“Unsporting conduct” lol if they really wanted to enforce this rule properly every club in Italy would be on -points every season.
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i mean those professionals had zero chance. reality didn't matter in the trial, the sentence was predetermined
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your point is nonsense and proves that you didn't read, understand what i wrote, and don't know a lot about calciopoli. as @Juliano13 wrote, juve's offences were not serious at all, while both milanese clubs should have been relegated, with inda getting the more serious punishment.
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your point is nonsense and proves that you didn't read, understand what i wrote, and don't know a lot about calciopoli. as @Juliano13 wrote, juve's offences were not serious at all, while both milanese clubs should have been relegated, with inda getting the more serious punishment.
I am 100% sure we did some shady shit, but pretty much everything in the football world is suspect financially speaking.
I'd be very surprised if they can ever prove any wrongdoing though. We have a financial empire behind us. Surely we must be smart enough to not bend the rules too much?
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I'd be very surprised if they can ever prove any wrongdoing though. We have a financial empire behind us. Surely we must be smart enough to not bend the rules too much?
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Moggi supposedly asked to not appoint Collina for Milan-Juventus in 2005.
You know who we got?
Collina.
We still beat them.
We won those games fair and square. Calciopoli was an utter joke and it sickens me that something like that was allowed to happen in a first world country.
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You know who we got?
Collina.
We still beat them.
We won those games fair and square. Calciopoli was an utter joke and it sickens me that something like that was allowed to happen in a first world country.
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You just gave credence to it with your dumbass post. Like always, you manage to trash this club. Good on you. We weren’t guilty of anything that warranted more than a light slap on the wrist. Maybe actually learn about the club you ostensibly support’s history.
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Snobist again proving he’s the most clueless, out of touch Juve fan on this forum.
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Snobist again proving he’s the most clueless, out of touch Juve fan on this forum.
No you really don’t. Read @s4tch and @Seven posts. We were guilty of nothing that warranted more than a slap on the wrist. Nothing that isn’t business as usual in Italy. Unsporting conduct lol. Other clubs were actually committing relegation to Serie C level offenses. But we were not and even after all that investigating over a decade have still not been proven to have done anything serious wrong.
You really should go support your EPL clubs. You’re an appalling Juve fan.
You really should go support your EPL clubs. You’re an appalling Juve fan.
the prosecution is still preparing the documents. there's only an investigation atm, and there are speculations about the charges. the main charge is rumored to be false accounting (which is fucking hard to prove if they have nothing besides the shady, plusvalenza driven swap deals) and falsifying invoices (again, hard to prove if the documents are contracts signed by two clubs, agents, players).
here's a good resumé on the current situation from a couple of days ago:
https://theathletic.com/2987869/202...-and-62-serie-a-transfers-are-under-scrutiny/
here's a good resumé on the current situation from a couple of days ago:
https://theathletic.com/2987869/202...-and-62-serie-a-transfers-are-under-scrutiny/
Explained: Why Juventus, Fabio Paratici and 62 Serie A transfers are under scrutiny
By James Horncastle Dec 2, 2021
54
Last week, the public prosecutor’s office in Turin issued a warrant to search premises belonging to Juventus as part of an investigation entitled Prisma.
Agents from the Guardia di Finanza — the police force responsible for investigating financial affairs in Italy — were authorised to pay a visit to the club’s training grounds in Continassa and Vinovo as well as offices in Turin and Milan.
Chairman Andrea Agnelli, vice-president Pavel Nedved and chief financial officer Stefano Cerrato were placed under investigation for alleged false accounting, false company reporting and billing for non-existent transactions, as were three other executives who have since left the club — among them former chief football officer Fabio Paratici, who joined Tottenham Hotspur as managing director of football in the summer.
The news comes a month after La Repubblica reported that Covisoc, the watchdog supervising football in Italy, had passed on a report to Giuseppe Chine, the prosecutor in charge of the Italian Football Federation’s disciplinary commission, highlighting 62 transfers from the last two years. Chine was invited to take a closer look at the activity and consider whether the transaction fees were inflated or not.
Juventus were not the only club to feature on the list. Thirteen moves featuring Parma caught Covisoc’s attention, as did Napoli’s acquisition of Lille striker Victor Osimhen in the summer of 2020 for a club-record €71.25 million.
Four Napoli players moved the other way to join the French club in a package worth €20.1 million. The only one of note was Orestis Karnezis, a now 36-year-old former Greece international goalkeeper who has made a single appearance for Lille, against fourth division Gazelec Ajaccio back in March in an early round of the Coupe de France. Claudio Manzi, Ciro Palmieri and Luigi Liguori, the other three, never played for Lille and are all back in Italy already, turning out for lower-leagues sides Turris, Nocerina and Frattese.
Napoli’s owner Aurelio De Laurentiis has told the New York Times he is not concerned by the probe.
Napoli’s €71.25 million move for Osimhen caught Covisoc’s attention (Photo: Jonathan Moscrop/Getty Images)
Juventus’ name was the one to feature most on Covisoc’s list, though. All told, 42 of the 62 deals flagged up to Chine involved them.
