Turin at this hour had a specific quality.
Andrea Agnelli stood in the doorway of his study and looked at the room he had spent the last forty-eight hours not leaving for any meaningful length of time, and he felt — somewhere behind the composure that he had been maintaining without interruption since the announcement went out — the very specific exhaustion of a man who had been working at this level for two days without his body being told it could stop.
The study was a long, panelled room on the second floor of the house. The furnishings were old in the way that things in Italian houses of a certain class were old — not antique for the performance of antiquity, but antique because the family had been there long enough that the furniture predated several of the people currently using it. A heavy desk in the centre. A leather chair he had inherited from his father. Bookshelves running the length of two walls, the books on them genuinely read. A framed Juventus shirt from 1985 — Platini, the European Cup, the year before Heysel — hanging in the corner with the deliberate, slightly understated emphasis of a man who took the history of his institution seriously without needing to perform that he took it seriously.
The room was dark.
He had not turned the main lights on. The desk lamp was on, and a smaller lamp by the window, and the laptop screen on the desk was open and bright, and that was the available light. The rest of the room sat in the warm, half-shadowed state of a study at ten in the evening when the man working in it had not yet given himself permission to stop.
Outside the window, Turin was quiet.
He could see, through the partial gap in the curtains, the particular dark blue of the sky over the city at this hour, the lights of the buildings below the house, the steady traffic on the road two blocks over. None of it, from this height, looked like a city in which anything significant was happening.
Inside the room — across his laptop, across the secondary screen on his desk, across the phone face-down beside the keyboard that had not stopped buzzing for two days — was a different story entirely.
He moved to the desk.
He did not sit. Not yet. He stood with his hands resting on the back of the chair, the way he had been standing periodically for the last hour as he read messages and made calls and watched the project he had spent eighteen months building come under attack from twelve different directions simultaneously.
Phones. Plural.
Three of them. The standard one, the secure one for the Super League negotiations specifically, and the personal one his wife had been trying to reach him on for the last four hours and which he had been failing to answer with the practiced guilt of a man who had been failing to answer it for the last several days.
The laptop showed the Zoom call window, currently in the staging room, the participants beginning to log in. The names appearing one by one in the participant panel as he watched.
Pérez, Florentino — Real Madrid CFLaporta, Joan — FC BarcelonaCerezo, Enrique — Atlético de MadridBerlusconi, Paolo — AC Milan (proxy)Marotta, Beppe — Juventus FC (proxy)
The Marotta one was for him — he had not yet selected his own video stream — and he reached down and clicked the icon to bring himself into the call. His face appeared in the small panel at the corner of the screen. He looked at it briefly, the small reflexive check of a man making sure the camera was showing what he wanted it to show, and then he stopped looking at himself and looked at the others as they continued arriving.
Scaroni, Paolo — InternazionaleGlazer family proxy: Woodward, Edward — Manchester United
Andrea registered the Woodward entry with the particular small note he had been making about the Glazers since this began. They had not bothered. Not once, in all of the late-night calls and the legal coordination sessions and the strategic planning meetings, had a single member of the Glazer family appeared on a screen. Woodward had handled all of it. He was, at this stage, essentially representing absent owners, which was — Andrea filed the observation — the kind of thing that told you something about how committed an institution actually was, and how much weight you should place on its participation when the project came under stress.
Levy, Daniel — Tottenham HotspurHenry, John — Liverpool (Fenway Sports Group)Khan, Bruce Buck — Chelsea (proxy for Abramovich)
Buck was a lawyer. Abramovich was not on this call. That was also notable. Andrea filed it.
Mubarak, Khaldoon — Manchester City (City Football Group)
The Mubarak entry took him a moment longer to read than the others because he had been expecting it and had been expecting it specifically, and the confirmation that Mubarak himself — rather than a proxy — had logged in personally was, in itself, a piece of information. It told him that whatever Manchester City were going to do tonight, they were going to do it through their actual chairman rather than through their lawyers, which suggested that City's chairman had decided that the moment was significant enough to require his own face on the screen.
He did not love what that implied.
Kroenke, Josh — Arsenal
Josh Kroenke. The son. Stan was not on the call. The pattern with the Premier League side of the table was already clear and not yet fully spoken: the actual owners, the people who controlled the money, were largely declining to put their faces on the project. Their representatives were here. The principals were not.
He kept reading.
Pérez, Florentino — Chairman, European Super League (presenting)
The last entry. The one that made the call official.
He pulled out the chair and sat down.
His coffee was on the desk. It had gone cold approximately forty minutes ago and he had been continuing to drink it on the principle that warm or cold, it was caffeine, and caffeine was what the next two hours were going to require. He took a sip. He grimaced. He drank it anyway.
A thought arrived, unwelcome and accurate.
This is going to be a long night.
He let the thought sit. He did not refuse it. He did not soften it. He acknowledged it with the small interior nod of a man who had been doing this job long enough to know the difference between hopeful prediction and accurate one, and reached forward to unmute his microphone.
The call began.
Pérez did not start immediately.
He let the silence settle for a moment after the last person joined — the specific, deliberate silence of a man who had built a career on understanding that the first thirty seconds of any meeting belonged to whoever was prepared to hold them longest — and only when the room of twelve participants had arrived at a quality of attention that satisfied him did he begin to speak.
When he did, the voice came through the speakers with the slow, considered weight that Andrea had heard him deploy in every important meeting they had had together over the last eighteen months. Pérez did not rush. He had never rushed. He spoke in the measured, slightly elongated rhythm of a man who had decided, decades ago, that the people listening to him would adjust their pace to his rather than the other way around, and the world had, by and large, agreed.
"Gentlemen," he said.
A pause.
"And lady," he added — Susana Werner had recently been confirmed at one of the Italian clubs, and Pérez, who was nothing if not procedural, had updated his greetings accordingly. "Thank you for coming together at this hour. I am aware that for several of you it is now quite late. I am aware that the last forty-eight hours have placed considerable demand on every institution represented on this call. I am also aware that what we are doing — what we have begun together — does not pause for the convenience of any one schedule."
He let that sit.
"I will be brief in my opening, because the substance of this call is not in the opening. It is in the work we will do over the next hour. Before we begin that work, I want to remind everyone here of the fundamental truth that brought us together."
He paused again.
"European football is broken."
The words came through the speakers with the specific quality they always had when Pérez deployed them — not as an opinion, not as an argument, as a statement of fact that the speaker had decided would not be debated.
"It is broken financially. It is broken structurally. It is broken in its distribution of revenue, in its governance, in its accountability to the institutions that produce the actual sporting product. The current administrators of this sport have presided over a model in which the clubs that fill the stadiums, that develop the players, that carry the historical weight of this competition — receive a fraction of the revenues that the central administration distributes to itself and to its preferred political relationships. We have, between the twelve of us, accepted that arrangement for too long. We came together to correct it."
