ANDREA AGNELLI
Good morning everyone. Today, at 10 am on 18 January 2023, we start this shareholders' meeting. I assume the chairmanship of the meeting pursuant to Article 12 of the club statute.
Before commencing this meeting I would like to address a particular matter. In the dressing room corridor below us there are photos of the Juventus club captains over the years. From Carlo Bigatto to Virginio Rosetta, right up to Gianluigi Buffon and Giorgio Chiellini, the last two long-term wearers of the armband. Recently we have lost two Juventus captains, Ernesto Castano and Gianluca Vialli, whose photos appear in the dressing room. I would ask everyone to rise for a minute’s silence in their memory.
I have here with me the Vice President, Pavel Nedved, who has worked as Juventus Vice President and director since 2010. He has been alongside me all of this time so, Pavel, I give you the floor.
PAVEL NEDVED
Thanks, President.
Good morning everyone. I haven't spoken often in such shareholders' meetings, but today it seems right for me to do so, and to greet and thank you all. This final day of my time at Juventus comes following a journey that lasted twenty years. I came as a young footballer and leave as a middle-aged director. I’m so grateful for every moment of my time at Juventus. When I joined the Bianconeri in 2001, I was able to adapt with ease, thanks to the support of the management team.
I am especially grateful for the contribution of Umberto and Allegra, who were like a family to me. It was thanks to them that I was able to understand what this city, and especially Juventus, were all about, a club which is not only one of the most important and most loved in the world but one which makes every person able to represent it very proud, be it on the pitch or behind a desk.
I had been retired from my playing days for a few years when the shareholders of this club, led by the Agnelli family for almost a century, asked me to join the board of directors in 2010.
My first few years in the role were a great learning experience for me. I was able to work alongside great professionals and top-level executives. Every day I was able to pick up something new and the club were receptive to my ideas. I then went on to become Vice President. Obviously I’m very proud of this role, which while being a great honour is also a considerable job. It has involved daily work, consisting of meetings, gatherings, discussions and conversations. However, the most important element has been passion. I wouldn’t have got anywhere without passion. I have never been lacking in this department, from my first day training at the Comunale until today, in this room.
Finally, I would like to thank you, President. I’m so grateful to you for our friendship, which goes beyond our work. I’m thinking in particular of our Thursday matches, in which we had fun, argued and got into great discussions. That is where our bond was strengthened, our common sense of purpose. All of that was crucial in our work together.
I know how much you love Juventus, how hard you have worked and how many sacrifices you have made for the club. Most of all, how great your leadership has been for the Bianconeri, for all of us.
It’s been an honour to be by your side. A tremendous honour.
ANDREA AGNELLI
Thank you for the touching words, Pavel.
I’m now going to move straight on to the second line of the notes that I prepared for today’s speech as it’s a pleasure, albeit a different and special one, for me to welcome you all to our home, Allianz Stadium.
It’s special today because I can’t and don’t want to hide the emotions that are running through me and all of us. A chapter in Juventus’s history is coming to a close. A chapter for Pavel and me that’s lasted almost 13 years. A chapter that we’re finding hard to read and reread at this moment in time.
I’d like to make sense of and put our activity in recent years into context, including my own on a personal level, and some of Juventus’s outstanding results.
My job has always entailed trying to understand the context and steering the club’s strategic direction, which is the key foundation upon which operations can be directed.
When we speak about football, what are we really talking about in reality? It often boils down to passages of play, goals and offside decisions that were given or not given, but that’s not really what football is about. Football is part of the entertainment industry. It’s part of the sports sector and it’s the biggest activity in the world of sport.
When we speak about the entertainment industry, we’re talking about an industry worth €750 billion which encompasses gaming, sport, music, museums, theatre and however we entertain ourselves in our free time.
When we speak about the sports industry, we’re talking about an industry worth €140 billion. When we speak about football, we’re talking about an industry worth €43 billion. It’s therefore right to talk about goals that were given or not and offside decisions, but we’re still talking about an industry of huge dimensions.
Let’s try and understand the best ways to improve our industry. Here are some figures from our investors: from January to September 2022 they poured €30 billion into football, having invested €50 billion in 2021 in pursuit of opportunities offered by our industry.
