Juventus has experienced the blackest day of its last decade. Due to its false system of capital gains, the Court of Appeal of the Football Federation has penalized the Vecchia Signora with 15 points in the classification, six more than the penalty requested by the prosecutor. All its leaders have also been harshly sentenced with disqualification sentences: The maximum for the sports director Fabio Paratici (today at Tottenham), and the minimum to the club’s manager Pavel Nedved. For Andrea Agnelli, president until recently, two years of sanction.
Thus, the sports courts deal a very hard blow to Juventus, from a sporting, economic and image point of view. The classification has changed immediately: The Juventus drops from third to tenth position. Thus, he moves away from the Champions League, which would have meant an income of 60 million euros, just for the fact of qualifying. It is a damage to the staggering economy of the club, which registered a liability of 238 million euros, in its balance sheet on June 30. In fact, some analysts believe that the setback marks the end of Juventus’ era of extraordinary power.
The sentence is produced by the so-called case of fictitious capital gains in the exchange or sale of soccer players, that is, capital gains were falsified to reduce losses in their balance sheets. Juventus abused this fiscal mechanism, with 22 operations, to falsify their accounts and give oxygen and a better image to their balance sheets. False capital gains with fictitious market values set by the clubs, when buying and selling players, is a fairly common practice to make accounting more presentable in times of crisis. Not only has Juventus done it. Any exchange of footballers involves two companies, sometimes more. These are operations that almost always benefit the clubs that make the exchange.
In addition to Juventus, eight other teams were implicated in the accusations of false capital gains: Sampdoria, Empoli, Genoa, Parma, Pisa, Pescara, Pro Vercelli and Novara. But only the Vecchia Signora has been condemned, in the Federal Court of Appeal. However, in the judgment of the first degree court, nine months ago, Juventus was acquitted. Hence, the club’s lawyers consider that there has been an “obvious injustice due to the disparity of treatment” in relation to other teams. Obviously, the reasons for the sentence remain to be known, which will be made public within ten days. Once read, the Juventus lawyers will appeal to the Sports Guarantee Association.
Why is Juventus the only one sanctioned?
Why the disparity of treatment to Juventus? There is only one explanation possible: In reality, Juventus would have been made to pay for everything behind the judicial investigation called Prisma, opened by the Turin prosecutor’s office, with the accusation of false accounting in the company’s balance sheet. This complaint led to the resignation of its president, Andrea Agnelli, and his board of directors, at the end of last November.
The judges have a series of telephone interceptions to the directors of Juventus, in which, unlike the rest of the clubs, there are “self-accusing statements”, according to the magistrates, such as this phrase from an executive: “To make the capital gains from Pjanic, you paid Arthur 75 million”, in reference to the exchange with FC Barcelona of the Bosnian player for Pjanic for the Brazilian Arthur, an operation that also favored the accounts of the Catalan club. In another exchange, that of Cancelo for Danilo, between Juventus and Manchester City, the Turin team achieved a capital gain of around 30 million euros.
More trouble and more sanctions
The nightmare for the people of Turin does not end with this sentence. Based on the Prisma investigation, the prosecution has opened another important section under the name “salary maneuver”, which could cost Juventus new and harsh sanctions The club is challenged by a controversial use of private agreements to cut player salaries , during the Covid period, with false communications aimed at the transfer market. According to the prosecution, the players did not waive four monthly payments, as the club officially announced, reporting a saving of 90 million, but rather the waiver was for a single monthly payment. And here the famous “Ronaldo letter” comes into play. This is a private agreement between the player and the club for the deferred payment of 19.6 million euros, as a residual debt that Juve had accrued with the Portuguese before his transfer to Manchester United. A debt that, according to the prosecution, would never have been accounted for in the budget.
It should be noted that Juventus is a company listed on the Milan Stock Exchange. Therefore, their accounts are subject to the rules of the CONSOB (National Society and Stock Market Commission), which requires transparency and not giving false information to the market.
