Manchester City’s deal with Juventus for Joao Cancelo is being investigated by the FIGC as part of an investigation into the Serie A giants.
That’s according to Il Tempo, who say Juventus and Napoli’s ‘capital gains’ in recent years are being investigated by the Italian FA.
The newspaper reports that the accounts ‘have not been adding up’ for years, and now, thanks to the pandemic, the bubble has finally burst.
Every club around the world has lost money because of the virus, and this is seen on the balance sheets, which are also showing other discrepancies.
The biggest issue is the ‘exasperated way’ in which clubs will swap players, transfers that don’t actually see money change hands but millions registered on accounts like it has.
Juventus do these kind of deals on a yearly basis, but their accounts have been under investigation by CONSOB, the Italian public authority responsible for regulating the Italian financial markets, for the last year.
That has seen these swap deals brought into focus, particularly the bigger deals, which is where Manchester City come into it.
They did a ‘mega-exchange’ with Juventus in the summer of 2020 that saw Joao Cancelo and Pablo Moreno head to the Etihad for a total of €75m while Danilo and Felix Correia went the other way for €40m, generating a profit of €47.5m.
In these deals, the Covisoc investigation has noticed a ‘curious correspondence’ between the sum of the prices agreed for individual players with the newspaper citing an example that saw a player sold to Juve for €18m and the club then buying €18m of players but both clubs registering ‘double capital gain’.
Juventus have done this on several different occasions, and Covisoc, having learned of the investigation from Consob, have asked Juventus for ‘information on the matter’.
The ball is now in the hands of the FIGC Prosecutor’s Office, which has not yet opened any proceedings but is almost obligated to do so at this point as they look to crack down on what is considered a ‘dangerous phenomenon’.
Now, this is unlikely to affect Manchester City at any point, but it seems after dodging UEFA, they now find themselves tied up in another financial investigation elsewhere.
