Lately, the fact that VR46 made money by producing official Juventus merchandise is all over the news. Cristiano Ronald’s landing in Turin is so exciting that everyone is now making his own speculations. Today we can finally uncover that the commercial deal between the black and white soccer club and VR46 has been broken. The deal was signed back in 2015 by Valentino Rossi, Alberto Tebaldi, and Alessio Salucci for Tavullia’s firm and by Andrea Agnelli together with Maurizio Arrivabene for Juventus. We still don’t know by now the reasons why they decided to get out of it.
THE DEAL – The partnership between the two firms was forewarned by Tuttosport News on June 3rd 2015. According to the sports newspaper, they perfected the deal in 2014 and it should have lasted 4 years (until 2019), with the merchandise’s selling starting in September 2015. Tuttosport wrote that Francesco Calvo, back then Juventus marketing manager, dealt with all aspects of the deal even though it was eventually signed by others. “The bigs”, the sports newspaper said. We reached out to Calvo – that in the meanwhile left Turin and moved to Barcelona – who told us: “I didn’t negotiate the deal, so I honestly can’t remember how long it should have lasted”. Alberto Tebaldi, on holiday in Croatia these days together with Valentino Rossi and Uccio Salucci, confirmed that the commercial partnership between VR46 and Juventus has been stopped because Juventus asked for that in order to “do it on its own”.
THE BREAK – According to the collected information, the deal has been very recently broken. Reliable sources said it happened in March this year. As opposed to what they did during the contract’s signature that created a bond between the two firms (two press releases made by those directly involved), nothing has been officially confirmed yet regarding the commercial break up. Off the records, we managed to obtain some information related to the deal: it regarded the production, on VR46’s side, of a free-time clothing line – nothing to share with Adidas’ production of uniforms’ replicas – that Juventus should have distributed through its official sales channels.