The long road to redemption
Sunday April 1, 2007
The Observer , Ed Vulliamy
Juventus, giants of Italian and world football, were cut down in Serie A's match-fixing scandal last summer and relegated to the second division for the first time in their 110-year history. Ed Vulliamy spends a week with the team as they battle for promotion in unfamiliar, dilapidated stadiums. Speaking to the stars who stayed, the fans, the coach and club officials, he finds a side humbled but resilient in their quest to return to the big time.
Alessandro Del Piero is smiling because he has just scored a hat-trick to put Juventus back where the club feel they belong: on top of the league. Except that this is Serie B - the country's second division - where, before this season, Juventus had never previously played in their 110-year history. The game, a 4-0 victory over lowly Piacenza last month, began another extraordinary week in an extraordinary season for Juventus.
Before the match at the Stadio Olimpico in Turin, the fans on the two curve at either end of the ground had laid out their banners early, proclaiming the pride and history of Juventus: 'TRADIZIONE', 'FORZA ONORE'. Tradition and honour: these are the notions for which the club believes itself to stand but which were so shabbily betrayed by the influence-peddling antics of Luciano Moggi, the now departed and disgraced director general who used his contacts to manipulate football in Italy and even across Europe to Juventus's advantage.
No sooner had the Turin club claimed the Serie A title for the 29th time in May last year, than it was announced that they were under investigation for match fixing. Phone taps revealed that Moggi had tried to arrange the appointment of referees who would be favourable to his club. This was all part of his network of influence that extended to every level of the Italian game and up into the Champions League. Even television pundits were implicated for having suppressed discussion of controversial decisions that favoured the team. Juventus were stripped of both their 2005 and 2006 scudetti and relegated to Serie B.
The match against Piacenza began with a goal from David Trezeguet, a member of France's World Cup final team, to put the disgraced champions ahead after 33 seconds. There followed a sustained period in which Piacenza mounted sturdy resistance, as many teams have against Juventus this season. Then Del Piero struck.
Only six days later, however, he emerges from the locker room in a different mood, in a different place, having just captained his side to a 3-1 defeat, the second of the season, against Brescia.
Because of recent violence at Italian matches, the match is played on a neutral ground at Mantua, where, by odd coincidence, Juventus had suffered their first defeat of the season, to the home side in January. Mantova's Stadio Danilo Martelli is shabby: the roof of the single covered stand is upheld by rusting ironwork; flats and the local fire brigade headquarters overlook the pitch; the home fans sit on metal benches and the low-slung away end is concrete terracing. To complete Juventus's humiliation, they lose to a hat-trick by an obscure midfielder called Matteo Serafini, the first ever scored against the world's greatest goalkeeper, World Cup-winner Gigi Buffon.
But it is at scrappy grounds such as Mantova's that Juventus - still star-studded with World Cup veterans - must now play. It is at such grounds that the team they call La Vecchia Signora - The Grand Old Lady - must continue to win if they are to return to the summit of Italian and European football.
Alessandro Del Piero has made more than 500 appearances for Juventus, a club he joined as an 18-year-old in 1993. With more than 200 goals, he is the club's all-time leading scorer, and he is one of a breed of players that Aldo Cazzullo, co-author of a recent bestseller whose title translates as 'The Mystery of Turin', calls 'L'Uomo Juventus' - The Juventus Man: those who play for and never leave the club. It was Del Piero who lifted hearts when - with Juventus shamed and demoted - he announced that a gentleman never leaves a Grand Old Lady and pledged to stay come what may. 'Alex is our emblem,' says Alessio Secco, the club's sporting director. 'He was the first to commit last summer, and remains a case apart.'
For such a gladiator on the pitch, Del Piero is surprisingly small, and boyish in demeanour. 'I've got plenty of playing years left in me and I hope to spend them all here,' he says when we meet after the Piacenza game. 'I'll play for Juventus until I'm 40 if I can.' Reflecting on the season so far, he notes how 'for every team that plays us, it is the match of a lifetime. This has been our difficulty and it's not a simple situation, I have a bit of experience, and I understand that attitude.'