We are part of the media, we have content, and today we know perfectly well that content is paramount to the success of distributors. Clubs, especially the bigger ones, have huge fanbases. What clearly has been lacking is good governance. Then, in addition to consolidated opportunities, we have a series of other opportunities which can be defined as opportunistic, serendipitous, or from financial shortcomings.
Last year alone, we saw M&A transactions involving some of the main clubs: Chelsea for €3 billion, AC Milan for €1.2 billion, Newcastle for €340 million, 47% of Atalanta for €237 million, 22% of Leeds for €57 million.
These are numbers that make you think.
However, in my opinion what really makes you think is who the buyers of these clubs are. At Chelsea we have the Boehly and Clearlake consortium, we have Redbird at Milan, we have a sovereign wealth fund, PIF, at Newcastle, we have a consortium directed by Pagliuca at Atalanta and we have an American investor from San Francisco 49ers at Leeds.
Let’s then look at the operations which are carried out by the leagues themselves. La Liga in Spain reached an agreement for the sale of 8% over 50 years for €2 billion, valuing La Liga at €24 billion; while the LFP in France was €1.5 billion for 13%, valued at €11.5 billion. Both of these were carried out by CVC.
In Serie A, after the approach made by CVC itself, which was managed during the course of 2020/21, we received two more letters of intent in autumn last year. The Bundesliga is evaluating a series of operations for the sale of 20% of its international part.
This is in regard to M&A activity.
We’re witnessing the booming phenomenon of multi-club ownership. First was the well-known City Group, who now own 11 clubs, the latest one being Palermo in Italy, and there’s also Red Bull which have five clubs. We have Bolt Ventures with five clubs in Europe and one in the United States. Redbird now have three clubs and Seven Seven Seven, the owners of Genoa, have four clubs in Europe at present.We’re witnessing a new multi-club ownership phenomenon. Then there’s recent speculation, albeit not yet confirmed, that we’ve read about a former Goldman Sachs partner putting together a fund worth €1 billion to invest in football. We’re also seeing interest at QSI, the sovereign wealth fund that owns PSG, in acquiring a Premier League club.Now I’m going to say something that may be trivial. I don’t think that everyone I’ve mentioned is an association or NGO. Clearly there must be some interest in this sector. In my opinion, the response from our governors and regulators to this significant interest by institutional investors hasn’t been up to scratch. They haven’t evolved and they continue to fail to grasp the difference between a game and an industry. These differences are obviously being emphasised more and more now, but I’m going to try to take a step back and not look at what’s happening in January 2023, but rather think about the analysis and solutions that were put forward when I was part of the system. I was the ECA President and a member of the UEFA Executive Committee.The situation at that time was clear. There was an unsustainable system and a lack of profitability for clubs, which are the ones who really take on the entrepreneurial risk because nobody else in our industry faces the same risks as clubs. There’s horizontal polarisation, the same clubs winning repeatedly in several leagues, and a vertical polarisation of interest towards two competitions; access mechanisms which are no longer on sporting merit but an access to the distribution of extremely risky financial resources – which was apparent even back then, and there are studies which demonstrate it – and fan disaffection.“We’ve often been criticised in this regard. I must say that it had quite an impact on me to read in the reform proposal for the Lega Pro championship by former president Francesco Ghirelli that there’s talk of disinterest among fans of Serie C clubs in Italy. Of course, this isn’t just an excuse to change top-level competitions, but also those who manage at an intermediate level are becoming aware of this.The proposal at the time was to create an ecosystem for the growth of European football that included a system of leagues involving promotion and relegation within international competition, increased stability while maintaining access to domestic leagues to some degree by keeping the connection between domestic leagues and international competitions. When you look at the Italian league since it became a unified league, from 1929 up until today, in its almost 100-year history, only 68 teams have played in Serie A and some of those were very fleeting tenures.So when we talk about promotion and relegation, we should remember that when as far as Serie A is concerned, we’ve only had 68 different teams in 100 years – a system that was open to everyone, so if we wanted to build a new club here, we’d be able to have the ambition of reaching the top competition and, of course, that would be based on sporting merit. These analyses and proposals were put forward together by the ECA and UEFA