Juventus: 4 Mistakes of the Old Lady After the Calciopoli Scandal

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Before the wake of the Calciopoli scandal in Serie A, Juventus was one of the best teams in the world. After it, however, the club has endured the worst times in its history.

Juventus were punished for match-fixing and were relegated to Serie B, which lead to the team losing all its stars except for Gianluigi Buffon, David Trezeguet, Mauro Camoranesi, Pavel Nedved and Aessandro Del Piero.

Many mistakes were made in the past five years but some of these mistakes, which will never be forgiven by the fans, really hurt the club and its reputation. 

Choosing an Awful Director of Football

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During the summer of 2006 it was announced that Alessio Secco was the going to be the director of football.

Secco, who had worked under Luciano Moggi for five years, was expected to make the Juventus squad world-class again by making world-class signings for cheap prices. After all, he had worked under Moggi and would definitely know some of the secrets to Moggi's transfer-market strategies.

To be fair, Secco did a good job for keeping at least some of the key players in the team when Juventus were in Serie B and also choosing Didier Deschamps as the man to take Juventus back to Serie A. However, problems started to arise once Juve were back in the top tier.

In the summer of 2007, Secco signed many players who would prove unsuccessful in the future. As years went by, Secco's signings kept getting more expensive while the quality of the same team stayed the same. 

The coaches that Secco chose for the team were also mostly unproven. After Deschamps, Claudio Ranieri was the man that came in. While he was probably the best coach Juve have had during this five years, the players that Ranieri had to coach were not title-winning material. As soon as the team started to get shaky, Secco, instead of backing Ranieri by buying some good players, decided it was time to bring in and unproven, experimental coach in the name of Ciro Ferrara to shake up things in the club, which was also unsuccessful.

After an awful 2009-2010 season, Secco was sacked and replaced by Giuseppe Marotta.

Secco's major signings and their rating:

2007: Mohamed Sissoko (6/10), Zdenek Grygera (7/10), Vincenzo Iaquinta (6/10), Jorje Andrade (1/10), Cristian Molinaro (4/10), Hasan Salihamidzic (5/10), Tiago Mendes (4/10)

2008: Amauri (5/10), Christian Poulsen (4/10), Olof Melberg (5/10), Dario Knezevic (3/10)

2009: Antonio Candreva (6/10), Felipe Melo (6/10), Diego (5/10), Fabio Grosso (5/10), Fabio Cannavaro (3/10), Martin Caceras (7/10)

Putting Jean-Claude Blanc in Charge of Everything

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Bringing in Jean-Claude Blanc to fix up Juventus was probably the best decision made by the Juventus board and John Elkaan. Being the man that managed sporting events like the Winter Olympics and Tour de France, he was one of the only men that could think of a solution for the crisis Juventus was in.

Blanc is a businessman and he has been brilliant in doing business for Juventus. He planned and finished the stadium and made sure that the club was in little debt.

The problem with Blanc is that he was also put in charge of the sporting side of the club. Blanc had no experience in football and, although he was great on the business side, he made wrong decisions in signing coaches and directors.

Blanc should have been given his current general manager role from the start and that would have let him run the club's finances while not being blamed for the sporting decisions.  

Postponing Stadium Plans

Every Juventus fan is excited about this new stadium, but I can't understand how and why it was postponed for two years. I mean, Juventus didn't even play in the old Stadio Delle Alpi since 2006, so why was it not demolished and changed right away?

It seems that the stadium plan was postponed for a while to give the management some time to re-evaluate their plans and also to come back to the Italian top tier first. But without those two years of waiting, Juventus would have probably had a much better squad now.

Not Fighting the Italian Football Federation for Justice

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The further we get from the 2006 scandal, the more it becomes obvious that the decision made by the court and the federation at that time was too harsh on Juventus and that some evidence had been kept from the investigators—evidence that would prove how everyone in the league was doing the same thing that Moggi was doing.

It seems like fighting for justice was not given to Blanc as a task because he gave up on the appeal for Calciopoli punishments very easily and, until Andrea Agnelli became president, nobody in the team was thinking of fighting for the rights of Juventus.