He will not be drawn into talk beyond the moment. 'We have many dreams, but the first has to be Serie A, and only that,' he says. 'That's what I stayed here to achieve, that's my promise to the Popolo Bianconero [the black-and-white people, as the fans are known after the club's colours]. Everyone in Serie A and the Champions League misses Juventus, but not as much as Juventus miss Serie A and the Champions League. However, let's not think about the future, because it would be unforgivable to repeat some of the errors we have made this season. Let's talk only about Serie B and our present situation. The club can plan what happens next year but we players have to focus only on a championship, which is not easy and will not be easy, as is demonstrated by every match.'
Tonight's victory followed a 5-0 thrashing of Crotone on 17 February. 'It's good to exult during a difficult period,' says Del Piero, 'two excellent games at home and two great victories. Let's hope it's the turning point for the final run - but this is a difficult and long season. We need to keep working as we are, in a spirit of humility and sacrifice.' Words essential to the Vecchia Signora's self-image.
Juventus are an institution perhaps without parallel in football. When the corruption scandal broke last year, it was like the fall of an Italian monarchy, with subjects across the nation, Europe, and the world. There is something called L'emozione Juve - the Juve emotion - and it is strong and profound. But rarely has it been so deeply felt and strenuously tested as in the aftermath of the corruption scandal, when Juventus were relegated. Everything the club stood for had been betrayed from within and yet there was still the need for pride. Last summer, Juventus looked at their wretched present but, above all, to their remarkable past.
Juventus - 'Youth' in Latin - were founded in November 1897 by a group of students from the D'Azeglio high school in Turin. Since that day, the club have dominated Italian football like no other, winning the league title, lo scudetto, a record 27 times (counting the removal of those two most recent championships). The names of the club's stars constitute a directory of what is greatest in football: Giampiero Boniperti, John Charles, Roberto Bettega, Julio Cesar, Marco Tardelli, Michel Platini, Paolo Rossi, Zbigniew Boniek, Dino Zoff, Roberto Baggio, Gianluca Vialli and Zinedine Zidane. Three of the stars of Italy's World Cup-winning team last year were Juventus players: Buffon, defender Fabio Cannavaro and Del Piero. Then there were those playing for other countries at the tournament - Pavel Nedved and Emerson for the Czech Republic and Brazil respectively; Lilian Thuram and Trezeguet for France in the final, both of whom had been world champions in 1998.
Juventus's managers are world famous, too: men such as Giovanni Trapattoni, winner of six scudetti, and Marcello Lippi, master of the 'mental game' of football-as-chess, who won five of Juve's scudetti and masterminded the World Cup victory. And the club's owners, the Agnelli family, are part of Italy's modern aristocracy: their patriarch Giovanni Agnelli co-founded Fiat in 1899 and his grandson Gianni, who died in 2004, was a key political figure for decades, known simply as L'avvocato, the lawyer.
Juventus are the only major Italian club to have never changed hands: Fiat and the Agnellis still have a controlling share. 'To be Juventino is to have a sense of history and of time,' says Giovanni Cobolli Gigli, the current club president, in the trophy room of their elegant villa-headquarters. 'Last summer was not our best of times.'
'Turin without Italy would be more or less the same. But Italy without Turin would be very different,' Umberto Eco once wrote. Alongside its rival Milan, the city is the manufacturing powerhouse of northern Italy. And through the association with Fiat, Juventus, says Cobolli Gigli, 'are associated with the personality of Agnelli himself - who was a kind of prince in a country that has no monarchy, and hence the Juventus empire within Italy'.