To understand the volume, it is helpful to consider the context.
After Italy failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup finals, Juventus were the only club to act on the Italian federation’s decision to allow top-flight teams to enter an under-23s squad in the domestic third division. The intention was to help bridge the gap between youth level and first-team football in Italy by giving young players the chance to play professional men’s football earlier.
Juventus have cited Alvaro Morata’s experience at Real Madrid as an example to follow. Three years playing in Spain’s lower leagues with Castilla, the Bernabeu giants’ B team, against wily old pros readied the striker for competition at the highest level far better than going up against players his own age on training grounds up and down Spain.
Starting an under-23 team was a huge undertaking for Juventus — comparable to a Premier League team simultaneously running a club playing in League One.
Thirty-six of the 42 Juventus moves arousing Covisoc’s curiosity involve footballers you’ve probably never heard of who play for either their under-23s or even younger age groups. For instance, the swaps of Matheus Pereira for Barcelona’s Spain Under-19 international Alejandro Marques and Pablo Moreno for Manchester City’s Portugal Under-19 international Felix Correia in 2020 did not make the same headlines as more famous part-exchange deals between the same clubs such as the Arthur Melo-Miralem Pjanic trade in that summer window or the Danilo-Joao Cancelo one a year earlier.
Barcelona declined to comment when approached by The Athletic. It is understood Manchester City are not concerned by the report and believe the values in those deals concerning them will hold up to scrutiny.
As a publicly-traded company on the Euronext stock exchange in Milan, Juventus disclosed they are already subject to an inspection by CONSOB, the regulator of the Italian securities market, over “revenues from players’ registration rights”. On Saturday, the club confirmed they are also co-operating with investigators from Turin’s public prosecutor’s office. Paratici’s successor Federico Cherubini, who is not under investigation, was reportedly interviewed for nine hours over the weekend as a person informed of the facts.
In the 12-page search warrant, it emerges prosecutors are seeking to establish whether or not the information in financial statements, reports or other corporate communications over a three-year period covering 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2020-21 is correct, specifically as it relates to the €282 million in income from the management of players’ rights deriving from plusvalenze — that is, capital gains — from player exchanges. For clarity, football players are intangible assets on a club’s balance sheet so a plusvalenza is the positive difference between the sale value of a player and value of acquisition, net of amortisation and any writedowns. It is legitimate under accounting rules.
Public prosecutors in Turin are scrutinising three types of transaction.
One is the “mirror operation”, the like-for-like trades such as the one involving Italy youth international Franco Tongya and Marseille striker Marley Ake last January, with the value of one player “mirroring” the other at €8 million.
Then there’s the aforementioned Pereira-Marques swap, which is cited as one of the numerous operations involving young players that, in the prosecutor’s opinion, is “fuori range” — not in line — with the valuation of players turning out in the lower leagues, as they were at the time for Juventus Under-23s and Barcelona B respectively.
Third is the trade for Genoa’s talented teenage midfielder Nicolo Rovella — who, as detailed in the original terms of the agreement, is now back there on loan — after Juventus signed him for €18 million in January, with Manolo Portanova (€10 million) and Elia Petrelli (€8 million) going the other way. The Rovella deal stood out because his contract with Genoa was due to expire in June, only for the player to sign an extension with them before the deal with Juventus was struck.
A spokesperson for 777 Partners, Genoa’s new owners who completed a takeover of the club in September, told The Athletic: “We will collaborate if anybody calls us, but as of now we are not aware of any investigations where Genoa is directly a party. We were not aware of any of this until now, to be clear.”
Rovella is on loan back at Genoa after a January move to Juventus (Photo: Ettore Griffoni/LiveMedia/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The full transcripts of wiretaps carried out over three months during the last summer transfer window are under seal but unattributed snippets feature in the warrant and have opened up new lines of inquiry.
One relates to the Cristian Romero deal with Atalanta and an intercept citing a “non-federal obligation.” Juventus signed Romero from Genoa for €26 million in 2019. He was then sent on a two-year loan to Atalanta in a deal including a €16 million option to buy which the Bergamo club activated this summer, just prior to his sale to Tottenham.
Atalanta’s owner Antonio Percassi told La Gazzetta dello Sport: “I’ve asked my (executives), ‘Are we OK?’ They told me, ‘Yes.’ I have nothing else to add.”
The other regards the contractual relationship between Cristiano Ronaldo and Juventus. Ronaldo himself, now at Manchester United, is not under investigation.
In a statement on Saturday, Juventus said: “The company is co-operating with the investigators and with CONSOB and trusts it will clarify any aspect of interest to it, as it believes to have acted in compliance with the laws and regulations governing the preparation of financial reports, in accordance with accounting principles and in line with the international practice in the football industry and market conditions.”
A spokesperson from Parma, who have been taken over by new ownership since the 13 transfers listed in the report were made, said: “We are aware of the transactions and the list you referenced. We are co-operating with investigators and cannot comment further at this time.”
The Athletic has contacted Marseille and Lille for comment.
This is not the first time plusvalenze have been scrutinised in Italy.
