Luciano Moggi (; born 10 July 1937) is a former Italian association football administrator who was a club executive for Roma, Lazio, Torino, Napoli, and Juventus. During his career, he led them to win six Serie A (five with Juventus and one with Naples), three Coppa Italia (with Roma, Torino, and Juventus), five Supercoppa Italiana (four with Juventus and one with Napoli), one UEFA Champions League, one Intercontinental Cup, one UEFA Super Cup, one Intertoto Cup (all with Juventus), and one UEFA Cup (with Napoli). He has since become a freelance journalist, commentator, and TV guest.
In May 2006, Moggi was involved in the sports scandal that became known as Calciopoli, which remains a much debated and controversial topic due to the one-sided focus on Juventus and Moggi, an issue that was cited in the sentence of the first-instance trial held in Naples. The related Calciopoli trials in Naples, which revealed the implications of many other clubs who could not be put on trial due to the statute of limitations and were not weighted in the Moggi sentences, absolved him of some related offences and reached the appeal sentence in December 2013 with a sentence of 2 years and 4 months in prison. The appeal sentence and his remaining charges related to Calciopoli were respectively annulled and cancelled without a new trial due to the statute of limitations by Italy's Supreme Court of Cassation in March 2015. On the other hand, he was acquitted of criminal conspiracy throughout all three judgements in the other Calciopoli trial in Rome related to GEA World that ended in January 2014. In March 2020, Moggi appealed to the European Court of Human Rights for the conduct of the trials.
Biography Moggi was born into a modest family in Monticiano, in the province of Siena, on 10 July 1937. He had a passion for football from an early age, playing for forty days in Akragas in the 1963–64 Serie C season. He left school in 1950. After middle school, he worked at the Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, settling in Civitavecchia and playing as a stopper in teams of lower categories. In the late 1960s, dissatisfied with his work and tired of playing football without income, Moggi envisioned a future as a talent scout, particularly in minor football. His son, Alessandro Moggi, works as an agent for several football players and managers. He is head of GEA World, a consortium of football agents and managers, which was ranked first by volume (in terms of market share within Italy's football agency industry) from 2002 to 2006.
Career Moggi worked as a railway station caretaker until the early 1970s, when he met Italo Allodi, then Juventus' managing director, who appointed him to minor roles at the club. Before being called as chief managing director by Juventus in 1994, he worked for and collaborated with several teams, such as Roma, Lazio, Torino, and Napoli, where he won several league, domestic, and confederal titles.
Juventus and Roma
After entering senior football in the 1970s for Juventus under general manager Allodi, Moggi organized a network of scouts looking for young talent in suburban fields. Among his footballers are the sixteen year old Paolo Rossi in 1972, Claudio Gentile in 1973, and Gaetano Scirea in 1974. A few years later, Moggi took on a more important role, and he also established contacts with the other teams to start negotiations until he was forced to change companies due to the break with then-Juventus president Giampiero Boniperti.
Moggi's next job was at Roma of the new president Gaetano Anzalone. Thanks to the help of some journalists, it was Moggi who came forward and got to know Anzalone, who decided on his job as transfer market consultant in 1977. During his period at Roma, which won the 1979–80 Coppa Italia, Moggi acquired Roberto Pruzzo, who was blown right to Boniperti's Juventus. His departure from Roma occurred a few days after Dino Viola, the new president, learned that, on the eve of the match against Ascoli, Moggi had been having dinner with Claudio Pieri, the match referee. It was 25 November 1979 and the tenth matchday of the 1979–80 Serie A that was being played; Roma won the match 1–0 and the president of Ascoli, Costantino Rozzi, was upset about a refereeing that, in his view, was in favour of Roma. In the locker room, Rozzi met Viola, to whom he said his criticism of Moggi, seen in a restaurant in the company of the referee and the two linesmen. Moggi described it as a casual event. Viola used the episode as a pretest to release Moggi, telling him he wanted a sporting director who lived in Rome, even though Moggi lived in the Rome metropolitan area of Civitavecchia.
Lazio, Torino, and Napoli
After the 1980 Italian football betting scandal, which came to be known as Totonero and in which he was not involved, Moggi was hired as general manager by Lazio to relaunch it. After two years, he resigned with the club still in Serie B. In 1982, he moved to Torino of president Sergio Rossi and managing director Luciano Nizzola. He suffered the protests of the fans due to the underwhelming market hits completed, such as the Argentine Patricio Hernández, or missed ones, such as the Yugoslav Safet Sušić. He remained at Torino for five years with mixed results. On 29 May 1987, he resigned from his position.