Juventus are much more than the team of this elegant but gritty metropolis: they are a national and international institution and, oddly to an outsider, the team of il Mezzogiorno, of the south. The 1950s saw a mass migration from Sicily and the poor south of the country by those seeking work on the production lines at Fiat. For those migrants, the club became a point of belonging in a world far from home. (It is often said in Turin that a vero torinese - an indigenous citizen - supports not Juventus but Torino, the city's other team, who exist, bitterly and defiantly, in Juve's shadow, rather like Manchester City.) Accordingly, across Sicily and the south, every small town and thousands of villages founded a 'Juventus Club', where fans still gather every evening to chat and play cards as well as to watch on match days in front of the television. So Juventus became the emblem of both a hard-working industrial establishment and of those who crave a sense of belonging.
Then, of course, there was the Heysel disaster, when on 29 May 1985 rioting Liverpool fans brought about the death of 39 spectators, most of whom were Juve fans, as the two teams met in the European Cup final in Brussels. Those who died that night were not the Juventus ultrà, as the hardcore supporters are known; they were people who had come mostly in families from little Juve clubs across central and southern Italy, with tickets for the 'neutral' zone adjacent to the Liverpool section. People such as my friend Bruno Guarini from Puglia, who took his 21-year-old son Alberto to Belgium aboard a local Juve Club charter for his first ever Juventus game, as a reward for passing his dentistry exams, only to watch his boy crushed to death against a barrier.
Today, the team boast more than 28 million registered supporters in Europe (compared to 13 million for Manchester United), of whom 11 million live in Italy, one in six Italians. In Baghdad two years ago, I asked a bare-footed street urchin after yet another atrocity: 'What is your dream for the future of Iraq?' The response was: 'That I will play for Juventus.' He knew the team, players, scores and history, but when I asked how old he was, he said that he did not know.
Yet Juventus are as deeply despised as they are adored in Italy. If you are not for them you are invariably against them. Hatred of the club is based on envy mixed with contempt. It runs so deep that, driving through Italy after the carnage at Heysel, I once saw the words 'GRAZIE LIVERPOOL' daubed across motorway bridges around Rome and Florence. When the Moggi scandal broke last summer, a book was published (and sold well) called Dio Esiste, Juve in B (God Exists, Juve in Serie B). It is a collection of anti-Juventus jokes and slogans, such as: 'Meglio na vita in galera che Juventino per na sera' ('Better a life in jail than to be Juventino for an evening').
That Juve's disgrace coincided with Italy's victory in the World Cup - a team managed by a man who won five scudetti for Juventus and whose spine was made up of players from the club - made the emotion of the moment all the stranger: pride and shame, glory and punishment.
Guilty Juventus - their management purged - initially faced expulsion to Serie C. This was then changed to Serie B, with 17 points deducted. An appeal in October reduced the handicap to nine points, enabling the club's enemies to claim that even a 'clean' Juve could still pull favours in high places. That appeal came a month after the start of their adventure in Serie B and, early on, the publication of the league table each Monday morning showing Juventus at the bottom. But it was not all gloom. Pavel Nedved gave an interview early on in which he said that he had seldom enjoyed his football so much. Juventus were visiting towns where they had never before played and were more often than not being greeted as heroes as well as foes.
At the time of writing, Juve are top of Serie B and set for promotion, but it was no great glory to return with only a point from Rimini, Genoa, La Spezia, Bergamo, Naples, Vicenza and Albinoleffe. No great glory to draw 2-2 at home to Arezzo in December. After that draw, John Elkann, vice-president of Fiat and nephew of Gianni Agnelli, came to the team's training camp to encourage the players, only for them to travel to Mantua for their next match, the first after the winter break, and lose for the first time. The annus horribilis continued off the pitch as well as on it: just as former player and general manager Gianluca Pessotto, who was not implicated in the Moggi scandal but had tried to commit suicide during the World Cup by throwing himself out of an upstairs window, returned to work, two 17-year-old members of the youth team drowned at the bottom of an artificial lake at the training ground, after they went to retrieve a ball. The next first-team game was postponed as a mark of respect. Yet, despite these setbacks, Juventus had reached the top.
