How Juventus dethroned Ajax as Champions League kings and sparked contentious doping allegations

In 1985, Juventus pulled off the incredible feat of defeating a Liverpool side that consisted of Kenny Dalglish, Ian Rush, Alan Hansen and Mark Lawrenson in the European Cup final at Heysel Stadium in Brussels. That win was overshadowed by the disaster that claimed the lives of 39 people and injured 600 others, however. So tremendous and haunting was the human cost of that evening in Belgium that those at the club simply couldn’t look back on it with joy. "We never really considered 1985 as a victory because of Heysel," vice-president Roberto Bettega later said.

After early exits over the next two seasons, they vanished from Europe's elite competition for almost a decade. While they tasted UEFA Cup glory in 1990 and 1993 and returned to the final two years later, losing to domestic rivals Parma, the Champions League was the ultimate goal.

Replacing Giovanni Trapattoni in 1994, Marcello Lippi set about rebuilding the club. The summer of 1995 brought a radical overhaul: Roberto Baggio was sold to AC Milan in a record transfer, Jurgen Kohler and Robert Jarni departed, and the likes of Ciro Ferrara, Didier Deschamps and Paulo Sousa came in.

After winning the domestic double in his debut season, Lippi sought to further strengthen his team with a triple raid on Sampdoria that included the pivotal arrival of a certain smiling Serbian.

Though Juve finished second to AC Milan in Serie A during the 1995-96 season, their focus was fixed on regaining their place among Europe’s elite.

Their continental campaign got off to a woeful start as they conceded within the first minute of their opener against Dortmund with Andreas Moller coming back to haunt them two years after he traded the Bianconeri for the Black and Yellow.

It was only a momentary blip for the Turin side, however, as Del Piero was on hand to inspire a comeback, setting up Michele Padovano’s equaliser 10 minutes later before the 21-year-old forward curled in a beauty of his own and then set up Conte to kill the game off.

Del Piero’s pivotal performance sparked an unstoppable run. He scored in five straight matches as they dismantled Rangers and Steaua Bucharest to win the group.

Lippi’s team proved they had the grit required to battle with the traditional giants, too, as they overturned a 1-0 first-leg defeat to Real Madrid with a relentless 2-0 win to book a place in the semi-finals, where they outlasted a spirited Nantes 4-3 on aggregate semi-final thriller.

"We weren't afraid of anyone," Vialli said, "Once we beat Real Madrid, it seemed almost inevitable that we'd reach the final."

Eleven years on from the disaster that remains in the hearts and minds of football fans to this day, Juve were ready to show they were truly among the elite once again.

Standing in their way in Rome were Van Gaal’s reigning European champions. As well as winning the UEFA Super Cup and obliterating their rivals in the Eredivisie in 1995-96, the likes of Van der Sar, Jari Litmanen, Patrick Kluivert, Edgar Davids, Danny Blind and the De Boer brothers strolled through another dominant European run, failing to win on just two occasions en route to the Italian capital.

Juve were well aware of the challenge they were up against, with Sergio Porrini highlighting Litmanen as the main threat.

"He was undoubtedly the most dangerous, he was in a moment when if he touched the ball he scored. And in fact he did. The wingers in that 4-3-3 were also very good, the Dutchman Kiki Musampa and the Nigerian Finidi George, who could cause damage in attack but at the same time concede a lot in defence."

However, Ajax’s youthful exuberance had by now turned into hubris, with Van Gaal providing their opponents with extra motivation.

As Ciro Ferrara said: "A few days before the final, in fact, when asked who would win the Champions League, Ajax manager Van Gaal replied: 'I don't know who will win, but I know that cup will be returning on our plane.'"

The Italian added: "That spark gave us the push we needed."

Firing his players up with an improvised speech, Lippi sent them out with the message: "Nine times out of 10, they win, but one damn time it's our turn. And this is the night."

His words took immediate effect. Just 12 minutes into the final, Frank de Boer misjudged a header and waited for Van der Sar to rush out and grab the ball, but Ravanelli nipped in to steal it and poke into the empty net.

