Juventus, Ginevra Elkann and the Agnelli Family Chessboard: Who Really Holds the Presidential Chair?

At 61, I still pick up the phone at 4 a.m. – because Ulsan does not call to wish me good night. This time, the caller was an old friend in Turin, and he did not ask me about a transfer deal. He asked me one question: "Do you know who Ginevra Elkann is?" I went quiet for a few seconds. Nearly four decades writing about football, and I can recall the face of every striker, every sporting director, every owner. But that name made me pause, because it does not belong to the touchline – it belongs to a boardroom. That was the moment I realised: some of football's biggest changes come without applause in the stands. They happen quietly, in offices where people sign papers instead of kicking balls. And this time, the story begins with a name most fans have never heard. Juventus has never been an ordinary club. In Italy, people call this team the "Old Lady" – a nickname both affectionate and solemn, tied to a hundred-year history and to a family that has been bound to it for almost its entire existence. That family bears the name Agnelli. And today, the name behind many of Juventus's biggest decisions is not a coach but a holding company: Exor. To understand why this story matters, one must remember that the relationship between the Agnelli family and Juventus has spanned nearly a century. Since the 1920s, this family has been bound to the club's fate, through the ups and downs of one of Europe's most storied institutions. Across that span, the presidency has often been a symbol of dynastic succession. Any change in this position carries meaning far beyond a single contract or a single season. Exor is the parent company of the Agnelli-Elkann family and the main shareholder of Juventus. In other words, when we discuss the future of the club's presidency, we are not discussing an independent board election. We are discussing an internal decision of the family that controls the capital. This is the crux that any hasty analysis tends to miss. According to journalist Matteo Moretto – a writer who focuses on the transfer market and Italian football – Ginevra Elkann could become Juventus's new president. The club has not confirmed this. It sits at an early stage, when people are still asking "who is she" before asking "what will she do". So who is Ginevra Elkann? She was born in 2026, now around 46 years old. She is a film producer and director, president of Asmara Films, and president of the Agnelli Art Gallery. She is a granddaughter of Gianni Agnelli – once regarded as one of the most powerful figures in Italy – and a sister of John Elkann and Lapo Elkann. More importantly, she sits on Exor's board, meaning she is already inside the family's decision-making layer. Reading this, I understand why the story leaves Juventus fans both curious and puzzled. A person from film and art, not from football. A family member, not a specialist recruited from the market. These are two very different signals, and we need to read both with a cool head. Let us start from the logic of a deal. In modern football, whenever a new name appears in a position of power, I always ask three things: who benefits, who bears the risk, and what actually changes. Here, the answer lies not on the pitch but in the ownership structure. Juventus operates on a model of family control through a holding company. Exor holds the controlling stake, and every presidential position reflects the family's will. That means an appointment of Ginevra Elkann, if it happens, is not a shake-up caused by failure on the pitch. It is a move within the family, to maintain and reassert the family's control over its football asset. In a sense, it resembles an old family choosing the keeper of the ancestral home's keys – not to fix the roof, but to affirm that the house still belongs to them. From a governance standpoint, there is a notable point. Ginevra Elkann is both a board member of Exor – the main shareholder – and a possible president of Juventus. She would stand on both sides of the owner-club relationship. In modern corporate-governance norms, such a "one person, two roles" structure is typically scrutinised for conflicts of interest and the independence of the club's board. I am not saying it is wrong. I am saying it needs to be weighed, because at many European clubs, people have had to disclose and manage such overlapping roles to avoid suspicion. Once a club president is also a representative of the largest shareholder, the line between the club's interest and the family's interest grows blurrier. That is no individual's fault; it is a structural feature of the family-ownership model. Alongside this, there is the question of competence fit. The president of a big club does not merely sign papers. They must understand a balance sheet, understand UEFA's financial fair play rules, understand how to run a complex sporting machine. Ginevra Elkann's profile leans toward cinema, art and holding-company governance – not football operations. That is a fact, not a criticism. But – and this is where I want you to slow down – at many family-owned clubs, the presidency is not necessarily the day-to-day operator. Sometimes it is a symbolic role: the representative of the family's identity, the keeper of tradition, while sporting and financial decisions are delegated to specialists below. Read this way, a family member taking the chair is a way of telling the world: Juventus is still ours, and we remain bound to it. The interesting part is that the Serie A landscape is shifting fast. Many of Italy's big clubs now belong to foreign investment funds or multi-club groups. Against that backdrop, Juventus elevating a family member to the presidency is a counter-trend move. It asserts the family-ownership model as a deliberate choice, not a leftover from the past. In a league where international money flows in ever more strongly, a family still wanting to hold its club's fate in its own hands is worth watching. One thing I have learned from years of tracking deals and power transitions: the source matters as much as the information. Here, the story comes from a well-known journalist, but there is no official confirmation. Matteo Moretto belongs to a credible tier in the transfer world, yet a single journalist's report is still one data point. To paint the picture, I need at least three independent data points that align. Right now, we have one. And I remind myself every time a strange name appears: do not let a headline about "major change at the top" fool you about the level of certainty. Rumours of leadership transitions often have a high collapse rate, because decision-making inside a family happens behind closed doors and can reverse at any moment. The report gives no reason for a possible change, and that silence is more telling than the name. This is where I want to tell an old story. Son Heung-min was stoned in 2026, and I learned to see people not through public opinion. Back then, a whole nation called him a man who could only run. I sat reading thousands of comments and realised: crowds often judge with the emotion of the present, not with the long-term picture. That lesson applies to stories that have nothing to do with the pitch. With Ginevra Elkann, public opinion may split into two camps immediately. One says: what does a filmmaker know about football? The other says: the family is always right, they have been bound for a century. Both are hasty judgments. My counter-intuitive angle is this: the true value of a president does not lie in whether that person can play football, but in whether that person can allocate resources correctly and put the right people in the right roles. In football history, some presidents came from business, law, even art, and succeeded because they knew how to delegate to experts. Conversely, some former players took the chair and failed because they could not separate pitch emotion from governance decisions. In other words, Ginevra Elkann's film background is not automatically a negative. It is simply a variable to monitor. The real question is not whether she knows football, but whether she knows how to empower those who do. The second blind spot in the mainstream narrative is that people focus too much on the individual and forget the structure. A family member taking the chair can be a sign of stability – the family still in control – but it can also be a sign of a deeper restructuring we have not yet seen. When a story focuses too much on who, ask why. Why now? Why this person? Why at this stage of the season? Those questions often lead us to the submerged part of the iceberg, where the real decisions are born. And there is one thing I always remind myself: do not turn a rumour into a verdict. Do not convict someone because they have not yet proven anything, and do not glorify them merely because they carry the Agnelli name. The most honest approach is to present verified facts and let readers draw their own conclusions. There are phone calls that last only three minutes, yet change an entire summer. That dawn call from Turin may be a rumour that blooms and withers by nightfall, or it may be the bell opening a new chapter for Juventus. I do not have enough data to say. But I am lucid enough to know what to watch. I will track three signals. First, official confirmation or denial from the club and Exor. Second, the status of the incumbent president – is this a transition or merely an addition. Third, how sporting and financial roles are allocated under the new leadership. Those three signals will decide whether this story is a passing breeze or a seismic shift. At 61, I have learned that football is not decided only on the pitch. It is decided in rooms where people sign papers, and sometimes the most important decisions are the least noisy. Fans see a contract; I see the sleepless nights behind it. In Turin right now, there are probably sleepless nights like that too – not because of a match, but because of a name.