Ever since we were sitting around during the World Cup break in the winter of 2022 and, seemingly out of nowhere, we heard that Andrea Agnelli and the entire club board were going to resign, we understandably haven’t heard much from the former Juventus president. That’s obviously a by-product of how he left the club and subsequently was handed a long-term suspension for his involvement in the financial irregularities investigations both before and after he stepped away from Juve.
We now sit 2 1⁄2 years out from Agnelli and the entire board stepping down in a Monday night bombshell that made a quiet World Cup break suddenly anything but that.
And it seems like the Italian press, with Juventus very much in a state of flux and not having in sort of Champions League football going on the rest of the season, has rolled quite a big rumor out to welcome in everybody’s Wednesday morning.
According to Tuttosport as well as La Stampa contributor Enrico Testa, Agnelli wants to try and take control of Juventus — and in even a greater capacity than what he did during his time as president during one of the club’s greatest runs of success back in the 2010s. This time, it involves taking over even more of a share of ownership from his cousin, John Elkann, and Agnelli family’s holding company, Exor. Agnelli, who served as Juve president and chairman for 12 years starting in 2010, would almost certainly need a heavy financial backing to make such a move happen, with Red Bull being tossed out as said fund that would back the former Juve president’s bid to take sole control of the club that his family has owned since 1923.
The report states that current Juventus president Gianluca Ferrero, who took over as president in 2023 following Agnelli’s departure, has been “managing” a potential deal for months. Exor currently owns around 65% of Juventus, with Elkann at the helm of the entire holding company.
The kicker? Agnelli wants to bring in former Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp, who is the current Head of Global Soccer for Red Bull following his departure from Merseyside at the end of the 2023-24 season.
https://x.com/forumJuventus/status/1899554878390726721
As of now, it’s very much a juicy rumor that comes at a time in which so much negativity both in the fanbase and the Italian press is directed toward those currently at Juventus. Which would make you believe that any sort of link to Juve’s decade of dominance during Agnelli’s tenure would juice things up a little bit and have plenty of folks hoping that, no matter how much truth there is to what Tuttosport is throwing out there, it could actually materialize into something.
(Then again, after the summer of 2018, we’re no longer allowed to 100% just totally dismiss every single rumor that comes from the land of Tuttosport. It’s unfortunate, but it’s also the truth.)
Now, Tuttosport editor Guido Vaciago — you know, the same guy that Max Allegri got really mad at after the Coppa Italia final last season — poses three important questions when it comes an Agnelli-Juventus reunion.
Does Agnelli want to return to Juventus. “Yes, of course,” Vaciago writes.
Could it happen at the end of the 2024-25 season? “Very difficult,” he continues. “If he returns, the horizon starts at the end of next season, not before then.”
Will Agnelli buy the majority shares from Exor? “It’s very difficult, even if there are many investors who would buy Juventus (even in partnership with Andrea),” Vaciago states.
So, basically, if these rumors are even the slightest bit the start of something more, then it’s going to take a bit of time to actually get across the finish. If the rumors are true, nothing feels like it is imminent or probably even close to it. (Again, that is just a guy trying to read things from the outside with absolutely no inside information whatsoever.)
But is Agnelli coming back to Juventus something we might have to keep in the back of our heads for the summer months and beyond that? Sure seems like it’s something that the Italian press will certainly remind us of no matter what.
If anything, if Juventus’ current trajectory only continues to point downward, it certainly will become more of a thing no matter how much juice there actually is to it.