'We fell precipitously into Serie B,' says club president Cobolli Gigli when we meet. 'We were in free fall, heading for Serie C, public opinion against us. But we had good lawyers and Italy had won the World Cup, because of some of our players, and I think that is what saved us in the public eye. It is impossible for many opposition fans in Serie B not to see Buffon and Del Piero as great Italian champions. For sure, in places like Naples and Genoa, the hostility is as it has always been. But when we arrived in Crotone [in the far south] 60,000 people lined the streets to welcome us. Inside the ground, their supporters cheered their own team, but after 10 minutes they were all shouting "Gigi Buffon, jump with us", and he did. In Bergamo, out of a crowd of 20,000, 18,000 were cheering for Juventus.'
He continues: 'It is also different for the teams. We are filling their stadiums. The players know that to play Juventus is their stage, their big chance. Sky TV is watching, officials from the big clubs are watching. So they prepare, they concentrate, they play like they have never played before - as has been obvious from day one, when we drew at Rimini, completely unprepared for this.'
One evening I go along to Turin University, where Gigi Buffon is to receive a special award for services to Juventus and Italy. The main hall of the economics faculty is packed with excited students.
'Yes, I am a business student,' says Patrizia Caveri, closing her cosmetics purse, 'but I'd rather be a hostess at Juventus.' When the goalkeeper finally enters the auditorium, the students erupt with delight. When it is his turn to speak, Buffon, wearing a smart suit, says: 'I didn't expect this clamorous welcome. This is a university, and I thought you'd all be sitting quietly.'
He goes on to speak about the virtues of 'social order', 'the problems of violence' in society and 'the benefits of education', urging that 'the most important thing is to be a man'. After a dutiful reference to 'the ugly things that happened' last summer, he explains why he stayed on to play in Serie B. 'It was an instinctive decision. I didn't really need to think about it. It was a moment of difficulty for the club and it was unthinkable to leave. I feel better for having stayed. The club paid a price, individuals paid a price, and the players and supporters paid a price. It has been a case of starting from year zero and it has been extraordinary, with positive reactions, even from supporters of other teams all over the country. Of course, the World Cup made a difference. I'm Juventus's goalkeeper, but also Italy's, so a little piece of me belongs to everyone.'
When the students ask how long Buffon will remain at Juventus, he says: 'I get asked this 18 times a day. I'll say it again: I'm talking to the club, with whom I'll have an intense relationship whatever the decision.' Then he pours a drop of golden hope: 'I have a contract until 2011 and if they want to, the club can exercise their rights, and from my point of view, there's a will to stay.'
Later that evening, I speak to Buffon, his concentration intense. 'I stayed at Juventus because they were sent into B,' he says. 'If they'd stayed in A, I'd probably have gone to Milan. But for five years, Juventus has given me everything. They've even made me a world champion and I owe them a debt of conscience. Also, I've found a new enthusiasm in my game. I'm enjoying myself, I want to live day to day. The probability is that I'll stay at Juve so long as others remain around me and the team is competitive. In time, we will be a great team again, but in how many years, we don't know.'
On the edge of the city, in the shadow of the Alps, is a scrappy arraignment of high-rise blocks called Venaria, of which the Ristorante Lucio al Venaria is a focal point. And this Tuesday night, Lucio's is festooned and heaving: there are bottles of special Juventus Spumante wine, a huge Juventus cake, and flags adorn the walls. The occasion is a charity dinner to raise money for the Santa Anna children's hospital. There are hundreds of men and women here. Some 50 people have come by bus from Grenoble, telling jokes about the attitude in France to their Italian flags during the World Cup final. Many of the women are wearing black and white patterned mini-dresses, the team colours. There are also quite a few ragazzacci, naughty boys, with spiky hair and tattoos, for whom charity towards sick children is hardly the primary reason to be here. They are here to meet Pavel Nedved.
