Juventus’ annual shareholder meeting tends to be a fairly predictable affair. The board of directors gets confirmed, the accounts are published, all the usual stuff.
But things could become far more interesting this time around.
For the first time in a while, there is a minority owner that is looking to shake up the structure of the club. That owner is the stablecoin firm Tether. Led by CEO Paolo Ardoino, Tether bought a minority stake in the club this past February, and over the course of the year
have built up a 10.7 percent stake in the company. That makes them the second-largest shareholder in the company after Agnelli family holding company Exor, who hold 65 percent.
More importantly, they’ve pushed past the 10 percent mark, which, under Italian law, is the threshold for which they can propose alternative slates for the board of directors.
According to Reuters, Tether plans to do just that at the November 7 shareholder meeting, meaning things could get interesting. They are also proposing undisclosed “governance changes” to the club, as well as their intention to contribute to the club’s upcoming capital increase.
It was Exor’s exclusion of Tether from the most recent capital increase that prompted a frustrated social media statement from Arduino this past June, saying that the company is willing to contribute financially to the club but was being prevented from doing so by current management.
What chance Arduino has at altering the board election, which is expected to add new General Director Damien Comolli and club legend Giorgio Chiellini as part of Exor chair John Elkann’s slate, remains to be seen. If enough shareholders are frustrated with the financial situation of the club, which has been in flux since the 2022 resignation of the previous, Andrea Agnelli-led board over the plusvalenza affair, then Tether might be able to get themselves into a position where they can wield far more influence. But given the entrenchment of Exor, they may not find that kind of support.
Whether or not Tether getting that kind of influence would be beneficial or not remains to be seen. Obviously, Arduino, who is a lifelong Juve fan, is willing to inject money into the club. Just how much he can do while staying within Financial Fair Play rules is an open question. Arduino’s instincts in terms of running a team could also be a question, considering the fact he endorsed the idea of Jose Mourinho as the club’s manager in March. Still, any money injected into the team in addition to Exor’s would be a positive.
There’s also the checkered history of blockchain companies—both in calcio and out—to consider. Two years ago Inter and Roma both dropped crypto firm DigitalBits as their shirt sponsor due to the company’s failure to pay them. While stablecoins aren’t quite as volatile as some other parts of the blockchain sector, they can still be volatile and prone to collapses, as in the infamous crash of the Terra stablecoin, which wiped out almost $45 billion of market capitalization over the span of a week. Tether themselves haven’t always been in the news for the right reasons, receiving a $41 million fine from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 2021 for not having enough reserves to back their stablecoin in the late 2010s.
This story will likely continue to develop over the next month as the meeting draws closer. It could turn out to be business as usual, but it could also mark a major change in the governance of the club.
