LONDON: The president of Juventus says that he wants to see every other club work with UEFA’s financial fair play regulations (FFP) as he is sceptical on whether sanctions will be introduced.
Andrea Agnelli was speaking at Leaders in Football in London when he said that his club’s dark days were behind now, “but we all know in sport can change suddenly, you can never lower the alert,”
On UEFA’s FFP, Agnelli maintained Juventus’ commitment but questioned the commitment of other clubs in Europe.
He said: “We at Juventus are working with Financial Fair Play in mind, our five year industrial plan keeps that in mind – I’m just I’m curious to see who else is working with FFP in mind.
“Once the actual FFP rules comes into effect, I am curious like everybody else to see how effective that will be and how the actual punishments will be distributed in-case someone breaches FFP.”
The Juventus chief threw up the possibility of teams being banned and what effect that would have on the broadcasters who paid enormous amounts of money for the rights to the Champions League for instance.
“Are you going to have regulations that are going to ban teams from the Champions League? Who is going to go to the broadcasters and say ‘whoops we don’t have these teams playing?’”
“To me it is fine – I fully agree with its principles, I want to see it fully in place and what is going to happen.”
Agnelli said that part of Juventus’s turnaround has been through the physical infrastructure as they have moved to a stadium with a more “realistic” capacity of 41,000.
“If you go through the various sport channels on TV and you see an event which is full of people, it will catch your attention. If you flick through and see an empty stadium, it is hard for it to catch your attention.
“Most of the money comes from TV rights; if that is true then you have to enhance the stadium experience.”
The new Juventus Stadium is situated on the same site as their old one and was opened in 2011.
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