The trial of Italian domestic football, with four major clubs facing allegations of match-rigging, is a grave business. But that doesn’t prohibit it as a subject for the country’s lively appetite for satire. One wag has designed twin Juventus replica shirts. The 2005-06 version has the traditional black and white stripes with the word “Champions”. On the next, 2006-07, the stripes become hoops, like a comic-strip prisoner’s uniform.

No Juventus footballers will be going to jail as a result of the charges against their former directors of systematically manipulating referees, but a punitive relegation for Italy’s most decorated club seems likely now that Juve’s lawyers have responded to the recommendation of prosecutor Stefano Palazzi. He said Juventus should start the next campaign in Serie C; they have pleaded for relegation by just the one division, to Serie B. To forsake the income that comes with Serie A status for 12 months might be bearable; to budget without it for two years could threaten bankruptcy.

Besides, there is the matter of Juve’s assets. If they are to sell their best players, Juve would rather not do it under duress, with a queue of them at the door explaining that they’d love to help out, but they can’t be expected to spend two valuable years of their careers playing games at Rimini or Ravenna with a view to being back in the top flight by 2008. “If we are lucky,” said the interim president Giovanni Cobolli Gigli, “we can give ourselves a year to get back to the top. Otherwise, it’ll be two.”

He does not expect his best players to wait that long. The coach Fabio Capello has already left for Real Madrid, and means to take one or two players with him. And this is a club with some of the finest footballers anywhere — in fact, eight of the men about to play in the World Cup final.

It is an extraordinary number in an age where the market is so fluid, and the idea that Gianluigi Buffon, Gianluca Zambrotta, Fabio Cannavaro, Mauro Camoranesi, Alessandro Del Piero, and the Frenchmen Lilian Thuram, Patrick Vieira and David Trezeguet might play in a World Cup final one month and a Serie C fixture the next makes for a unique backdrop to Berlin. A further eight Italian squad members, from Milan, Fiorentina and Lazio, also face relegation for their clubs’ connection to the scandal, though their sentences would be lighter than Juve’s.

Juve have usually had a substantial presence among the Azzurri. At this tournament it has become a defining one. Buffon’s reputation as the game’s finest goalkeeper has been done no harm by saves like the one preventing Lucas Podolski giving Germany the lead in the semi-final. Zambrotta came to the tournament deemed perhaps the world’s best left-back. He has shown he can be the best right-back, too. Cannavaro looks a candidate for player of the World Cup. Del Piero, 13 years a Juve man, has left his imprint with a marvellous finish against Germany.

Add Thuram and Vieira, the leaders of a French team whose captain, Zinedine Zidane, was a Juventus player for five years and whose principal striker, Thierry Henry, was there briefly, too. Add Italy’s head coach, Marcello Lippi, associated with the Turin club more than any other. He led Juve to five league titles and four Champions League finals.

So it’s a World Cup final tailored in black and white, but a final obliged to compensate Italian football for Juve’s tarnished reputation, to celebrate the Azzurri while a cold, cynical, rather creepy side to Italian football’s character is revealed by the hearings in Rome. Even before details emerged of the corrupt relationships between ex-Juventus director-general Luciano Moggi and members of the Italian referees’ body, Moggi had a shady notoriety across European football and Juve had an image problem. Last year, they were defending themselves against accusations of “sporting fraud” over a four-year period of great success in the mid-1990s and the use of pharmaceutical products not obviously related to the treatment of sports injuries. The club doctor Riccardo Agricola would be cleared on appeal.

Cobolli Gigli acknowledges the Moggi scandal has exacerbated the club’s poor standing among neutrals. “Juve is the most loved and the most hated club in Italy,” he said. “We’ll work now to make ourselves a bit more loved and less hated. The new Juve will be transparent and sympathetic.”

Buffon said the other day Juve’s directors should “feel proud to have so many of their men competing in a World Cup final”. Which directors? The old or the new? Moggi and former administrator Antonio Giraudo are the men most implicated in the manipulation of referees, while Moggi faces investigation into his links with a dominant players’ agency in Rome, GEA, for whom his and Lippi’s sons have worked. As for the new management, replacing the disgraced directors, one, Gianluca Pessotto, is in hospital after a fall from a balcony of the club’s offices in what looked like a suicide attempt two weeks ago.

Del Piero and Zambrotta have been to Turin to visit Pessotto between World Cup matches. They used to play together. When Italy met France at Euro 2000, Pessotto provided the cross for the opening goal. He was one of half a dozen Juve men involved that day.

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