Andrea Agnelli, chairman of Juventus, spoke about Atalanta during the FT Business of Football Summit where he cast his doubts over clubs like Atalanta’s participation within the competition.
The Juve chairman spoke about the future of the Champions League and that clubs plenty of history are often penalised due to playing in smaller leagues and, as a result, having lower coefficients.
In this instance, he used Atalanta as an example of a club with no history in the competition, qualified directly for the group stages.
“I have great respect for what Atalanta is doing,” Agnelli began to tell those in attendance.
“Without international history and with a great sporting performance, they qualified directly to the biggest European club competition. Is that right or not?”
Agnelli continued where he furthered his ideas on the coefficients and clubs with history being affected like Roma in this example.
“They [Roma] have contributed to maintaining Italy’s ranking in recent years,”
“They had one bad season and have missed out, with that follows on an economic level.”