in spring 2019. It’s not my intention to remind everyone here of what happened after. The proposal was not carried out, but that does not take anything away from the fact that the analysis remains valid even today.There was the Covid outbreak and everything that ensued as a consequence of that. I’d like to leave Covid to one side today.Something I’m now thinking about and that I’d like to share today is that if I had wanted to remain in a privileged position, so staying in my role as the ECA President, being on the UEFA Executive Committee, keeping my role as an advisor to the Italian Football Federation (FIGC), of course, I wouldn’t have made the decision that I made in April 2021. I believed and still believe now that European football requires structural reforms to face the future. Otherwise, we risk a continuous, constant, relentless decline of sport, of football, in the face of a single dominant league, the Premier League, which within a few years will attract all the talent in European football to its championship, completely marginalising the other leagues, such as the Bundesliga, Serie A, La Liga and Ligue 1, while the others have already been marginalised.Unfortunately, it seems clear to me that the current regulators have no desire to listen or face the problems within the industry. They prefer to remain in their privileged position. They are the regulator, they are the monopolistic commercial operator, in Europe and internationally they carry out the function of both investigating and passing judgement within a self-appointed justice system, and they are the competition gatekeepers.In this perspective, it is to be hoped that the European Court of Justice, which is due to give its opinion on UEFA's monopoly, recognises high-level professional sport as an industry. Let us remember that they are to give an opinion on the possibility of free competition in Europe and the abuse of a dominant position in Europe.The arguments that I hear in this regard always mention the specific nature of sport and article 165 of the EU Treaty which speaks of recognising the specific nature of sport, structured on a voluntary basis. Within the EU, the direct and indirect turnover of football – not sport – is €55 billion and it employs 700,000 people. So I think article 165 of the EU Treaty should be taken in serious consideration for high-level professional sport, which is different to grassroots. I hope that this ruling can pave the way for a different management of international sport.I would like to personally thank Real Madrid and Barcelona who, together with Juventus, had the courage to face the threats and the sanctions that were issued or threatened by UEFA, in spring 2021. Based on what? Article 50 of its own statute that 'no combinations or alliances may be formed without the permission of UEFA'. In other words, we should be sanctioned because we met together in a room to contemplate a better future with having previously been authorised by UEFA.So, that is a large part of what I have dealt with in recent years and now we are not far away from a possible change. Over these years so much work has been done within Juventus and it has all been carried out with great pride. I would like to mention a few of these achievements.One is the real estate development of our club – all the direct and indirect investment totalling around €400 million in the last decade. That includes our headquarters, JTC, J Medical, J Museum, the shops around Italy, J Village, Nordiconad and the improvements made to Vinovo. These have been hugely significant investments. Another of our achievements was the creation of our logo, which has taken us into a new dimension and marks a fundamental change for the club's image on a global level. I personally believe that the courage shown in taking this decision will bear fruit over time and make our club widely recognisable, to non-football fans as well, because it enables you to work and to expand the brand in many different fields.We have managed some complex situations, such as the involvement of Juventus employees in the football betting investigation at the start of the last decade, the Alto Piemonte investigation, the Last Banner investigation, and the most recent investigation, Prisma. They were all tricky situations to manage and we have managed them and will continue to manage some of them over the coming months.Our results on the field are obviously a reason for tremendous pride, starting with the first team and the creation of the Juventus Women and the results they have achieved in these years. I am also particularly proud of the results of the Next Gen, our former U23 team. They have added a trophy to the museum – the Serie C Coppa Italia three seasons ago – and the project is bearing fruit in terms of providing youngsters for the first team. I believe that with perseverance, dedication and passion we can realistically aim to have 50-60% of the first-team squad coming from our academy in the next five to eight years. That would of course offer huge benefits in terms of both investment and remuneration for our playing staff, while