On Monday, we were treated to the seismic news of the resignation of the entire Juventus board, including president Andrea Agnelli and vice president Pavel Nedved.
The board of the Italian club has been under strain for some time, and it has been a turbulent time on and off the pitch for the Old Lady.
For starters, the Turin club is under investigation for several financial misdemeanours. Chief among these transgressions were irregularities in Juventus’ transfer dealings, particularly irregularities in “revenues from player registration”.
This time last year, Juventus’ offices in Milan and Turin were raided by the police, but nothing seismic occurred until now.
For now, Maurizio Arrivabene will remain interim managing director while Juventus put together a new board. According to the BBC, the matter is to be reviewed and hopefully resolved by January 18th, when Juventus’ shareholders will convene to elect new board members.
What does this all have to do with the price of cheese you might ask, and particularly, what does the Turin turmoil have to do with Spurs?
Well, given that Juventus will not have a functional board until the middle of the January window will presumably make doing business with the Italians difficult, and having signed Rodrigo Bentancur and Dejan Kulusevski (sort of) from them already, there have been plenty of rumours doing the round that ex-Juve man Fabio Paratici was to raid the Turin outfit again this winter for the likes of Weston McKennie and Adrien Rabiot.
The fact that Juve will have to get their house in order before doing business with other clubs may very well offset any moves Spurs had planned for either player.
However, the club are in financial turmoil – Agnelli hasn’t been doing a great job in balancing the books, with Juve posting an Italian record loss of €254.3m (£220m) last season – and they’ve got an almighty battle on their hands to secure Champions League football next season, currently a point clear of fifth-placed Inter Milan in third but with plenty of sides in Serie A vying for a place in Europe’s top table.
Of course, they’ve also already been knocked out of the Champions League group stages with a whimper.
All of these financial farces will invariably put pressure on Juventus to balance the books, as they really don’t have a choice given the aforementioned factors. Selling players to Spurs may just be a way to do that.
One positive outcome from all this may ultimately be the ending – or at least, subsiding – of the rumours linking Antonio Conte to a return to Turin, as Agnelli and Nedved had reportedly been banging the drum for the Italian to come home and lift the Old Lady from the doldrums they currently find themselves in.
Now that Heckle and Keckle no longer have a say in Juve’s purported managerial search, it looks like Conte may stick around for longer yet.
For now, in one capacity or another, it looks as though Spurs may just benefit from all this instability, but we will see…