The Observer:
Tickets for Juventus's Champions League quarter-final with Arsenal went on sale in Italy last Friday, and they were hardly flying out of the box office. Well, they never are nowadays. Juventus might be the defending Serie A champions, the runaway league leaders, and the self-styled most popular club in Italy backed by an estimated 11 million fans. But their crowds are an absolute abomination.
It is the great paradox of Juventus: prestigious club, pathetic support. Yet more proof was in evidence this month as they hosted two huge games in a week. They gave away 26,000 tickets for the Werder Bremen must-win Champions League match, but were still almost 30,000 short of a sell-out. Then they entertained AC Milan in one of the biggest Serie A matches of the season, and the crowd was even lower.
It is a perennial embarrassment that the backdrop for televised games at their unloved home, the Stadio Delle Alpi, reveals banks of empty grey seats, and what noise is generated (with megaphones) echoes sadly around the cavernous spaces inside. Despite on-field excellence, the turnout has been in steady decline for the past few years. The average is a little over a third of their capacity.
Not so long ago Juventus registered their all-time low crowd for a Coppa Italia match against Sampdoria - 237 anoraks rattling around inside a stadium that holds 67,000. Live TV coverage, limited interest in the Italian Cup and cold weather were given as official excuses. Cold weather? (It is at this point you would like to imagine Sir Alan Sugar making Juve's public relations department squirm and beg before presenting them with the inevitable two-word salvo.) More than 237 would click through the turnstiles at Old Trafford even if there were an outbreak of bubonic plague - so the question must be asked: just what is Juventus's problem?
It's a question the club's directors have asked themselves with sufficient soul-searching to seek a solution. They are about to become the only major European football club to redevelop their ground because they need to make it smaller.
At the end of this season Juventus will move out as construction workers turn the Delle Alpi into a more compact, and hopefully atmospheric, 42,000-seat stadium. The hated athletics track will disappear. So will the corners, with new rectangular stands built inside the oval shell. These modifications are designed to make the Delle Alpi more like an English ground, more intimate, more of a bums-on-seats attraction.