April 16, (THEWILL) – On Friday, some of Italy’s top football figures heaved a sigh of relief, when the country’s football federation acquitted everyone charged in a tribunal over shady transfer practices.
Andrea Agnelli and Aurelio De Laurentiis, the presidents of Juventus and Napoli, were among 61 people brought before the FIGC’s tribunal for their alleged roles in inflated transfer valuations intended to artificially increase clubs’ financial sheets.
Agnelli was facing a year-long penalty, and prosecutors had also requested bans for a number of Juve directors. De Laurentiis, his wife, and two of his children were looking at lengthy bans.
Their clubs, two of Italy’s biggest, went before the judges with nine other teams from Serie A and the lower divisions.
The trial was closed to the public, but it apparently looked at 62 moves between 2019 and 2021, the majority of which involved Juve, but with the most expensive being Nigerian international Victor Osimhen’s €70 million move from Lille to Napoli.
That transfer was notable since it entailed the sale of four players for slightly over 20 million euros to Lille. Three of them never played for the French club and now play in the Italian second tier.
The defendants said there was no objective way to determine a player’s worth, and Napoli’s lawyer claimed that prosecutors had based their own valuations on data from popular website Transfermarkt.
The tribunal’s decision brings an end to what had been expected to be a protracted legal struggle with appeals, but it does not totally resolve the issue, as Juve is also being examined by criminal prosecutors in Turin for allegedly overstated capital profits between 2019 and 2021.
During that time, the club is suspected of giving investors fraudulent financial information and producing invoices for non-existent transactions.
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Jude Obafemi is a versatile senior Correspondent at THEWILL Newspapers, excelling in sourcing, researching, and delivering sports news stories for both print and digital publications.
