charisma nor the power that his uncle Gianni had. The legendary " The Lawyer" was the patriarch of the family, while Andrea has to ask about the money from John Elkann's nephew, Gianni's grandson. And the relations with the football players are completely different. Lawyer Agnelli and President Giampiero Boniperti knew how to put players, even the biggest ones, like Michel Platini, in their place. In their era, no one could be more important and bigger than Juventus.

Fabio Paratici and Pavel Nedved had the idea to give another chance to Antonio Conte and promised to "work out" Agnelli. They reckon that without Marotta looking over them, they can convince Andrea. But, Agnelli didn’t forgot him, nor forgave Conte’s famous scathing remark: ’don’t go to a restaurant where a meal costs 100 euros with ten euros in your pocket’. Persuasion lasts for weeks, Conte was eager to return to Juve, but he started to lose patience, because he has already refused Roma and didn’t want to refuse Inter too.

If the arrogance of Paratici and Nedved "drove" Beppe Marotta into the arms of the young Stephen Zhang, who invited the experienced manager the same night he was fired at Juventus, the vanity of Andrea Agnelli served Conte to his biggest rival. In other words, the president and executives of Juventus directly strengthened their biggest rival by giving him a duo that laid the foundations for Juventus, which ruled Italy for nine years.

(©AFP)

Paratici and Nedved are responsible for bringing Maurizio Sarri. Sarri is good for Juventus, just as Che Guevara would be good for the position of director of the bank Goldman Sachs. The Tuscan expert makes a mistake at the start: he goes to Ronaldo's feet in his rented villa on the sea. At the start of the season, CR7 fires another poisonous arrow at Allegri's statement that Juve are finally playing football. However, the love affair with Sarri is short-lived. In two consecutive matches, Maurizio substitutes Christian, which the Portuguese never forgot or forgave.

The Covid-19 pandemic and losses in the Round of 16 of the Champions League for two years in a row against modest rivals, Lyon and Porto, throws Juventus into a financial knockdown. With a total player salary of 240 million euros, plus more than 20 million euros for two coaches per season (Allegri and Sarri paid to do nothing), the whole construction of Andrea Agnelli is starting to collapse. Without income from stadiums, museums, sponsors, without the help of Elkann , with another failed attempt to win the Champions League, Agnelli and his associates lose their lucidity. To some extent, that explains why the president of Juventus is the biggest ally of Florentino Perez in the battle for the Super League.

At the same time, Ronaldo, from the added value of Juventus, becomes, euphemistically speaking, a soloist who does not have many points of contact with the rest of the team. The experiment with Sarri failed ingloriously, despite winning the ninth title. The Tuscan was brought in to create a fluttering Juve game and win the Champions League. He only managed to quarrel with everyone: from the player to the club's management and the president.

The choice of Andrea Pirlo was an impulse move by Agnelli. To paraphrase famous Flavio Briatore: „Giving Pirlo a team in charge would be like giving a new Ferrari to a kid who just got his driving licence“. There are only two possible scenarios: he will either break the machine or crash it. Pirlo did both to the Juve „Ferrari“. The end of an era of Juventus is reflected in the fact that the current management of Juventus is the first in history that allowed one player to be more important than the club and to do what and how he wants. Ronaldo not only allowed himself the luxury of choosing when, how much and how to play, but yesterday, accompanied by Elkann and Agnelli, while the other players trained in Continassa before the match with Sassuolo, he drove around Maranello and bought a new Ferrari along the way. „Lawyer“ Agnelli and Boniperti are rolling in their graves.

Ronaldo did score over 30 goals in Serie A and the Champions League this season, but he failed in all key games: against Milan, Inter and Porto. Against Atalanta, he did not want to play, because the match in the Portuguese jersey with Luxembourg was more important to him.

(©AFP)

Looking at the Sarri experience, Pirlo never replaced Ronaldo if he did not ask for it. He changed the Juventus first 11 like socks. In 35 matches in Serie A, we saw 35 different teams. Paradoxically, Juve were less bad in the first than in the second part of the season, which shows that even the little idea that Pirlo had, he lost over time. Someone even tried to justify the failures of the Old Lady with the fact that they could not count on the effect of the full Allianz stadium, which was an almost invincible fortress of Juventus until the Pandemic. It is true that the Bianconeri have lost almost the same number of matches at home since the beginning of the epidemic than in the previous eight and a half years, but it also corresponds to the truth that Juve did not lose their place in the Champions League in Turin, but away.

While we can find a series of excuses for Pirlo for a failed season, Paratici and Nedved do not have many mitigating circumstances. The two made a series of mistakes in the last two transfer windows: they spent over 200 million euros, and Juventus lacks a complete midfield, at least one defender and a striker at the level of the reputation of the Old Lady.

Rabiot and Ramsey proved to be total misses, Weston McKennie and Dejan Kuluševski are still green, Rodrigo Bentancur is not made to be the leader of the big team, maybe a water carrier. In the Arthur-Miralem Pjanić exchange, neither Juve nor Barcelona were happy. Federico Bernardeschi looks more like a model than a footballer, Alvaro Morata is a good reserve and nothing more. Giorgio Chiellini and Leonardo Bonucci are on the wrong side of their thirties. Paulo Dybala gives the impression of a player who has already passed his zenith and spends more time with doctors and physiotherapists than in training. An attempt to launch players from the reserve "Under 23" team failed as well. Neither Gianluca Frabotta, nor Nicolo Fagioli, nor Radu Dragusin, nor a couple of other football players are not good for Juventus. The only players who justified the trust are De Ligt, Juan Quadrado, Federico Chiesa, Danilo and Wojciech Szczesny.

Cristiano Ronaldo teams up with Mozzart to help eight-month-old baby

Without the Champions League and with a big deficit, Juventus will be forced to sell a couple of their best players. The problem is, there are not so many clubs who would welcome Juve rejects, certainly not at the price Bianconeri are hoping for. Dybala’s contract expires next year. It would be hard to take big money for him even in normal times, let alone crisis times. Cristiano Ronaldo is 36 and with such a big salary, it will be a great thing for Juve to get rid of him without additional obligations. This way, or another, the only player for whom the Bianconeri can take a huge amount of money is De Ligt, and he is the only player who should stay in Turin.

After all has been said, the conclusion is that Juventus debacle has "extramarital fathers" who do not want to take the blame. Disagreements are possible only in the distribution of responsibilities: from Andrea Agnelli through Paratici and Nedved to Pirlo and the players.

The key date for the future of Juventus is May 27, when the Assembly of shareholders is scheduled. Andrea Pirlo will certainly not be on the Juve bench next season, and there is little chance that sports director Fabio Paratici and Cristiano Ronaldo will remain. Rumors say that Pavel Nedved will start working with his former manager and great friend Mina Raiola, and Andrea Agnelli is also ’hanging’: it’s still possible that he will leave Juventus after 11 years as its most trophy-winning president in history.