Ajax responded well, though, and Porrini’s words proved prophetic when De Boer’s free-kick was parried by goalkeeper Angelo Peruzzi into the path of Litmanen who fought off a defender and scooped home from close range.

Neither side could break the deadlock across the remainder of the 120 minutes of intense football and it eventually came down to a penalty shootout.

Gianluca Vialli, according to Lippi, refused to take one of the early spot-kicks, haunted by ghosts at the same stadium while representing Italy at the World Cup.

"At the Olimpico I had missed a penalty in the 1990 World Cup against the United States, and I had broken my foot taking another against Roma," he told Corriere della Sera, explaining why he wanted to take the fifth or sixth penalty. "That night I knew it was my last chance to win the Champions League.

"Imagine the nightmares, otherwise!"

Lippi explained: "Vialli had the negative feelings of the final against Barcelona and he cared particularly about that final. He told me: 'I care so much about this Champions League that if we were to lose because I missed the penalty I would commit suicide'."

A similar situation was going on at Ajax, as Sonny Silooy admitted: "None of us wanted to take a penalty after extra time. I was really bummed about that. Louis had gone around to everyone. Key players ran away from it."

While Ferrara, Gianluca Pessotto and Padovano converted their kicks, goalkeeper Peruzzi produced the heroics between the posts. He palmed away Davids' opening attempt - later laughing that the midfielder "shot it right at me!" - before diving to deny Sonny Silooy.

At 3-2, the stage was set for Jugovic to step up.

His team-mates were nervous and the directors in the stands couldn’t bear to watch, but Jugovic was smiling. The outcome had already been decided, he sensed.

"I was certain I would score; I was smiling because destiny had chosen me for such an important victory - both personally and for Juventus, a club that had been waiting for it for so many years," he told Corriere della Serra.

Van der Sar had no chance of stopping the missile Jugovic sent into the bottom corner.

As the Juve contingent erupted in wild celebrations, the exhausted Ajax players walked off the Stadio Olimpico pitch with a deeply unsettling feeling.

In the dressing room, Overmars pulled Ronald de Boer aside to air his concerns.

"Marc Overmars told me very quickly that he felt there was not something right,” he told The Independent. "He saw an opponent who did not look normal out of his eyes. He felt like he was taking something.”

He added: "I didn’t have that feeling. You know why? Because I’m always thinking that nobody would do it. I was totally not aware of that. And if somebody runs faster, maybe he runs faster. We knew it was a long season for us."

Ajax simply had to accept the defeat and move on as Juventus went on to reach the Champions League final in consecutive seasons, losing to Borussia Dortmund and Real Madrid.

Then, in August 1998, Roma manager Zdenek Zeman gave a bombshell interview to L'Espresso in which he condemned the illicit tactics of some Italian teams, highlighting Juventus in particular. Italian football must "come out of the pharmacy", he said.

"I'm not a demagogue or a provocateur," he said. "I'm a man of sport. I pick up on the rumours, the moods that swirl around. I hear and see that not only in cycling, but also in football, they try to make up for the lack of preparation with pharmacy products. In football, there hasn't yet been an explosive scandal. But the more important a sport, the more the dangers become. I know of many doctors who have switched from cycling to football. I know of many Serie A clubs that employ pharmacologists. We must prevent the championship from becoming like the Tour de France."

He added: "It’s a source of astonishment that begins with Gianluca Vialli and extends all the way to Alessandro Del Piero. Having played various sports myself, I used to think that such results could only be achieved through bodybuilding, after years and years of specialised training. I am convinced that football is a completely different kind of activity - at least the brand of football I play, which I would define in a single word as ‘positive’."

Zeman admitted that his Lazio players had taken different chemicals to help with their recovery or provide a psychological boost, but stressed: "I have the impression that lately things are going too far. The pressure on players is becoming increasingly heavy. And it's increasingly difficult to resist the temptations of the magic pill… [Diego] Maradona's drug problems were already being talked about when Napoli bought him from Barcelona. I can't believe his team-mate Ciro Ferrara, who certainly wasn't known for his good manners in his controversy with me, was unaware of them. Maradona continued to play like a champion. And he still plays today. But I'd like to remind Ferrara that if they hadn't turned a blind eye, if someone had taken his drug addiction to heart, he could have been saved from such a sad situation. But now business prevails over everything. The world of football is dominated by finance, as well as pharmacies."