keeping us competitive both domestically and internationally.Everything I have just mentioned would not have been possible without the contribution of all the women and men who have worked for Juventus in these years.I would like to thank Alessandro D'Angelo, Maurizio Bertoli and all of the kitroom staff, Maurizio Arrivabene, Beppe Marotta, Aldo Mazzia, Domenico Mendolia, Fabio Paratici, Javier Ribalta, Pablo Longoria, Giovanni Manna, Tognozzi, Scaglia, Gianni Rossi, Federico Cherubini, Marco Re, Stefano Bertola, Vincenzo Ampolo, Caterina Barzan, Federico Furfaro, Giovanni Reggiori, Claudio Albanese, Cesare Gabasio, Stefano Cerrato, Michele Bergero, Jean-Claude Blanc, Francesco Calvo, Francesco Gianello, Greta Bodino, Fabio Tucci, Stefano Braghin. Our coaches and their staff: Joe Montemurro, Rita Guarino, Gigi Del Neri, Maurizio Sarri, Antonio Conte, Massimiliano Allegri and Andrea Pirlo; Alberto Mignone, Riccardo Abrate, Alessandro Sorbone, Sergio Spinelli, Enrica Tarchi, Riccardo Coli, Gabriella Ravizzotti, Cristina Demarie, Federico Palomba, Elisabetta Cravero, Francesco Roncaglio, Paolo Garimberti, Antonio Canese; everyone at Telecontrol for the security they have provided us with; Tiziana Di Gioia, Mike Armstrong, Luca Adornato, Silvio Vigato, Giorgio Ricci; Paolo Piccatti and Roberto Spada as the two chairmen of the board of auditors; Dina Moschillo, Fulvia Moscheni, Alessandra Borrelli, Stefania Dulio, Daniele Lunazzi, Edoardo Bandini, Martino Rimondi, Alberto Pairetto, Luca Conte, Riccardo Scaletta, Matteo Stasi, Francesca Zerbino, Claudia Mijno, Lella Guillaume, Fabrizio Tencone, Luca Stefanini, Riccardo Agricola, Nikos Tzouroudis, Marco Freschi, Paolo Cavalli, Fabio Tenore, Gianluca Stesina, Andrea Causarano, Claudio Rigo, Marcello Magro, Gigi Chiappero, Maria Turco, Maurizio Bellacosa, Davide Sangiorgio, Alessandra Zanello, Cristiana Civita, Andrea Maschietto; my captains, Alessandro Del Piero, Gigi Buffon, Giorgio Chiellini, Leonardo Bonucci and Danilo. Matteo Fabris, Giorgia Spinelli, Raffaella Masciadri, Marco Albano, Alessandro Sandiano, Marco Fassone, Ben Tavener, Gigi Milani, Elisa Miniati. Sara Gama and Cecilia Salvai; Claudio Leonardi, Paolo Morganti, Massimo Cosentino, Marco Patania, Marco Storari, Maurizio Lombardo, Ciccio Grabbi; our Under 23 coaches: Massimo Brambilla, Paolo… the coaches of our academy teams, Brambilla, Montero and Panzanaro, Gianluca Pessotto and, of course, last but not least, my Vice President Pavel Nedved.- Applause -
Naturally this list cannot be exhaustive and I am sure I will have forgotten some people but those people whose names I have forgotten to mention should know that everyone, even those I forgot to mention, has my deepest gratitude for these almost 13 years. The final point is the three-year plan we approved in June 2022 called “Path Qualibility”, which is based on five key pillars: financial, managerial, sporting, ESG and political. For each of these pillars, full responsibility is handed to the management figures in charge of the individual areas, because they are the people who have operational responsibility in this club. This operational responsibility is part of the complex management of a club like Juventus, because it is a medium-sized company, a listed company, with different business lines: hotel, retail, stadium, sponsorships and digital.“Clearly we cannot be highly specialised in all business areas, but here we try to do lots of different businesses within the same company. So this is the tremendous result that all these people have achieved in these years. I will quickly move onto the last part of this speech, which is my personal part.Having ended such an important chapter of my life, it is my desire, once this shareholders' meeting ends, to turn the page and start again on a blank page that I can get stuck into with enthusiasm and passion. After a few days' holiday, of course. Therefore I have made a personal decision, which is to take a step back from the boards of the listed companies that I am on. This decision has been taken in agreement with John Elkann, whom I remain extremely close to regarding the strategic development of the Group, with Ajay Banga and Carlos Tavares.It was a request of mine because after such an intense period I wish to see the future as a blank page, free and strong, and I believe that taking a step back from the listed companies is necessary to have the freedom of thought and the intellectual freedom I wouldn't otherwise be able to have.The final aspect is the people who are really important to me: my wife, Deniz, and my children, Baya, Giacomo, Mila, Livia and Vera. They have been the foundations that I have been able to support myself on to achieve what we have achieved, and together we will try to begin a new chapter.At this point it is impossible for me not to mention the words Deniz used in a post that I wasn't aware of, at the end of November, which is that I can't wait to start with her and I can't wait to see what the future holds for us. We know that side by side we will make the future better than any expectation. I love you.Fino alla fine. Grazie.