He paused.
"Nothing that has happened in the last Twenty-four hours changes that diagnosis."
Andrea watched the faces in the participant panel as Pérez spoke.
He had known, going into this call, what he would see. He had been doing the version of this work that the people on the call had not been doing — the late-night phone tree, the individual conversations, the specific calibration of which presidents needed which kind of reassurance — and he had a very precise sense of which faces would be doing what.
Cerezo, at Atlético, was already nodding. The Italians were composed. Laporta was watching Pérez with the careful attention of a man who was on the same side of the project but had his own version of the political pressure and was sitting with it.
The Premier League side of the panel was a different picture.
Daniel Levy was looking at something off-screen, his head turned slightly to the left, the angle of a man who was reading another document while pretending to be present on the call. John Henry was on camera but not in the camera — the unfocused gaze of a man whose video was on while his mind was emphatically elsewhere. Bruce Buck, the Chelsea lawyer, had the composed neutral expression of a senior counsel who would not be expressing any opinion that had not first been cleared with his client, and his client, Andrea was now certain, had not given him much to express.
Woodward looked tired.
That was the most charitable interpretation. The less charitable one was that Woodward looked frightened, in the specific way of a man whose principals had washed their hands of a thing while continuing to require him to manage the thing's consequences. His eyes were doing the small, restless movement of someone who was not paying attention to what was being said because he was waiting for his own opportunity to say what he needed to say.
Khaldoon Al Mubarak was watching Pérez directly.
His expression was not particularly easy to read, but Andrea — who had spent enough hours across tables from Mubarak in ECA meetings and other industry forums to have developed a working sense of the man — noted the quality of his attention. Mubarak was listening properly. He was not multitasking. He was not performing engagement. He was actually following Pérez's words, which meant he was preparing a response, which meant the response was going to be substantive.
That was also not what Andrea had wanted to see.
Josh Kroenke looked, frankly, out of his depth. He was the son of a billionaire who had inherited his presence on this call rather than earned it, and the difficulty of the moment had reduced him to the basic professional posture of a young executive who did not want to embarrass himself or his father, which was a kind of posture that did very little for a project that needed conviction at this stage.
Andrea looked at all of them and felt, with the specific clarity that came when he allowed himself to think the thoughts he did not say in rooms, the thing he had been thinking about the Premier League contingent for the last twelve months.
Vultures.
The word arrived clean.
He let it sit, internally, with the other words he kept filed and did not deploy. He was a professional. He understood the political requirement of speaking about his colleagues on this call as colleagues, of treating the twelve of them as a single coordinated entity, of suppressing — at least in any forum where it could be heard — the fact that he viewed roughly half of the table with a contempt that had been building for a decade and that he had no intention of ever fully expressing.
But internally, in his own study, in his own head, with the room dark around him and the desk lamp the only meaningful light: vultures.
That was the word.
He looked at Mubarak — at the particular composure of a man who represented an ownership group that had, over a period of years, poured several billion pounds of sovereign wealth into a football club and had used the resulting on-pitch success to remake the competitive landscape of European football in a way that had specifically, materially, and irrevocably damaged the institutions Andrea had been raised to believe in. He looked at Henry — at the American investment fund that had bought Liverpool and operated it as an asset class, with the specific Anglo-Saxon discipline of capital deployment that had nothing to do with the local supporter culture or the historical traditions of the institution. He looked at Kroenke — at the son of an American real estate magnate who had bought a London football club essentially as a portfolio diversification. He looked at Levy — at the chairman of an institution whose sporting trophy cabinet did not justify its current position in the European elite, whose place on this call existed entirely because of the wealth its owner had accumulated through other means.
He thought about Juventus.
He thought about the family that had built it. About his uncle. About the specific Italian notion of industria — that a football club was a piece of an industrial fabric, owned by a family that operated factories and held its place in the city across generations, and that this fabric was the actual constitutive element of European football and not the recent, slightly grotesque arrival of unlimited foreign capital.
He thought about all of this and he did not say any of it, because Pérez was still speaking, and because the meeting required him to be a professional, and because the project they were defending tonight specifically required the participation of the people he was thinking these thoughts about.
Pérez had insisted on it from the beginning.
The Super League cannot happen without the Premier League, Pérez had said to him, in their first private conversation about the project, eighteen months ago in a hotel suite in Madrid. The world will not take a competition seriously if it does not include the English clubs. Their commercial reach is too large. Their broadcast footprint is too dominant. Without them we are a Mediterranean club tournament with delusions of grandeur.
Andrea had agreed.
He had not loved agreeing. He still did not love agreeing. But he was a serious man and he could read a market, and the market told him that Pérez was correct, and that the project they had built required the very people Andrea would have, in a different version of his career, been most prepared to exclude from European football's top table.
So he had agreed.
And he had built a Super League that depended, structurally, on the loyalty of clubs whose ownership models he viewed as part of the disease the Super League was meant to treat.
The contradiction was, he knew, enormous. It was, in fact, the core contradiction of the entire project, and it was the contradiction that was now, in front of him on twelve screens, beginning to play out in real time.
He returned his attention to Pérez.
"—the financial structure remains intact," Pérez was saying. "JP Morgan have not withdrawn. The facility commitments remain. The revenue projections, on the basis of the participation we currently have, support the recovery plans every one of us has built around them. None of that has changed. I want everyone on this call to be clear about that."
"Florentino—" Levy.
The interruption came in the slightly nasal, deliberate voice of the Tottenham chairman, the man who had built a career on the specific Anglo-Israeli skill of being the most uncomfortable person in any negotiation he was part of.
"Florentino, with respect — the fan response in England is a different category of problem from anything the financial projections account for. We are seeing organised supporter mobilisation outside grounds. The Government has made a statement. The Prime Minister has personally intervened. UEFA's response is one thing. The domestic political environment is another. I'm not sure the JP Morgan facility holds up if the English participation comes under genuine domestic legal threat, and I'm telling you frankly — that threat is now real."
Andrea watched Pérez's face.
Pérez did not move.
He did not interrupt. He did not allow any visible reaction. He let Levy's intervention sit on the call for a beat longer than the panel expected, and then — when it was clear that nothing further was coming — he resumed in the same slow, deliberate voice he had been using before the interruption.
"Daniel," he said. "Thank you. Your concerns are noted. We will return to the English political situation specifically in this call. Before we do that, I want to complete the structural overview, because some of what you are raising is addressed by the structure rather than by the politics, and I would prefer that we have the structural picture in front of us before we go to the politics."
Levy nodded once, the specific nod of a man who had been smoothly managed and was choosing not to escalate.
Pérez continued.
"Čeferin," he said.
The name came through the speakers with the very specific tone Pérez reserved for it — flat, professional, the tone of a man saying a name he did not particularly enjoy saying but said anyway.