Chievo were docked three points in 2018 and fined €200,000. Their owner Luca Campedelli was handed a three-month ban.
Reaching even further back, public prosecutors in Milan opened an investigation in 2008 into swaps between AC Milan and neighbours Inter four years earlier. Both were acquitted in the criminal court and agreed to a €90,000 fine before a federation tribunal.
Reflecting on the case in La Stampa, Milan’s legal counsel at the time, Leandro Cantamessa, said: “I would like to say that the capital gain in itself is a beneficial concept for a football club. You have to fight it when it becomes a toxic phenomenon. But the problem is always the same: it is very difficult to prove that the parties knowingly wanted to conclude a fictitious deal. It is complicated because, in football, there is no price list. Let’s not forget the history of football is littered, in one sense or another, with incredible mistakes in the transfer market: champions bought for next to nothing or flops valued very highly.”
Which brings us back to the same old question: how do you determine a player’s worth?
In 2018, a FIFA task force endorsed the use of an algorithm to “estimate transfer values and probabilities in a scientific way” as one of the possible “mechanisms to achieve transparency and objectivity” in deciding the value of a player.
Had the Super League been successfully launched back in April, the game’s financial structure would have changed with the introduction of a cash-based control system looking at salaries plus net player spend. For now, however, it remains the same as always. And it is a “sick” and unhealthy system, according to Turin’s public prosecutors.
John Elkann, president of Juventus’ majority shareholder EXOR, reassured: “In the ongoing investigation, the club is co-operating with investigators and trusts that light will be shed on all aspects under investigation. I am confident in the work of the magistrature. Juventus has a new board of directors, a new coach, who together with the vice-president and president, are dealing with problems on and off the pitch. Every club goes through difficult moments. It is important to face them. This is what is happening at Juventus.
“I’m convinced the future will be as important as the past. It’s a great club and all the conditions are in place. By facing difficulties, you get stronger.”
The Prisma case continues and a sense of trepidation has descended on the rest of the Italian league.
The possibility of further investigations being opened into other clubs’ affairs cannot be ruled out.
By James Horncastle Dec 2, 2021
Last week, the public prosecutor’s office in Turin issued a warrant to search premises belonging to Juventus as part of an investigation entitled Prisma.
Agents from the Guardia di Finanza — the police force responsible for investigating financial affairs in Italy — were authorised to pay a visit to the club’s training grounds in Continassa and Vinovo as well as offices in Turin and Milan.
Chairman Andrea Agnelli, vice-president Pavel Nedved and chief financial officer Stefano Cerrato were placed under investigation for alleged false accounting, false company reporting and billing for non-existent transactions, as were three other executives who have since left the club — among them former chief football officer Fabio Paratici, who joined Tottenham Hotspur as managing director of football in the summer.
The news comes a month after La Repubblica reported that Covisoc, the watchdog supervising football in Italy, had passed on a report to Giuseppe Chine, the prosecutor in charge of the Italian Football Federation’s disciplinary commission, highlighting 62 transfers from the last two years. Chine was invited to take a closer look at the activity and consider whether the transaction fees were inflated or not.
Juventus were not the only club to feature on the list. Thirteen moves featuring Parma caught Covisoc’s attention, as did Napoli’s acquisition of Lille striker Victor Osimhen in the summer of 2020 for a club-record €71.25 million.
Four Napoli players moved the other way to join the French club in a package worth €20.1 million. The only one of note was Orestis Karnezis, a now 36-year-old former Greece international goalkeeper who has made a single appearance for Lille, against fourth division Gazelec Ajaccio back in March in an early round of the Coupe de France. Claudio Manzi, Ciro Palmieri and Luigi Liguori, the other three, never played for Lille and are all back in Italy already, turning out for lower-leagues sides Turris, Nocerina and Frattese.
Napoli’s owner Aurelio De Laurentiis has told the New York Times he is not concerned by the probe.
Napoli’s €71.25 million move for Osimhen caught Covisoc’s attention (Photo: Jonathan Moscrop/Getty Images)
Juventus’ name was the one to feature most on Covisoc’s list, though. All told, 42 of the 62 deals flagged up to Chine involved them.
To understand the volume, it is helpful to consider the context.
After Italy failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup finals, Juventus were the only club to act on the Italian federation’s decision to allow top-flight teams to enter an under-23s squad in the domestic third division. The intention was to help bridge the gap between youth level and first-team football in Italy by giving young players the chance to play professional men’s football earlier.
Juventus have cited Alvaro Morata’s experience at Real Madrid as an example to follow. Three years playing in Spain’s lower leagues with Castilla, the Bernabeu giants’ B team, against wily old pros readied the striker for competition at the highest level far better than going up against players his own age on training grounds up and down Spain.
Starting an under-23 team was a huge undertaking for Juventus — comparable to a Premier League team simultaneously running a club playing in League One.
