Juventus, Italy’s most powerful soccer club, will be forced to forfeit 15 Serie A points after an Italian court essentially found that it had rigged the finances related to transfer deals.
The point deduction will be applied to the current season, pending a potential appeal, and will be a crushing blow to Juve’s hopes of remaining among European soccer’s elite. It will take the Turin-based club from third place all the way down to joint-10th at the midway point of the season — just a few years after it won nine consecutive titles.
Italy’s soccer federation announced the point deduction Friday after prosecutors reopened the “plusvalenza” case. The term is Italian for “capital gains,” which is what Juventus allegedly made by inflating the values of outgoing players when they were traded away from the club.
Juve, which doubles as a publicly listed company, first attracted the scrutiny of the Italian government in or before 2021. CONSOB, the government authority responsible for regulating the stock exchange, probed dozens of transfer deals that, it suspected, had run afoul of either soccer’s financial rules or even criminal law.
Juventus wasn’t the only club investigated, but it was the primary one. All involved were acquitted in May, but the Italian soccer federation announced last month that a federal prosecutor had decided to appeal and re-take up the case.
A month later, on Friday, it announced the sanctions. In addition to the point deduction, Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli will be banned from Italian soccer for two years. Other executives involved were also suspended.
The Italian court responsible for the ruling will reportedly lay out its reasoning in 10 days. Juve will then have 30 days to appeal. It’s unclear whether the Serie A table would be modified while a potential appeal is ongoing.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