"Aleksander Čeferin has, in the last few hours, deployed essentially every regulatory tool available to him. He has threatened expulsion of our clubs from current European competitions. He has threatened bans on national team eligibility for our players. He has co-ordinated with Gianni Infantino at FIFA to extend those threats globally. He has spoken to the domestic leagues. He has personally contacted at least eight of the clubs on this call directly through back channels."
A pause.
"I am aware of all of it. I have anticipated all of it. None of it surprises me."
He let that sit.
"What I want everyone on this call to understand is that the threats Čeferin is making are largely not legally enforceable in the form he is currently announcing them. Our legal teams — and I want to acknowledge the work of Andrea's team in Turin, Joan's team in Barcelona, and the Latham and Watkins team coordinating across all twelve of us — have prepared a coordinated litigation response. We have filings ready in the European Court of Justice. We have parallel filings in the Spanish commercial courts and in the Italian administrative courts. We have antitrust groundwork prepared in three jurisdictions."
Andrea was nodding as Pérez spoke. The legal coordination had been substantial. His own team had been at the centre of it, working with a senior partner at Latham who had effectively been embedded in the project for months. Pérez was not exaggerating.
"The legal architecture of the Super League is robust," Pérez continued. "Čeferin knows this. Infantino knows this. The threats they are making in the press are designed to be politically effective rather than legally precise. They are designed to apply pressure on clubs whose commitment is uncertain. They are not designed to be litigated, because Čeferin understands that if any of his threats are tested in front of a competent European court they will not survive."
He paused.
"I want every legal team on this call to remain in close coordination over the next seventy-two hours. The Latham team will continue to lead. Barcelona's team and Juventus's team will provide the supplementary jurisdictional work in Spain and Italy. The Premier League clubs — your domestic legal exposure is the most acute, and I want your teams in direct contact with Latham starting tomorrow morning."
Several heads nodded on the panel.
Pérez moved on.
"On the domestic leagues," he said. "Tebas in Spain has been the most aggressive. He has indicated personally that he will pursue every available regulatory action to prevent Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Atlético from continuing to compete in La Liga while remaining founders of the Super League. I will be candid with the call — Javier Tebas does not concern me in the same way Čeferin does, and Javier Tebas does not concern me because Javier Tebas has, in private conversations with me over the last several months, indicated that his public position and his actual position will not be the same thing. He has been, behind the scenes, considerably more constructive than his public statements suggest. Of course I do not expect that to last forever, At the end of the day for the league survival even the political pressure on him would not be able to hold him off for long. But I do not expect domestic regulatory action from La Liga in the immediate term."
Andrea filed this. The Tebas information was new to him in this specific form — he had known Tebas was being managed, but the suggestion that Tebas was actually privately constructive was the kind of thing only Pérez would know, and only Pérez would know it because only Pérez had the specific Madrid political relationships that made Tebas reachable.
"Serie A," Pérez continued, "has been less aggressive. The Premier League has been the most aggressive, primarily because of the political pressure on Richard Masters and on the FA. Andrea — would you like to add anything on the Italian situation?"
Andrea unmuted.
"Briefly," he said. The voice he used in these meetings — the working, professional voice, the voice that had nothing of the contempt he had been silently directing at half the panel a few minutes ago. "Italian Serie A's response has been confused. Dal Pino has issued statements that are politically appropriate but legally cautious. The federation has been more aggressive but lacks the regulatory authority to back its threats. The Italian situation, in the short term, is manageable."
He paused.
"I would also note, for the call, that since I stepped down from the ECA chairmanship to take up the Super League leadership, the position has been assumed by Nasser Al-Khelaifi. Nasser is now using the ECA platform as a base from which to coordinate the institutional response against us. He has been publicly aligned with Čeferin since the announcement. I do not need to tell anyone on this call what that means."
He muted again.
Pérez nodded.
"Thank you, Andrea. Yes. Nasser's position is — predictable. PSG were never going to join us. The decision he has taken since assuming the ECA chair — to align openly with UEFA against us — was also predictable. We have planned around it. I do not consider it a meaningful tactical setback."
He paused.
"What I want to do now," he said, "is move to the discussion of consolidation. Because the structural and legal picture is what it is, and the threats are what they are, and the question that matters most over the next forty-eight hours is whether the twelve of us continue to operate as a coordinated block."
He let that sit.
"I would like to hear from each club. Briefly. On where you are tonight."
The screen was quiet for a moment.
Then Cerezo, at Atlético, spoke first.
He did so in the specific Madrid political register of a man who had been in this position for decades and had decided early in his career that loyalty to a particular set of institutional relationships was the only sustainable basis for a successful presidency.
"Florentino," he said. "Atlético is committed. We are committed publicly. We are committed privately. We will not be the institution that breaks the unity of this project. Whatever the political pressure, whatever Tebas does, whatever the supporters say in the short term — we are with you."
Pérez nodded. "Thank you, Enrique."
Laporta unmuted.
"FC Barcelona," he said. The voice carrying the weight of a man who had spent the previous two hours in a boardroom doing his own version of this work. "Is committed. The financial logic of the project for our club is, as I think everyone on this call understands, substantial. The political pressure in Catalonia is significant. The supporter mobilisation outside the Camp Nou tonight is — considerable. I am managing it. I have just come from a board meeting at which the institutional position of the club has been reaffirmed. We remain committed to the project."
He paused.
"I want to add — and I say this with respect — that the strength of our position depends on the unity of the twelve. If clubs begin to withdraw, the political calculus for those who remain becomes considerably more difficult. I would urge anyone on this call who is currently considering withdrawal to think carefully about what that decision means for the rest of us."
The line was directed at the Premier League side of the panel.
Pérez did not call it out as such, but the directness of Laporta's intervention sat on the call in a specific way that everyone present understood.
"Thank you, Joan," Pérez said.
The Italian clubs spoke next.
Scaroni at Inter — careful, politically conservative, the voice of a man who had been a board director at multiple major institutions over the course of his career and had developed a working sense of when to commit and when to hedge. Inter's position, he indicated, was committed but increasingly nervous about the Italian political environment. Berlusconi proxy at Milan — more aggressive, the family's commercial logic asserting itself, the position effectively the same as Inter's but communicated with more bravado.
Then Andrea, for Juventus.
He kept it short. Juventus was committed. The Italian position was committed. He had spent eighteen months building this project and he was not, in the next forty-eight hours, going to allow it to collapse for reasons of short-term political turbulence. He said this clearly, professionally, and without elevation.
He muted.
The Premier League contingent began.
Levy went first.
"Tottenham," he said, "is committed in principle. Our concern, as I indicated earlier, is the domestic political environment. Our supporters are mobilising. The Prime Minister has personally intervened. The Premier League itself is preparing what it has indicated will be aggressive sanctioning if we do not withdraw. I am not announcing a withdrawal tonight. I am communicating to the call that the operating environment for English participation is becoming materially more difficult, and that some of us may need to reassess in the coming forty-eight hours."
