The Champions League semifinal match on Tuesday between Spain's Real Madrid, widely considered the favorite to make the final, and Italy's Juventus was tied 1-1 in the fifty-sixth minute when Carlos Tevez, the Argentine striker for Juventus, pounced on a fortuitous rebound. In another lucky break, a Madrid defender mistimed his tackle as Tevez reached the eighteen-yard box, appearing to push the forward. The referee immediately pointed to the spot—penalty. Less than a minute later, Tevez lashed the ball past the keeper and into the net—his fiftieth goal for the Turin club, and the deciding point in the semifinal's first leg. The second leg is May 13th.

This is the first semifinal appearance for Juventus in twelve years, and the first for an Italian club since 2010, when Inter Milan won the tournament. It’s a rare bright moment for Serie A, the country’s top league, which has struggled in recent years to keep up with the heavyweights in Spain, England, and Germany. By 2011, Italian clubs were playing so poorly that even Inter’s championship performance couldn’t prevent the league from falling behind Germany’s Bundesliga in the UEFA rankings, dropping from third place to fourth and thereby losing one of its qualifying slots for the Champions League. Serie A’s image as a league in decline has only been reinforced by a slew of unfortunate headlines about aging stadia with low attendance; fan violence and racism; financial ineptitude; and match-fixing scandals.

It didn’t used to be this way. In the late nineteen-eighties, Serie A was a global soccer power, home to some of the world’s best (and highest-paid) players like Diego Maradona and Michel Platini, and later the Brazilian wunderkind Ronaldo and France’s Zinedine Zidane. Its best teams, AC Milan, Internazionale, and Juventus, played with tactical sophistication as well as technical brilliance. In the nineteen-nineties, six of the ten Ballon d’Or winners—the prize given for the year’s best footballer in Europe—played for Serie A clubs, and the league produced a Champions League finalist for seven straight years, from 1991 to 1998. In 2001, Deloitte’s sports-business group, which ranks the highest-earning clubs in its annual Football Money League report, included five Italian clubs in its top ten. Italian football arguably peaked at the moment of the 2003 Champions League final, where Milan defeated Juventus in a penalty shoot-out following a 0-0 match, the first and only all-Italian European Cup final.

But three years later, both clubs were mired in the league-wide calciopoli, or “footballville,” scandal, in which various Italian club directors were alleged to have influenced referee selection for matches. Although they were ultimately never convicted for their roles, the implication of two Juventus executives in 2006 led to drastic punishment from the Italian Football Federation: the club was stripped of the two scudetti, or league championships, that it won in 2005 and 2006; in addition, Juventus was relegated to the lower-tier Serie B, where it started the season with a points deduction. (It won promotion a season later.)

Calciopoli was not the sole reason for Serie A’s decline, but the scandal symbolized for many the institutional rot that was preventing Italian football from competing on the European stage. The league lags behind its rivals not only in points but also in the kind of infrastructure that could help attract commercial sponsors and increase its international following, which in turn could lead to more lucrative international broadcast-rights agreements. This year’s Deloitte Football Money League report bluntly stated that Serie A’s “pattern of decline, relative to its European peers” is likely to continue, “unless there is significant and immediate investment in both stadia facilities and improving the matchday experience.”

Ironically, the club at the center of calciopoli_ has become a model for the league in this regard. In 2011, Juventus finished construction on a new stadium in Turin, the first in Italy to be owned by its club rather than by a local municipality. Juventus Stadium put the crowd much closer to the pitch, and it looks gorgeous on TV. Gate revenues increased by a hundred and eighty-three per cent in the stadium's first season, despite the fact that the new venue has a significantly smaller capacity than its predecessor, the Stadio delle Alpi. Naming rights and the sale of land adjacent to the stadium have provided additional sources of income. Juventus is now the only Italian club to make the top ten in Deloitte’s report. It has also been able to invest in talent, like Tevez and the Italian national team legend Andrea Pirlo. Since moving into its new stadium, the club has won four scudetti _and, in 2012-13, it made it to the Champions League quarterfinals, before reaching the semis this year.

There are other hopeful signs for Serie A’s future. Despite the scandals, the league is still able to attract foreign investors, including Inter Milan’s Erick Thohir, from Indonesia, and Roma’s Jim Pallotta, from the United States, who have both pushed for reforms to attract more international fans. And in addition to Juventus’s success in the Champions League this year, two Italian clubs, Napoli and Fiorentina, have reached the semifinals of the Europa League, UEFA’s second-tier European club competition. But Serie A clubs, in partnership with local and national governments, will need to do far, far more, including implementing desperately overdue stadium upgrades and helping to insure fan safety in and around matches, before Juventus' run at the Champions League trophy is seen as representative of the Italian football landscape rather than an aberration from it.