Italian doping scandal: Juventus are at risk of being stripped of the trophies they won between 1994 and 1998 after a Turin judge, Giuseppe Casalbore, last week made public his judgment on the conviction of the club doctor Riccardo Agricola.
Agricola had been found guilty of administering banned substances and given a suspended jail term of one year and 10 months in a trial that ended in Turin last November, six years after the inquiry started.
"Agricola resorted to the use of drugs and substances - some absolutely forbidden such as EPO - to influence results which could not have been achieved with regular training systems," the judgment said.
From 1994 to 1998 the Turin team won three Italian titles, an Italian Cup, a European Super Cup and the Champions League after beating Ajax on penalties in the final played in Rome.
Zdenek Zeman, the Czech coach who while at Roma triggered the initial judicial inquiry in 1998 by calling on the authorities to clean up drug-taking in Italian football, says Juventus should give up their trophies.
"The conviction of the Juventus doctor doesn't close the case. It's the complete opposite, as the case should be reopened now," said Zeman, who is currently at Lecce.
"It's like this in the Olympics. If an athlete fails a doping test he has to give his medal back. It must be the same for football. It was a very ugly day for football and for people who work in football. Juventus have cancelled four years of football in Italy, four years of passion."
Parma, who finished runners-up to Juve in 1994-95 and 1996-97, would not comment yesterday. But Gianfranco Zola, who played for them before moving to Chelsea in 1996, said last November: "It's a disgrace. At Parma we all worked so hard and we did it legally."
The Italian football federation said it would be looking into the judge's comments together with the anti-doping commission of the Italian Olympic Committee.
The European governing body Uefa has said it will not take any action until a final sentence in the case is delivered. The case can go through various levels of appeal, taking years.
Ajax, the team defeated by Juventus in the 1996 Champions League final, said that they would not be making any official complaint and were waiting on a decision from Uefa.
"I have spoken to our lawyers. They have so far not received anything," a club spokesman said. "We are not proactively seeking anything yet. We are waiting for developments from Uefa. Obviously we played the 1996 final under Uefa rules . . . We can't start reacting yet to rumours."
During the doping trial Fabrizio Ravanelli, Gianluca Vialli, Attilio Lombardo and Zinedine Zidane were among past and present players with the Italian club who denied accusations of sporting fraud, the Italian charge for drug-taking.
Expert witnesses claimed that some Juventus players' red blood cell count indicated they were using the endurance-enhancer EPO (erythropoietin).
The Juventus chief executive Antonio Giraudo was acquitted of any involvement in the doping, and Agricola's lawyers have appealed against the sentence.
"Nobody can take away from us what we won on the pitch," said the Juventus vice-president Roberto Bettega. "I'm proud for those victories and serene regarding the future."
"We are winning too much, that's why many people don't have much sympathy for us," said Juventus's managing director Luciano Moggi.
Meanwhile, a tribunal in Florence last week decided to open an investigation regarding the deaths of some former Fiorentina players in the 1970s to discover if they were connected with the use of illegal substances.