Thirty-six of the 42 Juventus moves arousing Covisoc’s curiosity involve footballers you’ve probably never heard of who play for either their under-23s or even younger age groups. For instance, the swaps of Matheus Pereira for Barcelona’s Spain Under-19 international Alejandro Marques and Pablo Moreno for Manchester City’s Portugal Under-19 international Felix Correia in 2020 did not make the same headlines as more famous part-exchange deals between the same clubs such as the Arthur Melo-Miralem Pjanic trade in that summer window or the Danilo-Joao Cancelo one a year earlier.
Barcelona declined to comment when approached by The Athletic. It is understood Manchester City are not concerned by the report and believe the values in those deals concerning them will hold up to scrutiny.
As a publicly-traded company on the Euronext stock exchange in Milan, Juventus disclosed they are already subject to an inspection by CONSOB, the regulator of the Italian securities market, over “revenues from players’ registration rights”. On Saturday, the club confirmed they are also co-operating with investigators from Turin’s public prosecutor’s office. Paratici’s successor Federico Cherubini, who is not under investigation, was reportedly interviewed for nine hours over the weekend as a person informed of the facts.
In the 12-page search warrant, it emerges prosecutors are seeking to establish whether or not the information in financial statements, reports or other corporate communications over a three-year period covering 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2020-21 is correct, specifically as it relates to the €282 million in income from the management of players’ rights deriving from plusvalenze — that is, capital gains — from player exchanges. For clarity, football players are intangible assets on a club’s balance sheet so a plusvalenza is the positive difference between the sale value of a player and value of acquisition, net of amortisation and any writedowns. It is legitimate under accounting rules.
Public prosecutors in Turin are scrutinising three types of transaction.
One is the “mirror operation”, the like-for-like trades such as the one involving Italy youth international Franco Tongya and Marseille striker Marley Ake last January, with the value of one player “mirroring” the other at €8 million.
Then there’s the aforementioned Pereira-Marques swap, which is cited as one of the numerous operations involving young players that, in the prosecutor’s opinion, is “fuori range” — not in line — with the valuation of players turning out in the lower leagues, as they were at the time for Juventus Under-23s and Barcelona B respectively.
Third is the trade for Genoa’s talented teenage midfielder Nicolo Rovella — who, as detailed in the original terms of the agreement, is now back there on loan — after Juventus signed him for €18 million in January, with Manolo Portanova (€10 million) and Elia Petrelli (€8 million) going the other way. The Rovella deal stood out because his contract with Genoa was due to expire in June, only for the player to sign an extension with them before the deal with Juventus was struck.
A spokesperson for 777 Partners, Genoa’s new owners who completed a takeover of the club in September, told The Athletic: “We will collaborate if anybody calls us, but as of now we are not aware of any investigations where Genoa is directly a party. We were not aware of any of this until now, to be clear.”
Rovella is on loan back at Genoa after a January move to Juventus (Photo: Ettore Griffoni/LiveMedia/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The full transcripts of wiretaps carried out over three months during the last summer transfer window are under seal but unattributed snippets feature in the warrant and have opened up new lines of inquiry.
One relates to the Cristian Romero deal with Atalanta and an intercept citing a “non-federal obligation.” Juventus signed Romero from Genoa for €26 million in 2019. He was then sent on a two-year loan to Atalanta in a deal including a €16 million option to buy which the Bergamo club activated this summer, just prior to his sale to Tottenham.
Atalanta’s owner Antonio Percassi told La Gazzetta dello Sport: “I’ve asked my (executives), ‘Are we OK?’ They told me, ‘Yes.’ I have nothing else to add.”
The other regards the contractual relationship between Cristiano Ronaldo and Juventus. Ronaldo himself, now at Manchester United, is not under investigation.
In a statement on Saturday, Juventus said: “The company is co-operating with the investigators and with CONSOB and trusts it will clarify any aspect of interest to it, as it believes to have acted in compliance with the laws and regulations governing the preparation of financial reports, in accordance with accounting principles and in line with the international practice in the football industry and market conditions.”
A spokesperson from Parma, who have been taken over by new ownership since the 13 transfers listed in the report were made, said: “We are aware of the transactions and the list you referenced. We are co-operating with investigators and cannot comment further at this time.”
The Athletic has contacted Marseille and Lille for comment.
This is not the first time plusvalenze have been scrutinised in Italy.
Chievo were docked three points in 2018 and fined €200,000. Their owner Luca Campedelli was handed a three-month ban.
Reaching even further back, public prosecutors in Milan opened an investigation in 2008 into swaps between AC Milan and neighbours Inter four years earlier. Both were acquitted in the criminal court and agreed to a €90,000 fine before a federation tribunal.
Reflecting on the case in La Stampa, Milan’s legal counsel at the time, Leandro Cantamessa, said: “I would like to say that the capital gain in itself is a beneficial concept for a football club. You have to fight it when it becomes a toxic phenomenon. But the problem is always the same: it is very difficult to prove that the parties knowingly wanted to conclude a fictitious deal. It is complicated because, in football, there is no price list. Let’s not forget the history of football is littered, in one sense or another, with incredible mistakes in the transfer market: champions bought for next to nothing or flops valued very highly.”
Which brings us back to the same old question: how do you determine a player’s worth?
