Fabio Capello didn’t stick around. The Calciopoli trial had not yet delivered a verdict, but the writing was on the wall. A break clause in his contract with Juventus gave him an escape route, and on July 4, 2006, he exercised it. Capello was recognized as football’s leading coach at the time, having won eight league titles in 15 years. His past as a player with Juventus didn’t make him unconditional, loyalty.
When the club was relegated to Serie B for the first time in their history, docked 30 points, and stripped of two championships, Capello was already in Valdebebas, the second spell with Real Madrid, underway. Fabio Cannavaro, the world champion and Ballon d’Or-winning centre-back, followed him to the Bernabeu, along with Emerson, the Brazilian twine that ran through Capello’s last Scudetti at Roma and Juve.
The scandal, which led to lifelong bans for Juventus’ general manager Luciano Moggi and chief executive Antonio Giraudo, was not about match-fixing, but rather a network of power and influence. It remains a disputed watershed moment in Italian football’s history, forever war.
To paraphrase Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way), the 115 charges brought by the Premier League against City are different from the allegations the Italian Football Federation made against Juventus and others in 2006.
City welcomed “the review by an independent commission, to impartially consider the comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence” they claim will exonerate them from charges, including a failure to provide accurate details for player and manager payments, breaches of profit and sustainability rules, and compliance with UEFA’s FFP regulations.
Guardiola has repeatedly addressed the threat of relegation. “I said when all the clubs accused us of doing something wrong and people say: ‘What if we are relegated?’ I will be here. I don’t know the position they are going to bring us, the Conference? (But) next year we will come up and come up and come back to the Premier League.”
Whether Guardiola’s promise is tested by the verdict or not remains to be seen.
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