Pérez did not respond immediately.
He let Levy's intervention sit. Then, evenly:
"Daniel. Thank you for the candour. I want to ask you directly. Is Tottenham preparing for withdrawal?"
A pause.
"Tottenham," Levy said carefully, "is not preparing for withdrawal. Tottenham is monitoring the operating environment."
Pérez nodded once.
Henry, at Liverpool, spoke next. The voice of a man whose first language was American English speaking it with the specific emphasis pattern of senior corporate finance. "We're committed. FSG remains committed. The fan situation in Liverpool is — bad. I want to be honest with the call about that. We're seeing things in Liverpool that we have not seen in the time we've owned the club. But we are committed. We are not withdrawing tonight."
Buck, for Chelsea, was more careful. "Mr Abramovich's position has not changed. Chelsea remains committed. I am here on his behalf and I am authorised to confirm the institutional position."
The vagueness of Buck's intervention sat on the call.
Andrea filed it. Abramovich is wavering.
Kroenke at Arsenal — short, anodyne, the kind of intervention that committed to nothing while sounding like commitment. Andrea filed that too.
Then Woodward.
"Edward," Pérez said, when Woodward unmuted. "Manchester United."
Woodward had the look of a man who had been preparing to speak for the entire call and had not yet been given the opening. When he began, the words came out faster than he intended, in the specific cadence of a person who had rehearsed something and was failing to deliver it at the rehearsed pace.
"Florentino," he said. "I want to be direct. I want to be direct because I think the rest of the call deserves directness. Manchester United is — the Manchester United supporter response in the last hours is not something any of us anticipated at this scale. There have been demonstrations at Old Trafford. There have been demonstrations at the training ground. The Glazers — the family — are not, as I think everyone on this call understands, particularly comfortable with this level of public attention. They are not engaged with the project the way I think the rest of you would expect ownership groups to be engaged. I am reporting their position as best I can interpret it. Their position, as best I can interpret it, is that they did not expect this level of public response and they are not in a position to absorb a sustained period of this kind of attention."
He paused.
"I am not authorised to announce a withdrawal. I want to be clear about that. I am not announcing anything tonight. But I am required, as the executive responsible to this ownership, to flag to this call that the Manchester United institutional position is — under review."
The call was quiet.
Andrea felt — in the specific, professional way that came in moments like this one — the fabric of what they had built starting to give in his hands.
Pérez did not show it.
"Edward. Thank you. Your position is noted. I will want a follow-up conversation with you and any representative of the Glazer family who is willing to engage in the next twelve hours."
Woodward nodded. He muted.
The screen moved to Mubarak.
Khaldoon Al Mubarak's face, on screen, was the face of a man who had been preparing for this moment for several hours and was about to deliver something he had decided to deliver.
He unmuted.
"Florentino," he said. "I appreciate the time and the structure of this call. I want to add my voice on a specific point that I think has not yet been fully addressed."
Pérez nodded.
"Manchester City's position," Mubarak said, "is — as I think everyone on this call understands — somewhat distinctive. Our ownership is structured differently. Our institutional considerations are not entirely identical to those of the other clubs on this call. I want to be respectful of that distinction in what I am about to say."
He paused.
"The Premier League response over the last hours has been — significant. The political response from the United Kingdom Government has been more significant than any of us anticipated. The supporter response in Manchester specifically, and in England more broadly, has been — I want to be careful with my language — more sustained and more institutionally organised than the modelling we had done suggested it would be."
A pause.
"I want to be clear that City has not made a final decision. I am not announcing a withdrawal tonight. But I am communicating to the call that the considerations our ownership is weighing are real, and that the considerations are not — and I want to address this directly because I anticipate that it may come up — the considerations are not financial."
He looked directly at the camera.
"The Super League's financial guarantees are not the issue for City. I want to be very clear about that. Our ownership has the financial position to weather any sanctioning regime UEFA can credibly impose. The Super League's revenue commitments are — meaningful but not, for our specific institutional context, decisive."
Pérez was watching him.
"What is decisive," Mubarak continued, "is the political environment in England. The relationship our ownership has with the United Kingdom — the broader institutional relationship, beyond football — is one we are not in a position to compromise. The Government has communicated to us, through channels I will not detail on this call, that continued participation in the Super League will have implications for that broader relationship. Those implications are, for us, more consequential than any sporting consideration."
He paused.
"I am communicating this to the call so that the call understands the actual considerations. I am not announcing a decision. But I want the rest of the founding members to understand that if City reaches a withdrawal decision, the reasoning will not be the reasoning that several of you may publicly assume. It will be the reasoning I have just outlined."
Andrea exhaled, very slightly.
Pérez did not move.
When he spoke, his voice was, again, the slow, deliberate voice he had been using all call. He did not allow Mubarak's intervention to register as a setback, because to allow it to register as a setback would have given the call permission to read it as one.
"Khaldoon," he said. "I appreciate the candour. I want to address one specific point you raised — the financial point. I understand that for City the financial guarantees are not the load-bearing element of the project. I accept that. I want to ask the rest of the call to not interpret Khaldoon's intervention as an indication that the financial logic of the Super League is in question, because for several of the institutions on this call — institutions that do not have City's specific ownership structure — the financial logic is decisive. The Super League guarantees substantial revenue at a moment when several of our member clubs are facing structural financial pressure that the existing competition framework does not address. That is the case Joan is making at Barcelona. That is the case I am making at Real Madrid. That is the case Andrea is making at Juventus. The financial argument remains the central institutional argument for participation."
He paused.
"I will return to Khaldoon's broader point separately. For now, I want to move to what I think is the most important single observation about the timing of this announcement, which I do not believe has yet been fully appreciated by everyone on this call."
He let that sit.
"The timing was deliberate. We chose this week — specifically this week, the week of the Champions League semi-finals — for very specific reasons. The semi-finals divide the media attention. The semi-finals divide the supporter attention. Last night's match at the Etihad was a genuine sporting event of the kind that football still produces, and a meaningful portion of the European football conversation today is about that match rather than about us. We anticipated this. We chose the window. We are inside the window now, and the window is working in our favour."
The participants were listening.
"The political pressure is real. The supporter response is real. I am not minimising any of it. But I want the call to understand that the response we are seeing is what it is in part because the announcement is competing for attention with a Champions League semi-final, with another semi-final tomorrow night, and with a final being constructed. If we had announced this in a quieter window, the response would be considerably worse. We chose this window because we knew that. That decision is paying off."
Andrea nodded slowly.