In 2018, a FIFA task force endorsed the use of an algorithm to “estimate transfer values and probabilities in a scientific way” as one of the possible “mechanisms to achieve transparency and objectivity” in deciding the value of a player.
Had the Super League been successfully launched back in April, the game’s financial structure would have changed with the introduction of a cash-based control system looking at salaries plus net player spend. For now, however, it remains the same as always. And it is a “sick” and unhealthy system, according to Turin’s public prosecutors.
John Elkann, president of Juventus’ majority shareholder EXOR, reassured: “In the ongoing investigation, the club is co-operating with investigators and trusts that light will be shed on all aspects under investigation. I am confident in the work of the magistrature. Juventus has a new board of directors, a new coach, who together with the vice-president and president, are dealing with problems on and off the pitch. Every club goes through difficult moments. It is important to face them. This is what is happening at Juventus.
“I’m convinced the future will be as important as the past. It’s a great club and all the conditions are in place. By facing difficulties, you get stronger.”
The Prisma case continues and a sense of trepidation has descended on the rest of the Italian league.
The possibility of further investigations being opened into other clubs’ affairs cannot be ruled out.
the prosecution is still preparing the documents. there's only an investigation atm, and there are speculations about the charges. the main charge is rumored to be false accounting (which is fucking hard to prove if they have nothing besides the shady, plusvalenza driven swap deals) and falsifying invoices (again, hard to prove if the documents are contracts signed by two clubs, agents, players).
here's a good resumé on the current situation from a couple of days ago:
https://theathletic.com/2987869/202...-and-62-serie-a-transfers-are-under-scrutiny/
here's a good resumé on the current situation from a couple of days ago:
https://theathletic.com/2987869/202...-and-62-serie-a-transfers-are-under-scrutiny/
Explained: Why Juventus, Fabio Paratici and 62 Serie A transfers are under scrutiny
By James Horncastle Dec 2, 2021
54
Last week, the public prosecutor’s office in Turin issued a warrant to search premises belonging to Juventus as part of an investigation entitled Prisma.
Agents from the Guardia di Finanza — the police force responsible for investigating financial affairs in Italy — were authorised to pay a visit to the club’s training grounds in Continassa and Vinovo as well as offices in Turin and Milan.
Chairman Andrea Agnelli, vice-president Pavel Nedved and chief financial officer Stefano Cerrato were placed under investigation for alleged false accounting, false company reporting and billing for non-existent transactions, as were three other executives who have since left the club — among them former chief football officer Fabio Paratici, who joined Tottenham Hotspur as managing director of football in the summer.
The news comes a month after La Repubblica reported that Covisoc, the watchdog supervising football in Italy, had passed on a report to Giuseppe Chine, the prosecutor in charge of the Italian Football Federation’s disciplinary commission, highlighting 62 transfers from the last two years. Chine was invited to take a closer look at the activity and consider whether the transaction fees were inflated or not.
Juventus were not the only club to feature on the list. Thirteen moves featuring Parma caught Covisoc’s attention, as did Napoli’s acquisition of Lille striker Victor Osimhen in the summer of 2020 for a club-record €71.25 million.
Four Napoli players moved the other way to join the French club in a package worth €20.1 million. The only one of note was Orestis Karnezis, a now 36-year-old former Greece international goalkeeper who has made a single appearance for Lille, against fourth division Gazelec Ajaccio back in March in an early round of the Coupe de France. Claudio Manzi, Ciro Palmieri and Luigi Liguori, the other three, never played for Lille and are all back in Italy already, turning out for lower-leagues sides Turris, Nocerina and Frattese.
Napoli’s owner Aurelio De Laurentiis has told the New York Times he is not concerned by the probe.
Napoli’s €71.25 million move for Osimhen caught Covisoc’s attention (Photo: Jonathan Moscrop/Getty Images)
Juventus’ name was the one to feature most on Covisoc’s list, though. All told, 42 of the 62 deals flagged up to Chine involved them.
To understand the volume, it is helpful to consider the context.
After Italy failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup finals, Juventus were the only club to act on the Italian federation’s decision to allow top-flight teams to enter an under-23s squad in the domestic third division. The intention was to help bridge the gap between youth level and first-team football in Italy by giving young players the chance to play professional men’s football earlier.
Juventus have cited Alvaro Morata’s experience at Real Madrid as an example to follow. Three years playing in Spain’s lower leagues with Castilla, the Bernabeu giants’ B team, against wily old pros readied the striker for competition at the highest level far better than going up against players his own age on training grounds up and down Spain.
Starting an under-23 team was a huge undertaking for Juventus — comparable to a Premier League team simultaneously running a club playing in League One.
Thirty-six of the 42 Juventus moves arousing Covisoc’s curiosity involve footballers you’ve probably never heard of who play for either their under-23s or even younger age groups. For instance, the swaps of Matheus Pereira for Barcelona’s Spain Under-19 international Alejandro Marques and Pablo Moreno for Manchester City’s Portugal Under-19 international Felix Correia in 2020 did not make the same headlines as more famous part-exchange deals between the same clubs such as the Arthur Melo-Miralem Pjanic trade in that summer window or the Danilo-Joao Cancelo one a year earlier.
