“Juventus to ask for plea bargain in Federal Court hearing for salary maneuvers and irregular relationships”

Anticipated hearing before the Federal Court tomorrow: Juventus has decided to ask for a plea bargainfor the second line of investigation, the one concerning salary maneuvers, exchanges with other clubs and “irregular” relationships with agents, for which she should have gone to trial on June 15th. In theory, it was the trend that worried the most: the club – already punished with 10 penalty points for capital gains – is challenged for direct and objective responsibility for the behavior of eight of its managers, also referred for article 4, the lack of loyalty: Andrea Agnelli, Pavel Nedved, Fabio Paratici, Federico Cherubini, Giovanni Manna, Paolo Morganti, Stefano Braghin and Cesare Gabasio.

The club will ask to be punished only with a maximum fine, in exchange for the waiver of any type of appeal on the first line, that of capital gains, both before the guarantee college and before the TAR. The prosecutor Giuseppe Chiné – with whom the interlocutions have already taken place – will have to express his consent, then the Court will withdraw to decide the correctness of the legal procedure and the adequacy of the sentence. Will it be enough? The alternative will be to add a «mild» points penalty.

If the plea agreement had been attempted before the referral, it would have had to have the approval of the federal president (and the “discount” would have been half the sentence, which however is currently difficult to quantify), at this stage, however, with the referrals already arrived, the agreement (maximum of a third discount) is only between defense and prosecution, with the final decision of the Court. But if we have gone this far, it is easy to think that an agreement will be found.

The goal of the Juventus club is to close any dispute here, without repercussions on the next championship and keep the seventh place: therefore at most he could accept two additional penalty points (given that Juventus have 59 points and Turin and Fiorentina 53): in this way, if the exclusion of UEFA for a year from the Cups arrives, as is probable, Juventus would skip the Conference League. A sacrifice judged by the new company, led by the president Gianluca Ferrero, not too great. If he does not qualify for any competition, however, UEFA would trigger the exclusion the first time useful. The legal technicality that allows the agreement is to put all the irregularities “continuously”, that is to say that they are all within a single “criminal design”.

The words of Francesco Calvo were therefore revealing, director of the sports area (according to one of the “ambassadors” with the FIGC), in the pre-match match against Milan: “We believe we have been unfairly punished, but it’s now water under the bridge”. Maybe Juve are really about to move on.