"What this means," Pérez continued, "is that the next seventy-two hours are the critical period. If we hold together through this week — through the noise of the semi-finals, through the political response, through the supporter response — we exit this period as a viable competition. The institutional architecture will hold. The financial structure will hold. The legal architecture will hold. UEFA will be forced to negotiate with us as a fait accompli rather than an aspirational project."
He paused.
"If we do not hold together — if the unity of the twelve fractures in this period — the project does not survive."
He looked at the panel.
"I want to be very clear with everyone on this call. The Super League cannot be defended by Real Madrid alone. It cannot be defended by the Mediterranean clubs alone. It cannot be defended by any single grouping. It can only be defended by all twelve of us, holding the position publicly and privately, in coordination, for the next critical period."
He let it sit.
"That is what I am asking for tonight. Not commitment in the abstract. Coordinated, practical, day-by-day commitment for the next seventy-two hours."
Berlusconi, the Milan proxy, unmuted. "Florentino — Milan is committed. We will make a coordinated public statement in the next twelve hours. We will align with whatever the Latham legal coordination requires. We will hold."
Cerezo at Atlético: "Same. Atlético is committed. We will hold."
Inter, through Scaroni: "Inter is committed. We will hold."
Andrea unmuted.
"Juventus," he said, "is committed. The Italian position is coordinated. We will hold."
Laporta: "Barcelona is committed. We are holding."
The Italian and Spanish side of the call had spoken. The unity of that side was, for the moment, audible.
The Premier League side did not match.
Levy: "Tottenham will hold tonight. Tottenham will reassess in twenty-four hours."
Henry: "FSG will hold tonight. We are monitoring."
Buck: "Chelsea's position is unchanged from what I communicated earlier."
Kroenke, at Arsenal, said something so brief that Andrea barely registered the words. The intervention contained no commitment.
Woodward: "Manchester United will not announce a withdrawal in the next twenty-four hours. I cannot speak for what happens after that."
Mubarak: "Manchester City will not make a public statement before the supporter situation stabilises in Manchester. I cannot speak for what that timeline produces."
The asymmetry of the panel was now visible to everyone on the call.
Pérez did not flinch.
He moved to his closing.
It came in the same slow, deliberate voice he had used throughout, but the register shifted slightly — slightly more elevated, slightly more historical, the voice of a man who had decided that this particular call would end on a piece of speech that he had been preparing for some time and had been waiting for the right moment to deliver.
"Gentlemen," he said.
He let the word sit.
"And lady. Thank you all for the work tonight. I am going to close this call with one observation, because I think it is important that we end on the observation rather than on the operational coordination."
A pause.
"What we are doing — what we have committed ourselves to over these last weeks — is, in my professional judgement and my personal conviction, the correct decision for European football. I have been in this game for thirty years. I have watched the institutions that produce the actual sporting product be progressively asset-stripped by an administrative bureaucracy that does not produce the sporting product, that does not develop the players, that does not carry the historical responsibility for the institutions that built this competition into what it is. We are correcting that. We are correcting it because nobody else has been willing to correct it, and because if we do not correct it now we will be the generation that allowed this game to be lost."
He paused.
"I understand the political pressure. I understand the supporter response. I understand that what we are doing is being received, in this specific moment, as betrayal. I do not minimise any of that. But I will tell you, and I will tell every supporter who is currently chanting my name in a tone that is not flattering — I will tell them that we are on the right side of the long history of this sport. They will not understand it tonight. They will not understand it in three months. They will, in time, understand it, because the alternative to what we are doing is the slow death of the institutions they love, and the fact that they cannot see that yet does not change the fact that it is true."
He paused again.
"We are on the right side of football."
He let that sit.
"That is what I want every one of you to remember in the next seventy-two hours. When the press is at its most aggressive. When the political pressure is at its most acute. When your own boards are asking you whether the project is still viable. Remember that we are on the right side of football. Remember that this is the work. Remember that the institutions you represent will survive this period because of the decisions you are making in this room, even if those decisions are, in this moment, unpopular."
He looked at the camera.
"We will hold. We will hold together. And we will, at the end of this period, look back at it as the moment we chose to do the difficult thing rather than the easy one."
A pause.
"Thank you. We will reconvene at the same time tomorrow evening. I will be available to any of you bilaterally throughout the next twenty-four hours. Latham will distribute the coordinated legal update by morning. Goodnight."
The call did not end immediately.
It ended, instead, the way calls of this kind always ended — through the gradual departure of participants, each of them clicking the leave button at the moment that felt politically appropriate to them.
The Premier League side went first.
Levy left almost immediately. Woodward followed within thirty seconds. Mubarak took slightly longer — he composed his face, adjusted his collar, and left with the deliberate care of a man who had said what he came to say. Henry, Buck, and Kroenke departed in close succession.
The Italian side went next.
Inter, then Milan, then a polite goodnight from Cerezo at Atlético.
Then it was three.
Pérez. Laporta. And Andrea, in his study in Turin, watching the participant panel reduce to its smallest possible composition.
The three of them sat there for a moment.
Nobody had spoken. Nobody needed to. The fact that the three of them were the last three on the call was the entirety of what was being communicated.
Andrea looked at the screen.
He looked at the lamp on his desk and the dark room around it and the cold coffee and the phones still buzzing periodically beside the keyboard.
He looked at Pérez's face on the screen.
Pérez, alone in his own room in Madrid, looked tired in a way Andrea had not seen him look in eighteen months of working together.
The three of them sat in the silence of a Zoom call that contained no other participants and a great deal of unspoken work.
Pérez exhaled.
"Well," he said. "Gentlemen."
The voice, for the first time tonight, was something other than the slow deliberate version. It was quieter. It was the voice of a man speaking to two people he trusted, in a room nobody else was in.
"We have work to do."
...
The voice had changed. It was not the voice of the call any longer — not the slow deliberate one for the panel, not the elevated one for the closing speech. It was the voice he used when he was alone with the people he had built this with, and there were now exactly two of those people on his screen, and the formality of public address had no further use.
Andrea exhaled. Properly this time. The long exhale of a man who had been holding a particular kind of professional posture for two hours and was now allowing himself, for the first time since the call began, to register the cost of it.
"Well," he said. "That was a circus."
Pérez's face on the screen did not move, but something in the eyes did. The corner of his mouth. The smallest indication of agreement that a man in his position was capable of expressing.
"It was what it needed to be," Pérez said.
"It was a circus," Andrea repeated. "I am — Florentino. I am sorry. I will not pretend tonight. I have spent months working with these people. I have been in every meeting. I have been polite, I have been professional, I have been a good colleague to every single one of them. Tonight I am in my own house and the call is over and I want to say it once before I go to bed."
He looked at the screen.
"They are vultures."
Pérez did not respond.
Laporta did not respond either, but his expression carried the small, neutral acknowledgment of someone who was not going to disagree with the characterisation but also was not going to publicly endorse it.
Andrea continued.
