Passionately supported but despised by rivals, Juventus have a history full of emotion, honour and scandal as well, and now they look to add another Champions League title to their remarkable record

In Italy they call it l’emozione Juve – the Juventus emotion. And it cuts deep, whether you love and admire, or resent and despise, the team who next Saturday take back what they feel to be a rightful place at the apex of football, in the European Cup final.

Juventus start to acknowledge 39 victims of Heysel after 30 years Read more

Juventus last won the cup in 1996, for a second time – the first was, unforgettably, in 1985 at the Heysel stadium in Brussels, after 39 of their supporters had been killed in charges by Liverpool fans. The 30th anniversary of that slaughter fell on Friday, adding an ironic and painful poignancy to the moment and the match (in addition to the potentially comic reunion between Luis Suárez’s fangs and Giorgio Chiellini’s shoulder).

These have been years of relative doldrums for Italian football on the European and global stages, since Italy won the World Cup in 2006 and the two Milan teams won a Champions league title apiece, in 2007 and 2010. But now Italy and Juventus are back, to challenge the hegemony of Spain and Germany, in the form of a team who go by the name of La Vecchia Signora, perhaps best translated as the Grand Old Lady. A differently glamorous version has Juve as La Fidanzata d’Italia, Italy’s girlfriend.

Juventus are an institution like none other in football; La Vecchia Signora is a national icon of Italy in a way that is incomparable across Europe. In Spain, that iconography is complicated by rivalry between Madrid in Castile and Catalan Barcelona; in English terms, one could only liken Juventus to an entity that combined Liverpool and Manchester United with the Aston Villa of yore. Bayern Munich, though founded in 1900, just do not have the history, having won the German title only once before 1969.

Juventus’s domination of Italian football is overwhelming: 31 championships against 18 each for Milan and Internazionale. Juventus fans insist that the record rightly reads 33 scudetti, to include two of which the club were stripped after a calamitous corruption scandal – of which more later.

Juventus are followed across Italy and its diaspora, and now the world. The team boast 28 million registered supporters in Europe (Manchester United have 13 million) of whom 11 million live in Italy – one in six Italians. In 1991, I interviewed a street urchin in Baghdad wearing a very unofficial Juve shirt. He knew details of past players and trophies, and when I asked him what his dream was for the future of Iraq, he replied: “That I will play for Juventus.” When I asked his age, he did not know. The only major trouble between fans of Juve and Real Madrid after the former qualified for this year’s Champions League final was in Indonesia.

But all this is new. In slogan form, the time-honoured Juventus emotion is written across banners that will spread across the stadium in Berlin on Saturday as they did across the old Curva Filadelfia of Juve’s former ground, and do along the Curva Sud of their new one: ONORE, TRADIZIONE – honour, tradition.

Juventus see themselves as guardians of italianità, Italian-ness, a quintessence of the country, something at once aristocratic in quality and style but of the people. Bruno Guarini, a lifelong fan who lost his son Alberto at Heysel, explains: “Supporting Juventus in Italy is a bit like supporting the Beatles in your country.”

The great Torinese writer Aldo Cazzullo talked in his book The Mystery of Turin about the phenomenon of l’Uomo Juventus – Juventus man – to describe a certain kind of player and manager who characterise the club’s illustrious past, whether Italian or foreign. The roll call – among them players who became managers – illustrates his point: Giampiero Boniperti, Giovanni Trapattoni, John Charles, Roberto Bettega, Júlio César, Marco Tardelli, Gaetano Scirea, Michel Platini, Paolo Rossi, Didier Deschamps, Roberto Baggio, Gianluca Vialli, Zinedine Zidane, Pavel Nedved …

The towering example of this pantheon retired only recently to play in Australia: Alessandro Del Piero, Juventus’s highest-ever scorer and appearance record holder, who served the club from 1993 until 2012. Another remains: the goalkeeper Gigi Buffon – aged 37, captain of club and country – who joined Juventus in 2001. Also playing in the final against Barcelona is Andrea Pirlo, who made his name elsewhere but only at Juventus could a 36-year-old establish himself as one of the world’s great midfielders having been discarded by Milan as past his sell-by date. Carlos Tevez, shed by Manchester City, plays like a risen Lazarus at Juve.

Despite these durable perennials, the club’s name means Youth in Latin. Juventus were founded in 1897 by students from the D’Azeglio school, playing in pink and black until an English enthusiast secured a supply of kit from Notts County – thus the zebra-hallmark bianconero.

In 1923, Juventus became entwined with the Fiat car company that forms a crucial part in the Vecchia Signora’s history and identity. Fiat’s owner, Edoardo Agnelli, bought Juve, built a new stadium and turned the team into Italy’s first professional club, winning five championships in a row during the 1930s and forming the spine of the Italian national team.

In essence, not much has changed since then: the Azzurri have always remained heavily bianconero. Edoardo’s son Gianni Agnelli was the great owner, passionate patriarch and president of Juventus for decades, a position now held in turn by his own nephew, Andrea Agnelli. (Gianni Agnelli would exchange long and emotionally charged phone calls with Boniperti when he was manager, about the team and tactics.)

The coupling with Fiat equates the notion of what gets called juventinità– Juventus-ness – with industry and enlightened, Risorgimento Italy, modern and unified, against which Roma and Lazio pitch the ancient charisma of the capital. The Milanese teams claim the hub of finance against their industrial northern neighbour, while Napoli champion Parthenopean pride and the downtrodden south.

With Fiat, however, comes a southern twist to the anthropology and geography of l’emozione Juve. During the late 1940s and 50s, tens of thousands of Italians from the poor Mezzogiorno – the Italian south – flocked to Turin to work on the production lines. In the slums, they clung – perhaps ironically, poignantly – to the bosses’ team, in search of belonging to the northern capital of old Savoy, far from home.

