Juventus board resigns
Following days of increasingly embarassing press revelations over tapped telephone conversations involving General Manager Luciano Moggi discussing refereeing appointments with various referees and league officials, the entire board of Juventus F.C. has resigned today.
The Juventus website does not go into any detail:
The Board of Directors has returned its mandate to the shareholders until the appointment of the new Board and to this end has announced the first call of the shareholders’ ordinary general meeting for 29th June 2006 and the second call for 30th June 2006 with the following agenda: “Appointment of the directors after defining their number and remuneration”.
In recent years, Juventus has been surrounded by controversy on numerous occasions, not last when it was accused (and later found guilty) of administering the banned drug EPO to its own players, in the mid-90s.
While the club had managed to come clean of similar accusations in the past, today’s resignation is a historic event in Italian Football that people will talk about for a long time. It is hard to imagine that this will remain an isolated incident. It is the first time that such a potere forte of Italian football risks implosion: today’s resignation is likely to have a lasting effect on the football world in Italy that will see other illustrious names and big clubs implicated.
