Juventus defended itself this Thursday from the accusations about possible fictitious capital gains, for which the club’s senior officials are being investigatedquestioning the model with which the Italian Football Federation Prosecutor’s Office (FIGC) has set a fair price for players using the web portal Transfermarkt.
The FIGC Prosecutor’s Office accused several teams, from Serie A, B and C, last Tuesday of increasing the market value of the players to generate more income when transferring them and, according to the ‘Gazzetta dello Sport’, the body itself is using the German portal Transfermarkt to fix the fair price of the players and use it as a measure to calculate the alleged capital gains.
A strategy that, on this second day of judicial proceedings in Rome, and according to the same publication, Juventus has questioned to attack the Prosecutor’s Office using the statements of the person in charge of Transfermarkt in Germany, Martin Freudl.
“I spend part of my free time at home on my computer and then the football industry takes these assessments of mine seriously. It’s unreal, I’m a social worker, I do these things to Transfermarkt for fun, while the football industry moves millions. The contrast is crazy,” Freudl said in an interview with the Dutch outlet ‘Follow The Money’.
It is the second day of the judicial process on the ‘capital gains’ of players in which they are involved, in addition to Juventus, eleven teams and more than 60 managers. Among them, Naples, Sampdoria and Genoa, who also attended the Federal Court this morning.
The Prosecutor’s Office requested last Tuesday the suspension of their functions for several Juventus managers, including Pavel Nedved (eight months), Maurizio Arrivabene (eight months), Federico Cherubini (six months and 20 days) and former sports director Fabio Paratici ( 16 months and ten days). In addition, he claimed a fine of 800,000 euros for the Bianconero team. Also a disqualification for the president of Naples, Aurelio De Laurentiis, of 11 months and five days, as well as a financial sanction of 329,000 euros.
Teams like Empoli, from Serie A; Parma and Pisa, from Series B; o Pro Vercelli and Pescara, from Serie C, complete the list of those involved since, according to the Prosecutor’s Office, supposedly they also generated fictitious capital gains.