So that although the team plays in Italy’s heavy-industrial engine room – close to France, at the foot of the Alps – Juventus’s nationwide support makes them a team of the south above all. Each migrant to the factories left a family back home, and consequently every town and village across Sicily, Calabria, Puglia and Basilicata boasts its Juve Club, where people of all ages, mostly but not entirely men, will gather to chat, play chess, drink a coffee or glass of wine during the week, and watch games on television at weekends. (It was from these family clubs that most of the dead at Heysel came.)

Although Juventus were – and are – seen as the bosses’ team, l’emozione Juve runs deeper than that, ideologically. Turin was also the cradle of Italian communism – the adoptive home of the Italian party’s founder, Antonio Gramsci – and both the party’s great postwar leaders, Palmiro Togliatti and Enrico Berlinguer, were fervent Juve supporters. So that juventinità is a kind of football Peronism.

Today’s ultrà formations – with their names such as Viking and Drughi (after the Droogs in Clockwork Orange) – combine, as their veteran leader from the Curva Filadelfia Beppe Franzo, who has written two books about juventinità, explains “both the extreme right and the extreme left, united by their common antagonism”.

In Italy, three daily newspapers are devoted almost entirely to football, and one of them, Tutto Sport, covers little other than Juventus. “They count the hairs on our arses,” joked the former Juve defender Francesco Morini when I met him before an away game at Old Trafford in 1984.

On the morning of Juve’s fateful final at Heysel the following year, the main football paper, Gazzetta dello Sport, carried the headline: “Juve, Tutta L’Italia Sogna Con Te”, all Italy dreams with you. This was untrue then and would be next Saturday should the famous pink paper proclaim something similar. Juve’s success and claims for itself make both the team and its juventinità as deeply despised by those not of the faith as they are adored by their adherents.

Most importantly, in Turin itself, many of those who claim to be real Torinesi DOC (after Denominazione di Origine Controllata, applied to wine), rather than from migrant southern families, support the other team in town, Torino, and harbour an especial loathing for Juve.

Elsewhere, the hatred runs so deep that after the slaughter at Heysel, motorway bridges towards Florence and Rome were painted with Grazie Liverpool – no translation required. Police in Turin were even recently seeking to identify Fiorentina fans who hoisted a placard rejoicing at the deaths in Brussels.

Non-Juventus Italy is divided over Saturday’s final, at home and in the diaspora. At the Da Maria restaurant in Notting Hill, a bastion of Napoli and Neapolitan home cooking, patron Pasquale Ruocco will support Barcelona because “Juventus may be Italian but they represent corrupt Italy; they’re unclean, they buy everything”. His son-in-law, Giovanni, however, reasons: “In the scudetto, we’re against Juventus, of course. But in the European Cup final, they play for Italy.”

The corruption scandal of 2006 broke just after Juventus had claimed their 29th scudetto. The investigation was known as Piedi Puliti or Clean Feet, because one of the judges involved had worked on the judiciary’s Mani Pulite, Clean Hands, sweep across Italy’s political class in the early 1990s, and it was a watershed: Juventus caught match-fixing through the appointment of referees. “Tradition” was betrayed, “Honour” reduced to shame.

By way of punishment, Juve were relegated to the second division, Serie B, for the first time in their history, to battle not Roma, Milan and Napoli but Crotone, Mantova and AlbinoLeffe. Rival books were published, and sold well, with titles that summed up the two national moods: one was “Dio c’é: Juve in B” – There is a God: Juve in B – full of jokes such as: “Meglio ’na vita in galera che juventino per ’na sera” – better a life in jail than juventino for an evening. The other: “Juve, ti amo lo stesso” – Juve, I love you all the same.

The scandal was a thundercloud over Italy’s World Cup training sessions outside Florence, under the manager, Marcello Lippi, who had won five scudetti for Juventus. I asked him how it would affect a team that counted, and counted on, several Juve players. He replied: “The effect of the scandal will be that we will win the World Cup.” And they did, under a Juventus captain, Fabio Cannavaro.

Once back to domestic business, though, even Juve’s moment of tribulation – in fact, especially the hour of shame and need – gave expression to l’emozione Juve. Faced with playing in the second tier, Cannavaro promptly departed for Real Madrid; the Brazilian Emerson followed him – but the real uomini Juventus had other ideas. The goalkeeper Buffon admitted to me that had Juventus not been relegated, he might have considered a move to Milan but he said: “It was an instinctive decision to stay. I didn’t have to think about it. It was a moment of difficulty for the club, and unthinkable to leave”.

Then there was the case in point of Juve’s all-time highest goalscorer, Del Piero. Del Piero dedicated his crucial World Cup semi-final goal for Italy against Germany to his friend Gianluca Pessotto, a Juventus vice-chairman who attempted suicide, jumping from a building, during the corruption scandal. While Pessotto was recovering from a coma, Del Piero and others took the World Cup to show him and, although semi-conscious, he managed a victory sign.

Del Piero then not only stayed at Juventus through their road to redemption, through Serie B, he was the first to sign up that summer of 2006. “Alex is our emblem,” the then football director, Alessio Secco, said in conversation at club headquarters. “He was the first to commit and remains a case apart.”

Del Piero himself told me, after scoring a hat-trick at home to Piacenza but before losing 3-1 to Brescia: “We need to keep working in a spirit of humility and sacrifice” – words crucial to La Vecchia Signora’s self-image, and return to the summit of Europe this week, a shade less arrogant than before the storm.

But the reasoning of Del Piero’s public statement had said it all: “Un gentiluomo non lascia mai una Vecchia Signora” – a gentleman never leaves an old lady.