"Mubarak. The Khaldoon performance tonight. You understand what that was, yes? That was a man whose owners have communicated to him that the project is no longer politically viable for the broader Abu Dhabi relationship with the United Kingdom. That was not a man who has been weighing the considerations carefully and arrived at a difficult position. That was a man who has been told what to do and is now finding the diplomatic register in which to do it. He is leaving. I am telling you tonight, on this call, with only the three of us on it — he is leaving. Probably within forty-eight hours."
Pérez did not contradict him.
"Levy is going to follow him. Tottenham have no institutional reason to be the last man standing if City go. The Glazers — through Woodward — have already essentially announced that they are leaving in everything but the formal statement. Henry at FSG is — I do not know. The Liverpool supporter response is the worst response in England. It may be the determining factor for him. Buck was here as a placeholder for Abramovich. Abramovich himself was not on this call, which tells you everything you need to know. Kroenke — the son — is incapable of holding a position his father has not given him, and his father is not here."
He paused.
"Six clubs. Six Premier League clubs. And not one of them — not one — produced an unconditional commitment tonight."
Pérez's voice came in measured. "Andrea."
"I know."
"Andrea. We do not need them to produce unconditional commitments tonight. We need them to hold for seventy-two hours."
"They are not going to hold for seventy-two hours, Florentino."
The line sat on the call.
Pérez was silent for a moment longer than he usually was.
Then: "Some of them will. Not all of them. I am not, contrary to what you may be hearing in my voice, expecting all six to hold. I am expecting two. Possibly three. The question for the next forty-eight hours is which two."
"Which is the question I would like to know the answer to," Andrea said.
"Henry. FSG is institutional. They will not enjoy what is coming, but they have invested in this for the financial logic and they will look at the financial logic past the political moment. Liverpool stays the longest of the English clubs."
"Chelsea?"
"Abramovich. I do not know. I do not have the same channel into Abramovich that I have into the others. He may stay. He may go. The signal of him sending Buck rather than appearing himself is — I will not pretend to fully understand it. He is unpredictable. He has been unpredictable for as long as he has owned the club. We will know what he decides when he decides it, and not before."
"Mubarak goes first."
"Mubarak goes first. Yes."
Andrea looked at the desk in front of him. At the cold coffee. At the framed Platini shirt in the corner of the room. At the dark window beyond the desk.
"And after him."
"Tottenham. United. The other London clubs. The dominoes."
"Florentino—"
"I know what I am describing. I have been describing it to myself for six hours. I am not telling you anything I have not already told myself. The English participation is, as of tonight, structurally unstable. The question is not whether it cracks. The question is whether enough of the rest of the project survives the cracking to constitute a viable competition."
He paused.
"That question — I am still working out the answer."
Laporta unmuted.
He had been quiet since the panel had reduced to the three of them. He had been listening, his face composed in the way Andrea had come to recognise as Laporta's particular working mode — the quality of attention of a man processing several streams of information at once and selecting his interventions with care.
When he spoke, his voice carried the specific working tone of a third senior partner adding the perspective the other two had not yet fully developed.
"Tebas," he said.
Pérez looked at him. "Tebas."
"I am — I will be candid. I am more concerned about Tebas than the call tonight suggested. You said his public position and his private position are not the same. I believe that. I have my own information from sources in Madrid that supports it. But Tebas is a politician, and his private position is contingent on his public position remaining manageable, and the public position right now is escalating beyond what I think he is comfortable maintaining."
"Joan."
"Florentino, I respect what you are doing with him. I am not questioning the relationship you have built. I am communicating to you that the supporter pressure in Spain is building specifically against La Liga's continued tolerance of Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Atlético remaining in the competition while founding the Super League. If that pressure crosses a threshold — and I think it might, in the next two weeks — Tebas will have to convert his forced private flexibility into public action. He will not have a choice."
Pérez was already nodding. "I understand. I have for weeks. He has used considerable political capital to maintain the position he is currently maintaining. That capital is not infinite. I agree with you. I believe we have approximately three to four weeks before Tebas's position becomes untenable, and we will be operating accordingly."
"Three to four weeks."
"Three to four weeks. Yes. Which is, fortunately, a longer window than the seventy-two hours we need from the Premier League to maintain the project's structural viability. The Tebas timeline is not the binding constraint."
"It will become a binding constraint by mid-May."
"By mid-May, the European football landscape will be different from what it is tonight. By mid-May, we will either have stabilised the project and entered into negotiation with UEFA from a position of strength, or we will have understood what the project becomes after the English fragmentation. Either way, the Tebas window is sufficient. I am not minimising it. I am telling you that I am operating inside it."
Laporta nodded, slowly.
Andrea looked at both of them on his screen and felt — in the particular way these meetings always made him feel when the three of them were alone with the actual work — the small, residual professional pleasure of being in a room with people who knew what they were doing.
These two men were serious. He had known Pérez for years, had watched him operate at this level for as long as he had been senior enough to observe him operating at this level, and Pérez was, for all of his theatrical tendencies and his willingness to perform certainty he did not always feel, the most strategically intelligent club president of his generation. Laporta was the new arrival to the elite tier, but the work he had been doing at Barcelona over the last weeks — the work Andrea had glimpses of through the legal coordination, through the financial information that flowed between their teams — was the work of a man who had inherited an institutional crisis and was operating with a clarity that very few presidents would have managed.
The Premier League contingent had been a circus.
These two were not.
That was the asymmetry of the project, and it was, in the end, the asymmetry that gave Andrea hope that something — some version of the Super League, some restructured continuation of what they had built — might still emerge from the next several weeks.
"On the legal coordination," Pérez said, returning the call to its operational register. "Latham has filed in Madrid, in Luxembourg, and in Brussels. The Madrid filing was lodged this morning by Garrigues acting on our coordinated brief. The Luxembourg filing — at the European Court of Justice — was lodged late yesterday afternoon. We are waiting on initial procedural responses on both. The Brussels antitrust groundwork is not yet a filing — it is preparatory — but the architecture is in place to escalate to a formal complaint within forty-eight hours if the call requires it."
Andrea unmuted. "Italian filings."
"Filed yesterday morning in the Italian administrative court, supplementary to the Madrid filing. The Italian filing is narrower in scope — it addresses the specific Italian regulatory framework rather than the broader EU competition question — but it provides parallel jurisdictional pressure. The Italian commercial courts will take the question of the Italian Football Federation's threatened sanctions in the next ten days."
"Player eligibility."
"Player eligibility is the most acute legal point. Čeferin's threat to ban our players from national team competitions is — to be very clear, on this call — not legally enforceable in the form he has announced it. The free movement of workers within the European Union is a foundational principle of EU law. Any attempt to penalise individual employees of clubs participating in the Super League would be litigated immediately, and we would win. UEFA's lawyers know this. Čeferin knows this. He is making the threat because the threat itself produces political pressure on the players and on the national federations. He is not making the threat because he believes he can sustain it in court."
