There are investigations against Juventus Turin for falsification of accounts – sport

There was a time when Andrea Agnelli was considered the restorer of Juventus Turin, the modernizer of the backward Calcio, and that sounds like a strange interpretation of history these days. It has the right name, a name like a dynastic fully comprehensive insurance.

The Agnellis, owners of Fiat, formerly something like the uncrowned royal family in post-monarchical Italy, always afforded the club with the self-image that a year without a championship title is a lost year – and that’s how they operated. No price seemed too high for the perpetual motion machine of glory. Andrea, son of Umberto Agnelli, became President of Juventus in 2010. You just pulled yourself out of the hole. Shame and shame still echoed Calciopoli after, the scandal surrounding the powerful manager Luciano Moggi and inglorious shoving. He cost the club the withdrawal of two championship titles and the forced relegation to Serie B.

What is in the room is not trivial for a company that is listed on the stock exchange

With Andrea Agnelli at the top, Juve has won nine out of ten possible championships so far, and twice made it to the final of the Champions League. Pretty good-looking everything. The inauguration of the new arena, the Juventus Stadium, also took place in his era, and this building was also in keeping with the renaissance.

When Agnelli brought Cristiano Ronaldo to Turin in 2018, they said to themselves that the crown of Europe could also be grasped, had to – with such a player. But now, a little more than three years after the transfer of the century, it is becoming apparent that the supposed coup could in truth have been the beginning of another crash. Juve reappears in all the wrong headlines.

In terms of sport, the Turin team are as weak as they have been in living memory, seventh place in the current season, although the former master coach has returned: Massimiliano “Max” Allegri, the walking epitome of result football. The competition from Milan, Naples and Bergamo no longer only plays the nicer football, but also the more productive one. But that is just the minor concern.

A decade after Agnelli came to power, Juve is actually threatened with forced relegation again, at least in theory, due to alleged massive trickery in accounting. In addition to the sporting justice system, the ordinary criminal justice system could then also be of great interest to the club. After all, it is about the suspicion of falsifying accounts, issuing false invoices, communicating incorrect numbers, and these are no trivialities for a company that is listed on the stock exchange.

The judiciary is investigating seven current and former club superiors and managers, including Andrea Agnelli, 45 years old, the old club icon Pavel Nedved and the former sports director Fabio Paratici, who is now working in the same position at Tottenham Hotspur. They are accused of having beautified the books for 2019, 2020 and 2021 – by a total of 282 million euros. Or to put it another way: Without these unreasonable straightening, which must be discussed in detail in a moment, the deficit in the balance sheets would have been much higher, which in turn might have called the European football association Uefa and the national FIGC on the scene.

Suddenly, the nameless were worth millions – overnight and just for the balance sheets

The affair that is now filling Italy’s gazettes is running under the slightly confusing assault Capital gain. This is the Italian word for capital gain, as it can be when transferring a player from one club to another. In principle, there is nothing disreputable about capital gains, it is like in many businesses: If you have good and completely ensnared staff in your card file, you can make good money from the sale of their services. The profit margin is particularly large if you have trained the footballers yourself, in your own youth academy. With a nice transfer proceeds, the investment is more than well-balanced.

But it is curious when players, from whom even very well-informed fans have never heard of and who have had their first inconspicuous experiences in the lower leagues, suddenly have a value of several million euros on the transfer market, sometimes even tens of millions – a lot In any case, more than had been budgeted for them internally over several contractual years. If they are then booked as grandiose sales, the financial position of the association improves in one fell swoop by high millions. The supervisory authority of the Italian Football Association, Covisoc, has noticed a number of such dubious transfer operations over the past three years. There were a total of 62, of which Juve was involved in 42. The Milan stock exchange regulator, the Italian central bank and the Turin public prosecutor’s office are also concerned with it.

Often times, businesses followed the same pattern. Club X then bought the rights to an unknown player from Club Y, and Club Y at the same time sold the rights of an equally unknown player from their own back rows for the exact same amount to Club X. This is called mirror operations. In truth, none flowed Euros, the realizable value was purely fictitious in each case. But in terms of bookkeeping, printed on patient paper, the transactions worked wonders. Or to put it another way: these weren’t capital gains, none Capital gains – they just looked like that. Nobody seemed to care about the sporting fate of the players involved. In most cases they disappeared with loan agreements in Series C or Series D. Your chances of making it after all are slim: You are now in the books with surreally high market values.

“I was just a token,” says Luigi Liguori. He’s now playing in Serie D.

One of them, 23-year-old striker Luigi Liguori from Naples, told the newspaper his story a few days ago The Republic. “I was just a token,” he said. “You burned me.” Liguori was part of the deal negotiated by SSC Napoli in the summer of 2020 when transferring Nigerian center forward Victor Osimhen from Lille OSC.

Osimhen is said to have cost the Neapolitans 71 million euros. 20 million of this came from the sale of Naples’ third goalkeeper, Orestis Karnezis, whose market value was still invested at five million despite his 36 years at the time. Liguori, who played for Fermana in the third Italian league, was once estimated briefly at four million, as was a comrade from common times in the offspring; another was worth seven million. “We have never been to Lille,” said Liguori, not even for the signing of the contracts. Liguori is now playing for Ercolense in Serie D.

So there should have been 42 such stores at Juve. Tomorrow traced them all, a cascade of mostly unknown names on two newspaper pages. the Gazzetta dello Sport also believes that they know that the investigators are examining a secret supplementary contract with Cristiano Ronaldo, one that is said to have allocated the Portuguese superstar even more money than was known – more than the gross amount of around 80 million euros a year. CR7 brought in a lot of money, of course, but the super salary and the super bonuses probably first urged the people of Turin to do sham deals in order to get the books in order anyway.

Open detailed view

Now, this inflated market value trick is not a new one, and it is not a purely Italian one either. But the Italian press regards it as an “Italian original” that has been copied abroad. Milan and Inter started with it in the early noughties. The clubs faced sports justice as they swapped players in a vortex of operations to perk up their bookkeeping. However, they were exonerated on the grounds that there were no objective criteria for the market value of a player. A few years ago, two clubs were punished for the first time for imitating the pattern: there was incriminating material from tapped phone calls against Chievo and Cesena. Chievo, the former fairytale team from a district of Verona, has meanwhile disappeared from the professional business, the club only has a youth department. Cesena plays in the series C.

Giorgio Chiellini is already preparing for the time after

Juventus Turin is a different house number. Your defense lawyer Giorgio Chiellini thinks the scandal story is being hyped “because it’s about us”. Chiellini, 37 years old, studied economics, graduating with a thesis on “The business model of Juventus FC in international comparison”. After his athletic retirement he will probably work in the management of Juve, sometimes he already manages himself as Leader on.

When it became known that the investigators had searched the offices of the association, the stock market price of Juventus plummeted: minus 17 percent. A capital increase of 400 million euros was just planned. Now one wonders whether, besides the Agnellis and their always lavish Exor cash register, who are responsible for 64 percent of the capital of Juventus, other major shareholders will also be involved in the increase in finances. Andrea Agnelli, it is said, has long since ceased to be controversial in the family. His prominent role in the rather awkward attempt to found a European super league also displeased many Juventini. If he did not have this name with the almost indestructible sound, that much can be said, he would not have been president of the venerable association for a long time.