Every few decades, a foreigner emerges to become almost as deeply Juventino as the Italians, such as John Charles from Wales or Michel Platini from France. Today the most popular foreigner - the most integrated and loved - is the Czech Nedved. An intense and handsome man, with a distant stare, he is fanatically dedicated in training and works and works on his game, as if on some private quest for perfection. Even after the 4-0 defeat of Piacenza, he is still unhappy. 'I didn't enjoy it at all. I didn't feel close to the centre of the game, I didn't get enough of the ball,' he says, even though it was his pass that created Del Piero's crowning goal.
Nedved's season was interrupted by a five-game suspension following his sending-off in a match against Genoa. Returning before a friendly against AC Milan and the away game with Mantova, Nedved said: 'Milan doesn't matter. But Mantova matters a great deal - these are our new horizons. Writing off the handicap relieved the tension a little - at least after that we were playing for real points. But this is not last year's team. We are very good, with a few champions that the others don't have, but I wouldn't say that we are so very superior to the opposition in Serie B.'
He is unabashed about his commitment to the club and, at the age of 34, suggests that he might take up a coaching position at Juve before too long. While the understanding is that Buffon will stay if enough stars are signed to play with him, Nedved states plainly: 'I'm not going to say, "Juve must be strong or else I will leave". Why would I do that? I have a few years on the others, my home is here, my family doesn't want to leave and my children were born in Rome [he spent five seasons playing for Lazio] and grew up in Italy. Besides, I owe too much to Juventus to go anywhere else.'
Another training session ends at the 'Juventus Centre' in Vinovo, on the outskirts of Turin, against a background of snow-capped peaks reaching into a smoky-blue sky. Over the road is the Hippodrome for Trotto, Italy's brand of horse-and-cart racing, a small-time gambler's favourite outing.
It is impossible to see Buffon and Trezeguet bounce into the lounge after training without thinking of that moment in the World Cup final when they faced each other, and Trezeguet missed the penalty that made the Azzurri world champions. 'I remained with the club to help,' says Trezeguet, who is wearing a track suit and a baseball cap, 'and have adapted to Serie B. But it's taken me longer than the others to grasp the reality. It's a mental problem - I find it difficult to be stimulated on certain pitches with the crowd up close, after you've played at San Siro. The ground at La Spezia [on the coast south of Genoa] struck me especially - small, people on your back and a rotten pitch. I'd rather have written a different page, but Juve have suited me too well, teaching me that to be in second place is not good enough.'
Will he stay or will he go, especially as Liverpool and Lyon are said to be interested in signing him? 'I want to play in the Champions League again,' he says. In a recent interview with the daily newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport, Trezeguet promised that 'my future is Bianconero', and that 'for me, what counts is the rapport with my colleagues'. Now, he adds: 'I was unhappy with the fact that I was not given the possibility conceded to the others who left. Last May we won the scudetto, now I have to pay for things that others have done.'
There is another world champion - like Trezeguet, of Argentinian stock - whose future at Juventus is uncertain: Mauro Camoranesi, who plays on the right side of midfield and wears his hair long and often in a ponytail. In the run-up to the Piacenza game, Italy's three leading daily sports papers unearthed an interview given by Camoranesi to an Argentinian paper in which he spoke of how, when he asked to leave, he was held as a 'prisoner of Juventus' last summer. For his outburst, Camoranesi was booed when he came on as a substitute against Piacenza, to his manager's and team-mates' annoyance.
In the present strange atmosphere, the board of Juventus tries to measure what the horizons are, in terms of money available, the team that can be built with it, over how long, and with what ambitions. While the golden trio of Del Piero, Buffon and Nedved insist that they can concentrate only on the 'work in progress', fans are already dreaming of winning back the scudetto. But club president Cobolli Gigli urges that 'it is presumptuous even to talk about a scudetto next season'. 'We can't overlook the sporting and financial damage caused by last summer,' he tells me. Coach Didier Deschamps, a former player with the club and France's 1998 World Cup-winning captain, believes it could take as long as 'three or four years' to build a team as good as last season's title winners.