Barcelona declined to comment when approached by The Athletic. It is understood Manchester City are not concerned by the report and believe the values in those deals concerning them will hold up to scrutiny.
As a publicly-traded company on the Euronext stock exchange in Milan, Juventus disclosed they are already subject to an inspection by CONSOB, the regulator of the Italian securities market, over “revenues from players’ registration rights”. On Saturday, the club confirmed they are also co-operating with investigators from Turin’s public prosecutor’s office. Paratici’s successor Federico Cherubini, who is not under investigation, was reportedly interviewed for nine hours over the weekend as a person informed of the facts.
In the 12-page search warrant, it emerges prosecutors are seeking to establish whether or not the information in financial statements, reports or other corporate communications over a three-year period covering 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2020-21 is correct, specifically as it relates to the €282 million in income from the management of players’ rights deriving from plusvalenze — that is, capital gains — from player exchanges. For clarity, football players are intangible assets on a club’s balance sheet so a plusvalenza is the positive difference between the sale value of a player and value of acquisition, net of amortisation and any writedowns. It is legitimate under accounting rules.
Public prosecutors in Turin are scrutinising three types of transaction.
One is the “mirror operation”, the like-for-like trades such as the one involving Italy youth international Franco Tongya and Marseille striker Marley Ake last January, with the value of one player “mirroring” the other at €8 million.
Then there’s the aforementioned Pereira-Marques swap, which is cited as one of the numerous operations involving young players that, in the prosecutor’s opinion, is “fuori range” — not in line — with the valuation of players turning out in the lower leagues, as they were at the time for Juventus Under-23s and Barcelona B respectively.
Third is the trade for Genoa’s talented teenage midfielder Nicolo Rovella — who, as detailed in the original terms of the agreement, is now back there on loan — after Juventus signed him for €18 million in January, with Manolo Portanova (€10 million) and Elia Petrelli (€8 million) going the other way. The Rovella deal stood out because his contract with Genoa was due to expire in June, only for the player to sign an extension with them before the deal with Juventus was struck.
A spokesperson for 777 Partners, Genoa’s new owners who completed a takeover of the club in September, told The Athletic: “We will collaborate if anybody calls us, but as of now we are not aware of any investigations where Genoa is directly a party. We were not aware of any of this until now, to be clear.”
Rovella is on loan back at Genoa after a January move to Juventus (Photo: Ettore Griffoni/LiveMedia/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The full transcripts of wiretaps carried out over three months during the last summer transfer window are under seal but unattributed snippets feature in the warrant and have opened up new lines of inquiry.
One relates to the Cristian Romero deal with Atalanta and an intercept citing a “non-federal obligation.” Juventus signed Romero from Genoa for €26 million in 2019. He was then sent on a two-year loan to Atalanta in a deal including a €16 million option to buy which the Bergamo club activated this summer, just prior to his sale to Tottenham.
Atalanta’s owner Antonio Percassi told La Gazzetta dello Sport: “I’ve asked my (executives), ‘Are we OK?’ They told me, ‘Yes.’ I have nothing else to add.”
The other regards the contractual relationship between Cristiano Ronaldo and Juventus. Ronaldo himself, now at Manchester United, is not under investigation.
In a statement on Saturday, Juventus said: “The company is co-operating with the investigators and with CONSOB and trusts it will clarify any aspect of interest to it, as it believes to have acted in compliance with the laws and regulations governing the preparation of financial reports, in accordance with accounting principles and in line with the international practice in the football industry and market conditions.”
A spokesperson from Parma, who have been taken over by new ownership since the 13 transfers listed in the report were made, said: “We are aware of the transactions and the list you referenced. We are co-operating with investigators and cannot comment further at this time.”
The Athletic has contacted Marseille and Lille for comment.
This is not the first time plusvalenze have been scrutinised in Italy.
Chievo were docked three points in 2018 and fined €200,000. Their owner Luca Campedelli was handed a three-month ban.
Reaching even further back, public prosecutors in Milan opened an investigation in 2008 into swaps between AC Milan and neighbours Inter four years earlier. Both were acquitted in the criminal court and agreed to a €90,000 fine before a federation tribunal.
Reflecting on the case in La Stampa, Milan’s legal counsel at the time, Leandro Cantamessa, said: “I would like to say that the capital gain in itself is a beneficial concept for a football club. You have to fight it when it becomes a toxic phenomenon. But the problem is always the same: it is very difficult to prove that the parties knowingly wanted to conclude a fictitious deal. It is complicated because, in football, there is no price list. Let’s not forget the history of football is littered, in one sense or another, with incredible mistakes in the transfer market: champions bought for next to nothing or flops valued very highly.”
Which brings us back to the same old question: how do you determine a player’s worth?
In 2018, a FIFA task force endorsed the use of an algorithm to “estimate transfer values and probabilities in a scientific way” as one of the possible “mechanisms to achieve transparency and objectivity” in deciding the value of a player.
