Juventus Penalty: How the Italian League Turned into a Scene of Scandals
Sometimes the history of Italian football seems like a constant stream of scandals and match-fixing cases punctuated by football matches. Of the five major leagues, no other country has produced so many exciting titles throughout its history. The "Totonero" scandal in 1986, the relegation of Genoa in 2005 to manipulate the results, then "Calciopoli" one year later, and then the manipulation of the results again in 2011 in the case of Giuseppe Signori, the former captain of Lazio, at the head of its accusers, and in 2015 Catania repeats the act Genoa itself and falls to the third degree for the same reason.
The list is really long, so I made do with the titles from the last 40 years only.
An Egg and a Chicken
You can easily see that the pace of revelations of scandals is accelerating with the advancement of technology. With the current case in which Juventus occupies the forefront, the number of scandals that came to light in the last decade is twice as many as those we discovered in the previous decade.
Of course, this raises an important question without a real answer: Does the abundance of cases and scandals express the corruption of Italian football as an extreme anomaly compared to the rest of Europe or does it simply express the competence of the Italian judiciary compared to its counterparts? In another meaning; Is what is happening in Italy the same as what is happening in the rest of Europe, with the only difference being the degree of efficiency in conspiring?
As we mentioned above, this is an unanswered question, simply because the reference is absent here, and paradoxically, the absence of reference was the same reason that prompted Giuseppe Cini, the Italian Football Association's prosecutor, to dig into Juventus' files in particular.
The story began early last year when Cheney decided to search the files of some deals that took place in the Italian league in recent years, involving 11 clubs and 59 administrators in these clubs, in what was later known as the “Plusvalenze” case, which is literally translated into capital gains, added or amplified. The reason for naming is understandable, of course; These deals, most of which involved exchanging players between these clubs, were overvalued from Cheney's point of view.
In general, this is a method used by many clubs to fill their financial gaps, and the most famous example of this was the exchange deal between Barcelona and Juventus, according to which the Brazilian Artur Milo moved to the latter in exchange for Bosnian Miralem Pjanic and 16 million euros. This is the summary of the deal, but what actually happened is that Barcelona sold Artur for 76 million euros on the last days of closing the fiscal year to balance his accounts, then bought Pjanic at the opening of the new fiscal year for 60 million euros.
Cheney's problem this time was purely Italian, and all fingers were pointing to one club leading the orchestra of shady Italian deals, and the calculation is simple; Juventus was a party to about two-thirds of these deals (60%), and thus the old lady became the number one suspect in the case.
Cheney conducted his investigations and collected as much evidence as he could, then submitted it to the Italian court, and in April 2021, the court acquitted the defendants for lack of evidence.
The main reason for the acquittal was the absence of a reference to determine the “appropriate” prices for these players’ contracts, and the only evidence for this is Cheney’s use of the German “Transfermarkt” website to demonstrate price inflation, a site that provides approximate values for players based on several factors, some of which are objective and some of which are not, and is not endorsed by any official or governing body.
Local and International
Cheney lost his case, then appealed, then lost the appeal, and at that time everyone thought that the case had been buried forever, but then a new independent investigation arose, led by the Public Prosecutor in Turin, aimed at auditing Juventus' financial accounts in the past three years, in what was known as the "Prisma Case", at which point Cheney asked the investigators to look at the evidence they had collected.
Once again, the Italian media and judiciary used a metaphor for "Prisma", which means prism in Italian; The surface through which the bright white light passes to break down into its colour components and reveal its secrets. Metaphor is always present here.
The important thing is that the new evidence helped Cheney go to the court judges again with documents tempting them to open the investigation again, and it was, and in his recommendation, Cheney demanded the court to deduct 9 points from Juventus in the current season, and to punish Andrea Agnelli, the former president of Juventus, by suspending him for 16 months. Also, the current director of football current, Federico Cherubini, for ten months, and his predecessor Fabio Paratici, the current manager of Tottenham, for ten months and ten days.
Not only did the court implement Cheney's recommendations, but it increased the point deduction and extended the suspension, to 15 points, two years for Agnelli, and 30 months for Paratici. Cheney is currently seeking to address UEFA and FIFA to extend the latter's suspension to an international scope that includes England and is not satisfied with the Italian League.
The problem here is that even those deals that did not witness the exchange of players were suspicious in turn. Imagine, for example, that between the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 seasons, Juventus obtained approximately 70 million euros from the sales deals of Riccardo Orsolini, Stefano Storaro, Emil Audero and Rolando Mandragora. Haven't you heard of them before? Well, that's what prompted Cheney to investigate in the first place.
What made matters worse was that this quartet was sold to almost broke clubs, which are Bologna, Genoa, Sampdoria, and Udinese, respectively. Imagine that Sampdoria can spend 20 million euros on Juventus' fourth goalkeeper, for example, then imagine that this goalkeeper became the club's most expensive deal in its entire history once he was signed.
This is what happened with Mandragora in Udinese and Orsolini in Bologna, and before signing with Andrea Pinamonti the summer before last, Storaro was also the most expensive Genoa deal in its history, meaning that even regardless of the exchange deals, the pattern was clear; There are poor clubs that spend more money than they can to sign players that Juventus want to get rid of, and all this was done during and after the inclusion of Cristiano Ronaldo from Real Madrid for a record amount of 117 million euros.
Some press reports at the time stated that the then sports director, Giuseppe Marotta, objected to the signing of Cristiano, and it is what
caused his resignation and his departure to Inter.
The scary part is that this isn't the end as we will see in the second part of this two-parter series, the worst is still yet to come.