The most obvious way for Juventus to rebuild is to welcome back some of those who departed last summer in the fire sale that followed relegation. Most of them - with the notable exception of Zlatan Ibrahimovic at Serie A leaders Internazionale - are having mediocre seasons, especially Emerson and Fabio Cannavaro at Real Madrid, and Gianluca Zambrotta at Barcelona. Some have said they would like to return, but it might not happen. La Vecchia Signora does not forgive easily and Cobolli Gigli thinks it 'not a good thing to invite back those who chose to leave'. Deschamps demands that 'two or three major acquisitions are necessary, both to rebuild the team and to convince Buffon and others to stay'.
The player that most interests the Juventus board is Steven Gerrard. Cobolli Gigli has said: 'Gerrard? I would go personally and fetch himself - on a bicycle.' In conversation, when asked about the Liverpool captain, Deschamps says, with a wry smile: 'If Gerrard wants to come, he'd be most welcome, but I think he would have a little trouble leaving where he is now.'
Away from football, there are local politics to play as the club head home to a refurbished Stadio delle Alpi after a temporary lease of the smaller Stadio Olimpico. There is a long-term 'industrial plan' whereby the club, wounded financially by the scandal, will seek to rebuild their team in stages. They even need to find another sponsor. The Libyan petroleum giant Tamoil - controlled by the ruling Gadaffi family, which owns 7.5 per cent of Juventus - has withdrawn its funding, leaving the probability that before long the word 'Fiat' may finally appear on the black-and-white zebra stripes of a Juventus shirt.
After a final closed training session before the match against Brescia on 10 March, Deschamps finds time to reflect on the season. He talks quietly and courteously, in Italian, with a sense of self-ironic humour rare in football. 'Serie B has been an adventure for all of us - for the players, for me, for the club. The thing is that for every team, and their fans, playing Juventus is the biggest game they'll ever play. I watch videos of each side before we play them, but when they come out on to the pitch against us, they are different footballers completely, running everywhere, playing every ball. It's a different league, in which Juventus cannot play their usual game. Serie B - and certainly the Serie B in which Juventus are playing - is not the setting for a spectacle. It's not a league in which a team like Juventus can express themselves.'
He uses the word agonismo, which broadly means a mix of pain, grit and competitive spirit. 'We've been adapting to a league that is more physical than tactical, in which agonismo is more important than tactics. Just because we are playing teams who are inferior to us doesn't mean we don't suffer. It's no coincidence that Buffon has often been the best player on the pitch. We've been chewing tough bread in Serie B. We needed quickly to put aside any sense of triumphalism, any idea that this would be a stroll for the good of our health.'
Deschamps is honest enough to concede that he was hired to return Juve to Serie A and that, if he fails, he will be sacked. 'I know that if we are not in Serie A in June, I will no longer be coach. That's normal and a fair decision. I took on this team knowing that was the condition, the starting point. And I've been putting forward my ideas, without feeling as though there was a gun pointed at my head.'
He operates inevitably in the shadow of Marcello Lippi, who was Juventus coach from 1994 to 1999 and, again, from 2001 to 2004, before taking charge of Italy. He talks often to Lippi, whom he considers to be 'the master technician'. There are rumours that Lippi, who did not seek to stay on with the national team after the World Cup triumph, will return to take charge of Juventus once they are back in Serie A; indeed, his long-standing right-hand man at Juve and at last year's World Cup, Narciso Pezzotti, recently returned to the club as an assistant coach.
Of the fans in Serie B, Deschamps says: 'Those who hate us will always hate us, but Juventus have fans all over the country, and many have had the chance to see us in places in which we've never played before. Even for the opposition, it's a bit of a festa when we arrive in town. Once the game starts, however, the party stops, as it does for the players we're up against, who play with everything they have.'
There is a fine line between caution and tempting fate, but perhaps even Deschamps could not have expected the disaster against Brescia, in Mantua, the next day. Most of the Juve fans left Turin by car early in the morning, but there are a few stragglers on the 9.05 train to Mantua, via Milan - a five-hour journey that costs less than £10.
