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The Serie B football championship kicked off last weekend with two teams fewer than the twenty expected: Reggina, seventh-placed last season but then excluded due to tax defaults, and Lecco, promoted as winners of the Serie playoffs C who, however, cannot play yet due to issues related to his stadium.
These two teams will know for sure if and where they will play this season only on 29 August, the date on which their cases will be evaluated by the Council of State, the second-level body of administrative justice. It’s a rather absurd situation for a professional league that has been working for some time to give itself a more modern and attractive image, yet it will last for at least another week: in the meantime another day will be played and there will be other games to recover.
If in the worst case both are excluded, their place in Serie B will have to be awarded to two other teams, namely Brescia and Perugia, the best of the four relegated to Serie C last season. This situation therefore involves four teams from two different leagues, who are training these days without knowing exactly for what. Whatever the final outcome, they will have to adapt their squads to the championship in which they will be able to register after the maximum time, with the opponents already complete and few players left available to reinforce themselves. In any case, their season will be very complicated.
In June, Lecco had been promoted to Serie B after fifty years. Once promoted, his management had only a few hours to find a stadium in which to play. In fact, that of Lecco was not up to standard and was also too small: the rules of the Serie B championship impose a minimum of 5,500 seats for spectators, while Rigamonti Ceppi has fewer than 5 thousand. The club had laboriously found a solution, even if it was out of time, indicating the Euganeo stadium in Padua – over 220 kilometers away but apparently the only one available – as the venue for its home games. Even for the concession of the Padua stadium, however, some authorizations were missing: for this reason the club was unable to submit a complete registration application to Serie B within the scheduled time, and this complicated its position.
Reggina, on the other hand, had already been penalized by 5 points last season for tax defaults. However, at the end of the season, the club communicated that it had presented all the documents required for registration by the deadline of 20 June, after having declared its balance sheets restored thanks to a sentence by the court of Reggio Calabria, to which it had turned for have the recovery plan approved. Meanwhile, the chairman and board of directors have resigned, ownership has put the team up for sale and manager Filippo Inzaghi has left his post.
In mid-July, CONI’s Board of Guarantee, which is the last level of sports justice, had expressed its opinion by excluding Lecco and Reggina from the Serie B championship and readmitting Brescia and Perugia in their places. However, Lecco and Reggina had turned to ordinary justice, presenting an appeal to the Regional Administrative Court (TAR), which in early August had accepted the one presented by Lecco and rejected that of Reggina. In the meantime, the president of Serie B, Mauro Balata, had clarified that the championship would not wait for the outcome of the appeals: «The calendar starts as expected, we established it. Moving the dates would have been a problem », he said.
Lecco’s position has therefore been frozen: the Lombard team appears in the official Serie B standings but cannot play yet. These days she is playing some preparation friendlies and is also completing the squad with the purchase of players, given that she is quite sure of being admitted definitively. The place left by Reggina is instead indicated with an “X” and there is not much optimism in Reggio Calabria. For the official compositions of the Serie B and Serie C championships (the latter will start on 3 September) we will have to wait for the pronouncement of the Council of State.
– Read also: How Genoa is relaunched
2023-08-23 14:58:08
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