In the wake of Zeman’s claims, police raided Juve’s offices and training facility, uncovering 281 different pharmaceutical substances, "It looks more like the equipment of a small hospital,” an expert would later testify in court.

While none of the drugs - mostly anti-inflammatories, painkillers and cardiac stimulants - were on the banned list at the time, incriminating evidence did emerge in the medical records and blood samples seized during the raid.

When prosecutor Raffaele Guariniello brought Juventus club doctor Riccardo Agricola and chief executive Antonio Giraudo to trial in 2004, the court called on hematologist Dr. Giuseppe d’Onofrio as an expert witness to examine those samples.

The findings were damning.

"The variability I saw in the data could not be considered normal," D’Onofrio testified.

He explained that the extreme fluctuations in red blood cell counts and hemoglobin levels among the Juventus squad could only be explained by blood transfusions or the use of Erythropoietin (EPO) - the synthetic hormone designed to boost oxygen delivery to muscles and enhance endurance. D’Onofrio testified that it was "practically certain" two Juventus players from the mid-1990s had taken EPO, and "very probable" that seven others had. Juventus’ lawyers, though, insisted his talk of probability did not prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt.

For supplying the Juve players with large amounts of performance-enhancing drugs, Dr. Agricola was found guilty of sporting fraud and given a suspended sentence of 22 months in prison, but he and Giraudo were cleared on appeal in 2005. When Italy’s highest Court of Cassation reviewed the case two years later, it overturned the Appeal Court, ruling that the administration of pharmaceuticals could indeed constitute sporting fraud under Italian law. However, because the events had occurred between 1994 and 1998, the statute of limitations had expired.

The case was closed.

One crucial question lingered over European football: if Juventus players were systematically using performance-enhancing drugs, why did no player test positive around the 1996 final?

The answer finally emerged in 2013 in a landmark episode of the Dutch documentary series Andere Tijden Sport. Prosecutor Guariniello revealed on camera that his investigation had uncovered that doping samples sent from Serie A and European matches to the official testing laboratory in Rome were simply never tested - an account confirmed in the documentary by the former director of the now-defunct Rome lab.

D'Onofrio and fellow scientist Alessandro Donati re-analysed the blood records specifically surrounding the week of the May 1996 final in Rome. They were convinced that the blood parameters proved it was practically certain Juventus players had been prepared with EPO.

“Wow, this is strange. It doesn't give me a good feeling," Finidi George said of the revelations. "Not just one player, various players from the team. If you have six, seven players playing like that in that game, that is big cheating."

The feud between Ajax and Juventus did not die, but remained dormant until 2019 when the two sides met in the quarter-finals of the competition.

David Endt, Ajax’s former general manager, declared the Dutch side wanted revenge for losing to a team that was "a bit doped". He later told The Independent he remained "bitter" and "sick" over that defeat.

Ex-Juventus star Alessio Tacchinardi fired back: "I listened to these statements from the oh so famous David Endt and can only say he ought to be ashamed of himself. Shame on you! That team worked hard from the first day of pre-season training to bring the Champions League back to Turin and we achieved that dream.

“If anything, I hope his words act as further motivation for our players to eliminate Ajax yet again. Shame!"

Former defender Ferrara added: "I’d like to point out that Endt helped us a great deal in that victory. A few days before the final, the Coach Louis van Gaal was asked who would win the Champions League and replied: ‘I don’t know, but that trophy is coming back on our plane.’

“Well, as the man responsible for team communications, Endt should know that statement made us pretty fired up."

Still fired up and angry about the accusations, Juventus and their supporters continue to remember that night in Rome as one of redemption. A victory built on Lippi’s vision, Peruzzi’s heroics and Jugovic’s penalty. The moment the club reclaimed European football’s ultimate prize, free from the grief of Heysel.

For Ajax and many others across Europe, however, the triumph carries a permanent asterisk.