Had the Super League been successfully launched back in April, the game’s financial structure would have changed with the introduction of a cash-based control system looking at salaries plus net player spend. For now, however, it remains the same as always. And it is a “sick” and unhealthy system, according to Turin’s public prosecutors.
John Elkann, president of Juventus’ majority shareholder EXOR, reassured: “In the ongoing investigation, the club is co-operating with investigators and trusts that light will be shed on all aspects under investigation. I am confident in the work of the magistrature. Juventus has a new board of directors, a new coach, who together with the vice-president and president, are dealing with problems on and off the pitch. Every club goes through difficult moments. It is important to face them. This is what is happening at Juventus.
“I’m convinced the future will be as important as the past. It’s a great club and all the conditions are in place. By facing difficulties, you get stronger.”
The Prisma case continues and a sense of trepidation has descended on the rest of the Italian league.
The possibility of further investigations being opened into other clubs’ affairs cannot be ruled out.
By James Horncastle Dec 2, 2021
Last week, the public prosecutor’s office in Turin issued a warrant to search premises belonging to Juventus as part of an investigation entitled Prisma.
Agents from the Guardia di Finanza — the police force responsible for investigating financial affairs in Italy — were authorised to pay a visit to the club’s training grounds in Continassa and Vinovo as well as offices in Turin and Milan.
Chairman Andrea Agnelli, vice-president Pavel Nedved and chief financial officer Stefano Cerrato were placed under investigation for alleged false accounting, false company reporting and billing for non-existent transactions, as were three other executives who have since left the club — among them former chief football officer Fabio Paratici, who joined Tottenham Hotspur as managing director of football in the summer.
The news comes a month after La Repubblica reported that Covisoc, the watchdog supervising football in Italy, had passed on a report to Giuseppe Chine, the prosecutor in charge of the Italian Football Federation’s disciplinary commission, highlighting 62 transfers from the last two years. Chine was invited to take a closer look at the activity and consider whether the transaction fees were inflated or not.
Juventus were not the only club to feature on the list. Thirteen moves featuring Parma caught Covisoc’s attention, as did Napoli’s acquisition of Lille striker Victor Osimhen in the summer of 2020 for a club-record €71.25 million.
Four Napoli players moved the other way to join the French club in a package worth €20.1 million. The only one of note was Orestis Karnezis, a now 36-year-old former Greece international goalkeeper who has made a single appearance for Lille, against fourth division Gazelec Ajaccio back in March in an early round of the Coupe de France. Claudio Manzi, Ciro Palmieri and Luigi Liguori, the other three, never played for Lille and are all back in Italy already, turning out for lower-leagues sides Turris, Nocerina and Frattese.
Napoli’s owner Aurelio De Laurentiis has told the New York Times he is not concerned by the probe.
Napoli’s €71.25 million move for Osimhen caught Covisoc’s attention (Photo: Jonathan Moscrop/Getty Images)
Juventus’ name was the one to feature most on Covisoc’s list, though. All told, 42 of the 62 deals flagged up to Chine involved them.
To understand the volume, it is helpful to consider the context.
After Italy failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup finals, Juventus were the only club to act on the Italian federation’s decision to allow top-flight teams to enter an under-23s squad in the domestic third division. The intention was to help bridge the gap between youth level and first-team football in Italy by giving young players the chance to play professional men’s football earlier.
Juventus have cited Alvaro Morata’s experience at Real Madrid as an example to follow. Three years playing in Spain’s lower leagues with Castilla, the Bernabeu giants’ B team, against wily old pros readied the striker for competition at the highest level far better than going up against players his own age on training grounds up and down Spain.
Starting an under-23 team was a huge undertaking for Juventus — comparable to a Premier League team simultaneously running a club playing in League One.
Thirty-six of the 42 Juventus moves arousing Covisoc’s curiosity involve footballers you’ve probably never heard of who play for either their under-23s or even younger age groups. For instance, the swaps of Matheus Pereira for Barcelona’s Spain Under-19 international Alejandro Marques and Pablo Moreno for Manchester City’s Portugal Under-19 international Felix Correia in 2020 did not make the same headlines as more famous part-exchange deals between the same clubs such as the Arthur Melo-Miralem Pjanic trade in that summer window or the Danilo-Joao Cancelo one a year earlier.
Barcelona declined to comment when approached by The Athletic. It is understood Manchester City are not concerned by the report and believe the values in those deals concerning them will hold up to scrutiny.
As a publicly-traded company on the Euronext stock exchange in Milan, Juventus disclosed they are already subject to an inspection by CONSOB, the regulator of the Italian securities market, over “revenues from players’ registration rights”. On Saturday, the club confirmed they are also co-operating with investigators from Turin’s public prosecutor’s office. Paratici’s successor Federico Cherubini, who is not under investigation, was reportedly interviewed for nine hours over the weekend as a person informed of the facts.
