Juventus president and European Super League instigator Andrea Agnelli has resigned from his position at the Italian giants along with a number of other board members.
The Serie A giants have confirmed that Agnelli and the entirety of the board, including former Ballon d'Or winner Pavel Nedved, have stepped down from their positions with immediate effect due to legal investigations surrounding the club's transfer activity still ongoing.
A statement released by the club said: "Furthermore, the members of the Board of Directors, considering the centrality and relevance of the pending legal and technical-accounting issues, have deemed it in the best social interest to recommend that Juventus adopt a new Board of Directors to address these issues."
Agnelli has held his position as president since May 2010 and in that time saw Juventus win nine-straight Serie A titles as well as reach the 2015 and 2017 Champions League finals, where they lost to Barcelona and Real Madrid. During his reign as chairman, the Italian businessman also headed the signing of Cristiano Ronaldo from the Spanish giants in the summer of 2018 for a fee of £80 million.
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However, the Italian's refusal to abandon his European Super League dream is how he will be best remembered around the continent as he helped prise eleven other elite-level European clubs into the short-lived, shameful pursuit of forming a breakaway league in April 2021.
Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Tottenham and Arsenal were the six Premier League sides who initially signed up for the scheme before quitting in disgrace less than 48 hours later after a wave of backlash from supporters across the country, despite the fact they were unable to attend stadiums in England due to restrictions surrounding the Coronavirus pandemic.
But even after nine of the humiliated clubs initiated the process to withdraw from the legal agreement they had already penned, Agnelli continued to work with officials at Real Madrid and Barcelona in a desperate attempt to resume plans to assemble the European Super League, or an equivalent.
Speaking at the FT Business of Football summit in London earlier this year, Agnelli refused to admit to title the European Super League as a failure but instead insisted that the first attempts to form a breakaway league away from UEFA were in fact "very important" steps.
"To me it is not a failure," he said. "We have been hearing projects of potential breakaway leagues ever since I was a teenager.
"Last year was the first time that not one, not two, not three, but 12 clubs made a very important statement that was a profound alarm to the system.”
Juventus, Barcelona and Real Madrid are currently engaged in a tense legal battle with the European game's governing body, UEFA, with the trio adamant the obstruction of the European Super League was an abuse of UEFA's position.
Earlier this week they announced that an annual shareholders' conference that, was originally scheduled for November 23, had been postponed until December 27.
Despite their prestige in the European game, Juventus have suffered both on and off the pitch in recent years due to not winning the Serie A title since the 2019/20 season. They have also been knocked out of the Champions League by Lyon, Porto and Villarreal in the last three campaigns.
Off the pitch, the 36-time Italian champions' latest published accounts saw them reveal record-breaking financial losses of around £220 million.
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