LAST TUESDAY, 9,623 SPECTATORS — of which only 4,161 bought tickets; the rest were season ticket-holders — watched Juventus defeat FC Bruges in the cavernous Stadio Delle Alpi, a win that secured the Bianconeri’s place in the knockout stages of the Champions League. On the same night, Manchester United drew with Villarreal in the same competition and Old Trafford was, as usual, close to capacity.

But it is United, the endlessly self-described “biggest club in the world”, who are to lose their massive sponsorship deal, not Juventus. The further twist, of course, is that United’s contract with Vodafone, which will expire at the end of the season, nets them a relatively paltry £9 million a season, compared with Juventus’s £15 million deal with Tamoil.

When football clubs make claims about their global fan base — such as Florentino Pérez, the Real Madrid president, and his boast of having 93 million Madridistas worldwide — it is best to take it with a bucket of salt. Defining what constitutes a fan is not easy and these numbers often seem plucked from thin air.

What is not plucked from thin air is the hard cash that sponsors and television companies pour into Juventus. They attract more sponsorship than any other club in the world and also boast one of the most lucrative television deals, earning a guaranteed £48.5 million for their domestic digital terrestrial and digital satellite rights alone. It is numbers such as these that make Juve oblivious to the sneers and barbs that pundits from across the world occasionally direct their way as a result of the Stadio Delle Alpi’s paltry attendances.

The simple truth is that Juventus are more of a global club than any other in the world, in the sense that they have no real ties to their home city of Turin. It is claimed that one in three Italians are Juve fans. If this is true — and it often feels that way — few of them live locally. But that is all part of the game plan.

“In 1897, when a group of university students from Turin founded the club, they could have called it Torino, but they chose a totally nongeographic word, Juventus,” Romy Gai, the club’s commercial director, said. “I suppose it was an early marketing choice. It disengaged the club from territorial issues. In a world where many are proud of their roots, you could freely support Juventus without supporting Turin, which might be a rival to your own city. It invited people everywhere to come on board.

“There are people — in Asia, South America, other far-away places — who consider themselves Juventus fans but don’t know where we are from. They know we’re from Italy of course, but they might not know we’re from Turin.”

Far-flung United fans do not have that problem. While it is an oft-repeated joke that most United supporters hail from Surrey and other points south, it is also a myth. Without getting into the age-old argument of whether most of Manchester supports United or City, it is obvious that the club are deeply rooted in local traditions and culture.

Not so Juventus. To them, Turin is little more than an address, unlike their cross-town rivals Torino, who wrap themselves in the city’s colours and culture at every occasion. And this is why Juventus, the most successful club in the history of Italian football, have an average home attendance (29,122) only marginally higher than Torino (24,188), who are in Serie B and have won one league title in the past 55 years.

Some blame the usual factors for Juve’s poor attendances: high ticket prices, too much football on television and the Stadio Delle Alpi’s poor sightlines and inconvenient location on the outskirts of town. “But it’s just not true,” Gai said. “Two-thirds of our matches have a cheapest ticket which costs less than €10 (about £6). For those same games women and children get in for one euro. People blame the stadium and maybe it’s not all that it could be. But in the late 1990s we were averaging around 48,000 to 50,000 a game and that was in the Delle Alpi.”

Juventus’s plan to renovate the Stadio Delle Alpi, reducing capacity from the present 69,041 to about 40,000 — paid for, naturally, entirely by sponsors — is a rare concession to Juve’s local fan base. A few years ago, when Juventus first looked at renovating the Delle Alpi, it was suggested that, instead of choosing an alternate home for a year, the club might spend the entire season “on tour”, pitching up in a different town every weekend. Indeed, wherever Juventus go, they tend to sell out.

The origins of their popularity, in addition to the club’s name, are not hard to fathom. “The big one is that we’re historically one of the most successful teams in the world,” Gai said. “We have won 28 league titles. Among the major European leagues, only Real Madrid have won more and they have just one more than we do. Winning generates more fans, it’s a basic fact.

“As important, I think, is that we have had the same owners, the Agnelli family, since 1923. That has given us both tradition and identity, affording us the opportunity to make long-term plans.” The result is a club which is truly unique: more popular away than at home.

One of the maxims of selling is “know your customer”. Juventus do this better than most. Their customer, ultimately, isn’t the Turinese shivering at the Stadio Delle Alpi. Chasing his euro is not as important as satisfying the tens of millions elsewhere around the globe.

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