On 22 June 1987, Moggi moved at Napoli of Corrado Ferlaino and Diego Armando Maradona immediately after the victory of their first scudetto, succeeding Allodi. Under Moggi, Napoli achieved its greatest success in the club's history, having won the 1989 UEFA Cup final, the 1989–90 Serie A, and the 1990 Supercoppa Italiana. In March 1991, Moggi resigned due to incompatibility with Ferlaino.
After his exit from Napoli, Moggi returned at Torino under president Gian Mauro Borsano. Shortly after his signing, Torino won the 1991 Mitropa Cup final; the club also reached the 1992 UEFA Cup final, which was lost due to the away goals rule, and won the 1993 Coppa Italia final due to the same rule. In 1994, he was investigated together with his collaborator Luigi Pavarese for sporting offenses and aiding and abetting prostitution for referees during the 1991–92 UEFA Cup matches. Borsano and the accountant Giovanni Matta testified that it was Moggi who personally took care of the hospitality of the referees and linesmen, and of providing them with prostitutes for the home games, while the services were paid for by Torino through black funds. All charges were dismissed by the preliminary hearing judge (GUP) because the actions did not constitute a violation of the prostitution law and Pavarese assumed all the responsibilities, while on the sporting side the fraud could not exist as sporting fraud did not apply to UEFA matches and UEFA quickly closed its investigation.
Roma and Juventus After leaving Torino, Moggi returned at Franco Sensi's Roma; the two did not see eye to eye and his stint at Roma was brief. In 1994, he moved at Juventus under the managing director Antonio Giraudo and where he would be described by Gianni Agnelli as "the king's groom, who must know all horse thieves". The twelve years with Juventus were the most successful of his entire management career and placed him among the most important football managers at national and international level. Juventus won five leagues (plus one revoked and one left unassigned), one UEFA Champions League, one Intercontinental Cup, one UEFA Super Cup, one Intertoto Cup, one Coppa Italia, and four Supercoppa Italiana. He also reached three Champions League finals, one UEFA Cup final, and two other finals of Coppa Italia.
Moggi remained at Juventus until May 2006 when he resigned, and said that his soul had been killed, referring to his "love" for football. He was linked to a judicial investigation in the sports field known as Calciopoli. Some telephone tapping of an investigation filed by the Turin's public prosecution office were published in some newspapers, and the folders of the investigation had been sent to Franco Carraro, then president of the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) and himself involved in the scandal but came out unscattered not without controversy. According to the allegations of corruption of a public official, Moggi ordered the referee designators Pierluigi Pairetto, then also a referee delegate for UEFA, and Paolo Bergamo the names of some referees who had to be drawn to referee the matches in Serie A of Juventus and also of others clubs and also discussing on referees for the next Champions League (something that other managers, such Giacinto Facchetti, he claimed they also did but the wiretaps, considered irrelevant at that time in the investigation, only emerged in public opinion years later), as well as that of referees for friendlies (as they were friendlies, this was not against the rules since there was not a draw and the organizers could choose the referee themselves, and there was no evidence of corruption or that Moggi had requested a corrupted referee).
When the investigation was made public with the publications of the transcripts from the wiretaps (not all of which proved to be accurate and most of them only showing the pro-prosecution side as they were only a dozen out of the hundreds of thousands), in violation of the law, a scandal broke out; the leak was later investigated but it was not found who had caused it, although it was clear that it came out from Rome, where the investigation was done. It was this public revelation that led to the resignation of Moggi, among others. This investigation heavily relied on wiretaps by the Carabinieri in Rome after a request by the public prosecutor's office of Naples, which had begun an unrelated football betting investigation implicating the Camorra that led to penalty points for some minor clubs. According to these new allegations, which theorized the crime of criminal conspiracy aimed at sports fraud, Moggi had singular relationships with some people who gravitated around Italian sports journalism, with the aim of putting the work of referees and clubs in a good or bad light; all investigated journalists later had the charges dismissed or were acquitted. In relation to the investigation regarding friendlies and UEFA's referee designation, the Turin public prosecutor asked for all the charges (ranging from criminal conspiracy aimed at sports fraud to corruption and sports fraud) to be dismissed and the criminal investigation was closed; at the same time, the documentation was sent through folders to the FIGC on the grounds that although there was nothing criminally relevant, it may be relevant for sports justice.
Calciopoli