Laporta was nodding. "Which doesn't mean the players don't feel it."
"No. The players feel it. The players are the population most exposed to political pressure of this kind, because they have the shortest careers and the most acute personal incentives to avoid disruption. The national team eligibility question is the lever Čeferin is using to put pressure on player camps, who in turn are putting pressure on agents, who in turn are putting pressure on us. The legal architecture is sound. The political architecture is — exactly as Čeferin intended — under attack."
Andrea registered all of this.
"The Bayern point," he said, after a moment.
Pérez nodded. "The Bayern point. Yes. Rummenigge has been the most aggressive of the German clubs. He has indicated publicly that no German club will participate in any structure that emerges from this announcement. The Bundesliga's regulatory framework — the fifty-plus-one rule — gives the supporter community institutional veto power over decisions of this kind in Germany, and the supporter community in Germany has, predictably, mobilised against the project. Bayern was never realistically going to join us. Their absence is structurally absorbed in the project."
"PSG."
"PSG is now Nasser. Nasser is now the ECA. The ECA is now Čeferin's coordination platform. We have lost that institutional channel, which is not a surprise but is — a real loss. The ECA chairmanship that I held for a number of years was the institutional position that allowed us to coordinate the elite club perspective from inside the existing UEFA structure. Andrea inherited it. Andrea handed it back when the project announced. Nasser took it specifically to use it against us."
"Smart move from Nasser, in fairness," Andrea said.
"Smart move from Nasser. Yes. He has, over the last few hours, used the ECA platform to publicly oppose the Super League while consolidating his own personal position as the broker of the new institutional arrangement. He will benefit from this regardless of how the project ends. He is, frankly, the player I would be most concerned about politically over the next several years, because his combination of state-backed financial resources and his current institutional position is unprecedented."
"He is the version of City with no fan-base brake."
"Effectively, yes."
The three of them sat with this for a moment.
"On the football front," Pérez said, moving on. "The Champions League semi-final tonight. Barcelona qualified. Real Madrid plays soon. If we both make the final — Andrea, you will appreciate the political symbolism of this — if Madrid and Barcelona meet in the Champions League final, in Porto, while the Super League negotiations are continuing in parallel, the message that sends to UEFA is significant."
Laporta nodded. "I have thought about it. I am hopeful about this."
"If we win — and I am not assuming we win, but if we win — the Clásico final is the strongest possible counter-narrative to UEFA's framing of us as a breakaway elite operating against the interests of the sport. We will be presenting two of European football's most historic institutions, in their first Champions League final between each other in the modern format, while the supporter response in both cities continues to argue that the Super League is the death of the sport. That contradiction will be visible to the people we need to be visible to."
"It will."
"Andrea."
"I am sorry, Florentino. I was — yes. The Italian semi-final. Allegri and Juventus are not in the Champions League this season."
"I am aware."
"I know you are aware. I am — let me be candid for a moment, while we are alone. I am exhausted. I have been on phones for hours. I have been in my study since six this morning. I am running on coffee and the specific kind of adrenaline that the ECJ filing this afternoon produced. I am here. I am committed. But I am — tired."
Pérez nodded. "I am tired also."
"I know you are."
"On Juventus specifically — Andrea. How are things at home."
The question landed.
It landed in the slightly altered, more personal register of a man asking another man how the institution he ran was holding up under specific pressure. It was not a question Pérez would have asked on a public call. It was a question only the three of them on this call would have heard.
Andrea felt it.
He sighed.
It was not a small sigh. It was not a performance. It was the actual exhalation of a man who had been holding a specific personal weight for several months and was, in the small hour of a call that contained only two people he trusted, briefly allowing himself to acknowledge the weight.
"It's bad," he said.
Pérez waited.
"It's bad, Florentino. Čeferin has — I will be specific. Čeferin has, in just a few hours, escalated the campaign against Juventus personally. Specifically. I want to be clear that this is not the general regulatory pressure UEFA is applying to all twelve of us. This is a coordinated campaign targeting Juventus institutionally, separately, in ways that were not in motion before and are now in motion."
He paused.
"The Italian financial authorities — Consob, the Italian markets regulator, in coordination with the Turin prosecutor's office — opened a formal investigation into Juventus's accounting practices three days ago. The investigation is centred on what is being called the plusvalenze matter — the capital gains on player transfers between 2018 and 2021, the question of whether the valuations attached to those transfers were inflated for accounting purposes, and the question of whether those inflated valuations were used to disguise actual operating losses on the club's financial statements."
Pérez's face on the screen did not move.
Laporta's did.
"They have," Andrea continued, "specifically subpoenaed records from our accounting team going back four years. They have requested the personal financial records of three former and current board members, including mine. They have indicated, through back channels, that they are preparing additional charges relating to false accounting more broadly — the suggestion that we misrepresented financial records, that we hid actual losses, that we delayed the recognition of salary costs in ways that were not in compliance with Italian commercial accounting standards."
He paused.
"The investigation will, in due course, produce sporting consequences. The Italian Football Federation has indicated that depending on the findings, sanctions could include relegation. Could include — and I want to be careful about how I say this on a call that may, despite our best efforts, not be entirely private — could include points deductions in the current season, depending on the timing of any preliminary findings."
The call was quiet.
"And the timing of all of this," Pérez said quietly. "Is not coincidental."
"Of course it is not coincidental. The Consob investigation has been on the books for months. Possibly longer. The decision to escalate it to formal investigation status — just a day after the Super League announcement — is not coincidence. It is coordination. Čeferin has used the access he has to the Italian football authorities, who have used the access they have to the Italian financial authorities, and the result is a coordinated campaign that is targeting the institutional viability of my football club."
Pérez was thinking.
Andrea could see it on the screen — the specific concentration of a man processing a problem and looking for the levers.
"On the Italian regulatory side," Pérez said, after a moment. "We can put Latham on the case directly. The Italian commercial law team they have — Corradini at the Milan office — is the person to coordinate with. I will make the introduction tomorrow morning. The defence strategy on the plusvalenze matter has to be technical and meticulous, because the prosecutors will, in this kind of case, be looking for procedural errors as much as substantive ones."
Andrea nodded. He had already been in conversation with his own legal team about exactly this. The Latham coordination would help.
"On the political side," Pérez continued, "I want to think about this more carefully. The Italian regulatory framework is not one I have direct relationships in. I have political access in Spain. I have working access at the European institutional level. I do not have the same access in Rome or in Turin that I would need to apply meaningful counter-pressure on the political dimension of this. I will need to think about who I can introduce you to who does."
"Berlusconi family has the political relationships," Andrea said. "They have been less helpful than they could be, but they have them."