In the 12-page search warrant, it emerges prosecutors are seeking to establish whether or not the information in financial statements, reports or other corporate communications over a three-year period covering 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2020-21 is correct, specifically as it relates to the €282 million in income from the management of players’ rights deriving from plusvalenze — that is, capital gains — from player exchanges. For clarity, football players are intangible assets on a club’s balance sheet so a plusvalenza is the positive difference between the sale value of a player and value of acquisition, net of amortisation and any writedowns. It is legitimate under accounting rules.
Public prosecutors in Turin are scrutinising three types of transaction.
One is the “mirror operation”, the like-for-like trades such as the one involving Italy youth international Franco Tongya and Marseille striker Marley Ake last January, with the value of one player “mirroring” the other at €8 million.
Then there’s the aforementioned Pereira-Marques swap, which is cited as one of the numerous operations involving young players that, in the prosecutor’s opinion, is “fuori range” — not in line — with the valuation of players turning out in the lower leagues, as they were at the time for Juventus Under-23s and Barcelona B respectively.
Third is the trade for Genoa’s talented teenage midfielder Nicolo Rovella — who, as detailed in the original terms of the agreement, is now back there on loan — after Juventus signed him for €18 million in January, with Manolo Portanova (€10 million) and Elia Petrelli (€8 million) going the other way. The Rovella deal stood out because his contract with Genoa was due to expire in June, only for the player to sign an extension with them before the deal with Juventus was struck.
A spokesperson for 777 Partners, Genoa’s new owners who completed a takeover of the club in September, told The Athletic: “We will collaborate if anybody calls us, but as of now we are not aware of any investigations where Genoa is directly a party. We were not aware of any of this until now, to be clear.”
Rovella is on loan back at Genoa after a January move to Juventus (Photo: Ettore Griffoni/LiveMedia/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The full transcripts of wiretaps carried out over three months during the last summer transfer window are under seal but unattributed snippets feature in the warrant and have opened up new lines of inquiry.
One relates to the Cristian Romero deal with Atalanta and an intercept citing a “non-federal obligation.” Juventus signed Romero from Genoa for €26 million in 2019. He was then sent on a two-year loan to Atalanta in a deal including a €16 million option to buy which the Bergamo club activated this summer, just prior to his sale to Tottenham.
Atalanta’s owner Antonio Percassi told La Gazzetta dello Sport: “I’ve asked my (executives), ‘Are we OK?’ They told me, ‘Yes.’ I have nothing else to add.”
The other regards the contractual relationship between Cristiano Ronaldo and Juventus. Ronaldo himself, now at Manchester United, is not under investigation.
In a statement on Saturday, Juventus said: “The company is co-operating with the investigators and with CONSOB and trusts it will clarify any aspect of interest to it, as it believes to have acted in compliance with the laws and regulations governing the preparation of financial reports, in accordance with accounting principles and in line with the international practice in the football industry and market conditions.”
A spokesperson from Parma, who have been taken over by new ownership since the 13 transfers listed in the report were made, said: “We are aware of the transactions and the list you referenced. We are co-operating with investigators and cannot comment further at this time.”
The Athletic has contacted Marseille and Lille for comment.
This is not the first time plusvalenze have been scrutinised in Italy.
Chievo were docked three points in 2018 and fined €200,000. Their owner Luca Campedelli was handed a three-month ban.
Reaching even further back, public prosecutors in Milan opened an investigation in 2008 into swaps between AC Milan and neighbours Inter four years earlier. Both were acquitted in the criminal court and agreed to a €90,000 fine before a federation tribunal.
Reflecting on the case in La Stampa, Milan’s legal counsel at the time, Leandro Cantamessa, said: “I would like to say that the capital gain in itself is a beneficial concept for a football club. You have to fight it when it becomes a toxic phenomenon. But the problem is always the same: it is very difficult to prove that the parties knowingly wanted to conclude a fictitious deal. It is complicated because, in football, there is no price list. Let’s not forget the history of football is littered, in one sense or another, with incredible mistakes in the transfer market: champions bought for next to nothing or flops valued very highly.”
Which brings us back to the same old question: how do you determine a player’s worth?
In 2018, a FIFA task force endorsed the use of an algorithm to “estimate transfer values and probabilities in a scientific way” as one of the possible “mechanisms to achieve transparency and objectivity” in deciding the value of a player.
Had the Super League been successfully launched back in April, the game’s financial structure would have changed with the introduction of a cash-based control system looking at salaries plus net player spend. For now, however, it remains the same as always. And it is a “sick” and unhealthy system, according to Turin’s public prosecutors.
John Elkann, president of Juventus’ majority shareholder EXOR, reassured: “In the ongoing investigation, the club is co-operating with investigators and trusts that light will be shed on all aspects under investigation. I am confident in the work of the magistrature. Juventus has a new board of directors, a new coach, who together with the vice-president and president, are dealing with problems on and off the pitch. Every club goes through difficult moments. It is important to face them. This is what is happening at Juventus.
“I’m convinced the future will be as important as the past. It’s a great club and all the conditions are in place. By facing difficulties, you get stronger.”
The Prisma case continues and a sense of trepidation has descended on the rest of the Italian league.
The possibility of further investigations being opened into other clubs’ affairs cannot be ruled out.
