Juventus FC

Juventus Football Club, commonly known as Juventus or Juve, is a professional football club based in Turin, Piedmont. Competing in Serie A, the top tier of Italian football, Juventus was founded in 1897 by a group of Torinese students. The club has worn a black and white striped home kit since 1903 and plays home matches at the 41,507-capacity Juventus Stadium. Known as “la Vecchia Signora” (the Old Lady), Juventus has won 36 league titles, 15 Coppa Italia trophies, and nine Italian Super Cups—holding the record for all these competitions. Additionally, they have won two Intercontinental Cups, two European Cups/UEFA Champions Leagues, one European Cup Winners’ Cup, three UEFA Cups (an Italian record), two UEFA Super Cups, and one UEFA Intertoto Cup (another Italian record).

Juventus leads the historical Federazione Italiana Giuoco Calcio (FIGC) classification and ranks sixth in Europe and twelfth worldwide for most confederation titles won, with eleven trophies. The club also holds the fourth position in the all-time Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) competitions ranking, having obtained the highest coefficient score during seven seasons since 1979—the most for any Italian team and joint second overall.

Originally founded as Sport-Club Juventus as an athletics club, it is the second oldest of its kind still active in Italy, after Genoa’s football section (1893). Juventus has competed in the top division every season since its debut in 1900, except for the 2006–07 season, and has been managed by the Agnelli family almost continuously since 1923. This relationship is the oldest and longest in national sports, making Juventus one of the first professional sporting clubs in Italy. The club has established itself as a major force in national football since the 1930s and at the confederation level since the mid-1970s, becoming one of the wealthiest football clubs in the world in terms of value, revenue, and profit since the mid-1990s. Juventus has been listed on the Borsa Italiana since 2001.

Under Giovanni Trapattoni, Juventus won 13 trophies in ten years before 1986, including six league titles and five international tournaments, becoming the first club to win all three seasonal UEFA competitions: the 1976–77 UEFA Cup, the 1983–84 Cup Winners’ Cup, and the 1984–85 European Champions’ Cup. Successive triumphs in the 1984 European Super Cup and 1985 Intercontinental Cup made Juventus the first and only club to complete a clean sweep of all five historical confederation trophies. This achievement was repeated with the 1999 UEFA Intertoto Cup under Marcello Lippi. In December 2000, Juventus was placed seventh in FIFA’s historic ranking of the best clubs in the world and was ranked the second-best club in Europe during the 20th century by the International Federation of Football History & Statistics (IFFHS).

Juventus has the largest fan base in Italy and one of the largest worldwide. Unlike most European clubs, which have supporters concentrated around their city of origin, Juventus’s fan base is spread throughout Italy and the Italian diaspora, making the club a symbol of anticampanilismo (“anti-parochialism”) and italianità (“Italianness”). Juventus players have won eight Ballon d’Or awards, four of these consecutively (1982–1985), an overall joint record. The club has also produced winners of four FIFA World Player of the Year awards and has provided the most players to the Italy national team, contributing significantly to Italy’s World Cup victories in 1934, 1982, and 2006.