"Yes. The Berlusconi connection is the obvious one. I will speak to Paolo. He will be — he will not love being asked, but he will be reachable. The Italian political establishment is interconnected enough that Paolo's outreach should produce at least the conversations we need."
Andrea nodded. "Thank you, Florentino. I am — thank you."
"Andrea."
"Yes."
"I am sorry. I am going to say this once, on this call, and then we are not going to discuss it again, because I do not want to be the person who tells you something you already know. But I am going to say it once."
A pause.
"What is happening to Juventus right now is happening because of the position you have taken on the Super League. The investigation that has been on the books for months is being escalated now because the political environment created by our project has provided cover for that escalation. You are absorbing personal cost — and your institution is absorbing institutional cost — that the rest of us are not absorbing in the same form. I am aware of this. Joan is aware of this. We will not forget it when this is over, in whichever direction it ends."
Andrea did not respond immediately.
He nodded once. He did not trust his voice in the moment to produce the response he wanted to produce, and he had been a professional long enough to know that silence was sometimes the most accurate answer available.
Then Laporta spoke.
His voice was careful. The voice of a man who had been thinking about something for several minutes and had decided to say it.
"Andrea."
"Joan."
"You were the closest to Čeferin. Of any of us. You were on the UEFA committees with him. You were at the dinners. You spent the years of your ECA chairmanship working directly across from him. You know him, in the way the rest of us do not know him."
He paused.
"Is there anything we can use? Anything you know, from those years, that we could — apply pressure with."
The question sat on the call.
Andrea did not respond at first.
He looked at his desk. At the framed Platini shirt. At the dark room around him.
He closed his eyes.
The thing about closing your eyes, he had found, was that it allowed you to see the things you spent most of your day arranging not to see. The things that lived in the slightly older corners of your memory, the corners you visited without meaning to when the lights were low and the room was quiet and the call had reduced to a small enough set of participants that you could allow yourself to stop performing.
What he saw, behind his closed eyes, was Aleksander.
His friend.
He had not allowed himself to use the word friend for several months now. It had been one of the small private accommodations the Super League project had required of him. The word had been replaced, in his internal monologue and his external statements, with colleague or counterpart, and the replacement had been clean enough that he had stopped noticing he was doing it.
Tonight, with the call reduced to two people, with the lamp on his desk and the cold coffee and the question Laporta had just asked sitting on the line, the word came back.
His friend.
He saw — across the years that he had not been letting himself remember — the dinner in Lyon, the working session in Geneva, the small concession Aleksander had made on the financial fair play technical implementation that nobody else on the committee had been willing to make, the wedding of Aleksander's daughter to which he had been invited and at which he had genuinely enjoyed himself, the phone call Aleksander had made personally when the news of Andrea's father's illness had become public, a call that had not been institutional, that had been the call of one man checking on another man whose family was struggling.
He saw Aleksander's face — the very specific Aleksander, not the public one, the one that lived behind the office of the UEFA presidency, the man who had been a small-town lawyer in Slovenia until improbable circumstances had moved him into the position he now held and who had never quite shed the slightly self-deprecating Slovenian quality that came out only in private.
His friend.
And then — because the mind did the thing the mind always did, which was to bring related material up at related moments — he saw something else.
He saw Edoardo.
His cousin.
Edoardo, the elder, the one who had been raised from birth to inherit the Agnelli family's industrial responsibilities, the one who had been the heir presumptive to everything the family represented in Italian commercial and political life. Edoardo, who had died in 2000 in circumstances that were never quite resolved to the family's satisfaction, who had stepped off a viaduct into a river while in his late thirties, and whose death had reorganised the entire architecture of expectation around the next generation of the family in a single afternoon.
He saw the day after.
He saw himself walking with his father — Umberto — through the gardens of the family house, a long, slow, mostly silent walk that had taken the better part of an hour. They had not spoken much. There had not been much to say in language. They had walked in the specific Italian male silence of fathers and sons who were both processing the same thing and did not need the language to do it.
At the end of the walk, at the gate by the road, his father had stopped.
He had looked at him.
He had said, quietly, in the unhurried Italian that he reserved for the moments that required precision:
Da oggi, ci si aspetta di più da te.
From today, there is more expected of you.
He had not added anything. He had not explained it. He had not offered comfort or apology or context. He had said the sentence once, looked at his son for the duration that the sentence required, and then kept walking.
Andrea had been twenty-five years old.
The sentence had not left him.
It had organised, in ways he was still discovering more than two decades later, the entire architecture of how he had operated since. The expectation that had been transferred to him in a single line, at a gate by the road, on the afternoon after his cousin's funeral, had become the load-bearing element of his adult life. He had inherited the family's positions in the Agnelli industrial group. He had inherited the chairmanship of Juventus. He had inherited the ECA. He had inherited, in slow and difficult succession, the responsibilities that had been organised, by every person around him, around the death of one cousin and the necessary redistribution of what that cousin had been expected to carry.
From today, there is more expected of you.
He sat in his study in Turin with his eyes closed and the question on the line and the friendship on one side and the duty on the other, and he understood — with the specific clarity that arrived when the choice was not really a choice — that there was no actual decision being asked of him.
It had never been a choice.
Aleksander was his friend.
Juventus was his family.
The family was older than the friendship. The family had been here longer. The family had been built across more centuries and would continue across more centuries. The friendship was a thing he had been allowed to have, for a period, because the obligations of the family had not, in that period, required him to give it up.
The obligations were now requiring him to give it up.
The instruction was, in its way, simpler than the choice.
He opened his eyes.
He looked at the screen.
Pérez and Laporta were watching him. They had not interrupted. They had given him the time the silence required.
He breathed.
When he spoke, his voice was quiet, and entirely steady.
"I do."
Author here 👋
Hello everyone, I'm having an issue with my book ,it isn't appearing under any of its categories even though it has been updated. I've tried reaching out to the platform's support, but responses have been very slow or not coming through at all.
So I just wanted to ask for a bit of help.
If you're enjoying the book or would like to support it, could you please leave an honest review? It would really help give the book a small boost and improve its visibility, I want to check if that's the issue and if that could help it.
Thank you so much for your time and support ,it truly means a lot.
P.S, Join the discord to know when a new chapter drops since I'm not sure you would be updated while this issue is ongoing .
A/N:
Sorry for another technical chapter,I just wanted to clear out all the financial and regulatory details while I was already in that flow. The next chapter will be more relaxed and less technical. Thanks for sticking with me.
A/N
If you want to read chapters ahead with uploads and to support me subscribe to my Patreon below There is also a picture of how mateo looks like posted and later there would be votes and all on the site some you wont need to pay to vote but you can if you want to support me thanks
patreon.com/David_Adetola
Thank You your support is greatly appreciated thank you all
I've also created a Discord channel to make communication easier, where I'll post updates, cover/character pictures for all my books, and more. Here's the link:
https://discord.gg/3shtRgS5 (New discord link)