At the ground, the police are ubiquitous. A man called Guido is turned away because his seven-year-old son, Fabio, is not carrying his identity card and two Juve fans are arrested for carrying a banner saying 'Liberty for the Ultras'. I meet Giuliano Grisero and his son, Ludovico, Brescia supporters excited by the prospect of seeing 'a glimpse of Buffon and Del Piero for real, after seeing them on television so many times, and in the World Cup'. Little Ludo's blue Brescia scarf matches that of his Italian national shirt, which has Del Piero's name on the back.
Inside, the atmosphere is boisterous. At one end, overlooked by the fire-brigade headquarters, the fans of Brescia and Mantova have massed, united for one game to sing 'Solo rubare, sapete solo rubare' - 'You only know how to steal' - to 'Guantanamera', the tune English fans use for 'You only sing when you're winning'. At the other end, the Juve supporters jeer two of their own players, Camoranesi and Trezeguet, singing: 'We don't want mercenaries.' They become more and more rabid as La Vecchia Signora is beaten by Serafini's improbable hat-trick. To my left, Fabrizio Poletto from Brescia looks on amazed: 'I don't get it; we don't usually play like this. Usually, we're awful.'
At the end, Brescia's players strip down to their underpants and throw their kit into the crowd - including their shorts. Later, Del Piero still manages to smile. 'Well, I'm never coming here again,' he says. 'Serafini? I'd never heard of him, but that first goal was like Maradona.'
A delighted Serafini says: 'It's been strange day for me and for Gigi Buffon. He's the greatest goalkeeper in the world and, actually, what I wanted from this game was to exchange shirts with him, but he'd already given it to someone else, a photographer I think.'
One of the fans on the train back to Turin, Giancarlo Maccabruni, eats his ham panino as the sun sets over Lombardy. He pleads with me: 'This is not Juventus, please don't call this Juventus. We lost, but we're still top, and - like Jesus - Juventus will rise again.'
Notes on a scandal
2004 Italian police, investigating claims of organised doping of players, begin to tap the phones of leading football officials.
MAY 2006 Italian papers publish transcripts of suspicious phone calls. Some involve Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi and Pierluigi Pairetto, the official responsible for allocating referees and vice-president of Uefa's refereeing committee. Others involve Pairetto and referees. Three days before Juve retain their Serie A title, Moggi and the Juve board resign.
JUNE 2006 A week before the World Cup starts, Fabio Cannavaro, captain of Italy and Juventus, has to fly home to be questioned as part of the follow-up investigation. Five days after it is announced that Fiorentina, Juventus, Lazio and Milan are to stand trial before a sporting tribunal, Juve's new sporting director, Gianluca Pessotto, is found seriously injured in the street outside the club's HQ after an apparent suicide bid.
JULY 2006 Coach Fabio Capello leaves the club for Real Madrid. Cannavaro lifts the World Cup after a penalty shootout victory over France. Five days later, Juventus, Fiorentina and Lazio are relegated, and docked 30, 12 and seven points respectively for the start of the new season. Milan remain in Serie A but have 15 points deducted. On appeal Fiorentina and Lazio are reinstated to Serie A and Juve's points deduction is reduced to 17.
AUGUST 2006 Following the defection of Cannavaro, also to Real Madrid, Juventus are forced to sell star players Lilian Thuram, Emerson, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Gianluca Zambrotta and Patrick Vieira.
OCTOBER 2006 Juventus defeat Treviso to move off the bottom of Serie B. Two weeks later, a further appeal reduces their points penalty to just nine.
DECEMBER 2006 Juventus top Serie B for the first time. A few days later, 17-year-old youth team players Alessio Ferramosca and Riccardo Neri drown in a lake at the club's Vinovo training centre, while attempting to recover balls from the freezing water.
MARCH 2007 The board pledges €100m (£66m) to the transfer fund for next season, should promotion be achieved. 'This is to guarantee competitiveness in the top flight and at international level, reinforcing every area of the squad and assuring stability within the staff,' says a spokesman.
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