Juventus and Adrien Rabot are currently doing better than expected: against Lisbon, Turin made it into the semi-finals of the Europa League and moved up to third place in the league.
Photo: imago/Pedro Fiuza
This Thursday will go down in the 126-year history of Juventus Turin: Within a few hours, the club regained 15 points in the Italian championship and thus climbed five places in the table to third place. However, the danger of renewed disciplinary sanctions is not over. And the legal wrangling threatens to completely confuse the Serie A battle for Champions League spots – at a time when Italy’s club football is a force in Europe. This also includes Juve: On Thursday evening, Turin’s footballers reached the semi-finals of the Europa League against Sporting Lisbon.
Juve’s legal team was responsible for one success. The Collegio di Garanzia, the highest body of Italian sports justice, awarded Juventus the 15 points that the club had been deducted by the FIGC sports tribunal in January. The trigger was investigations by the public prosecutor’s office in Turin, which had uncovered inflated player ratings in Juventus transfer deals. So the revenue side was embellished.
“There is new evidence that Juventus’ behavior falsified the championship in several seasons. The club had great financial losses. But instead of balancing them out of their own pockets, fictitious increases in value were booked, which allowed real money to be put on the transfer market and players to be bought,” said prosecutor Giuseppe Chinè, explaining his demand for points to be deducted at the time. Clubs that didn’t embellish losses and sold their most valuable players to balance their balance sheets were at a disadvantage, Chinè argued. Incidentally, he only demanded a nine-point deduction, the court increased it to 15. Juventus appealed against this – and was able to achieve at least a partial success. The Court of Appeal of CONI, Italy’s National Olympic Committee, ruled that the number of points deducted must be renegotiated. It referred the case back to the arbitration board of the football association.
In the matter at least the Olympic judges agreed with their colleagues from the football judiciary. “The procedure at the association was correct. Only the amount of the penalty has to be reassessed,” said Ugo Taucer, investigating judge at Coni. This affects the club’s point deduction, but also bans for some of the accused managers. However, the bans for the four most important defendants were confirmed: Ex-President Andrea Agnelli, the former sports directors Fabio Paratici and Federico Cherubini and the former managing director Maurizio Arrivabene.
Paratici is now with Tottenham FC in the Premier League. Because the verdict against him has now been confirmed in the last instance, he took his hat off there too. This indicates that Juventus should not emerge completely unscathed from the process. It is realistic that the nine points originally requested will be deducted.
The court now has 30 days to give its verdict. Only then can a date for the new procedure be set. This threatens a horror scenario for Serie A: by the end of the championship it could be unclear who will qualify for the Champions League and who will not. It is also possible to postpone the point deduction to the new season.
In the Juventus camp, however, the decision was celebrated as a success. “It’s a nice day for us,” coach Massimiliano Allegri laughed at the cameras. He was referring to both the legal game and the 1-1 draw with Sporting Lisbon, which paved the way for his club to reach the semi-finals of the Europa League. “For us it was always 59 points, the ones we got on the pitch,” he said briskly. He was less bold in evaluating the performance against Lisbon. “We were lucky in the final phase when the opponent still had chances,” he commented on the course of the game. Sevilla FC are waiting in the semi-finals – “a difficult opponent”, as Allegri rightly said.
Because the team is in a sporting crisis. There is no game idea. Juventus is dependent on individual actions from Argentina’s world champion Angel di Maria or France’s former world champion Adrien Rabiot. Recently there were two defeats in the championship. As a result, even the provisionally awarded 15 points were only enough to jump from eighth place to third. The deficit to leaders Napoli is already 16 points. So the title is hardly at stake this season. God knows the club cannot hope for a gift of more points. There may even be trouble. On the one hand, the Napoli Maradona Association has been accredited as a joint plaintiff in the proceedings concerning the falsified balance sheets. She demands that Juventus be stripped of the 2019 championship title. The SSC Napoli was then second. That’s more of a coup for the gallery, though.
More threatening for the old lady is that the football association FIGC has just completed preliminary investigations into a new procedure. This is about incorrect information about player salaries in the balance sheets. With this means, the output page was artificially reduced. Again, the evidence comes from the criminal justice process that Juventus are also facing. There, the former management team around the industrial scion Agnelli is even threatened with imprisonment.
The new procedure for the salaries of football professionals could now override the old one for the manipulated ratings of players in transfers. Juventus have to reckon with a point deduction here too. Whether both procedures can be completed before the end of the season is questionable.
There is great uncertainty in the battle for the Champions League places in the coming season. The only good thing for the Italian clubs is that four of them still have a chance to qualify for the group stage of the Champions League via European competitions. Juventus and AS Roma are in the semi-finals of the Europa League – Roma meet Bayer Leverkusen. The two Milan clubs AC and Inter even determine the one finalist in the Champions League in a derby, who then has to deal with Real Madrid or Manchester City.
Italy’s football is a power in Europe in particular. But at home the hut is on fire. Investigations are also underway against other clubs for excessive player ratings, especially in the transfer business with Juventus. The Serie A clubs FC Bologna, Sampdoria Genoa, Udinese Calcio, Atalanta Bergamo and Sassuolo Calcio as well as second division Cagliari Calcio are affected here. The proceedings against them are to be conducted in the next season.
