Izuchukwu OkosiItaly’s football association (FIGC) on Friday announced that Juventus has received a 15-point deduction as a result of an inquiry into the team’s past transfer transactions.
The Serie A giants were charged with manipulating their financial statements to make fictitious benefits from club transfers.
The ‘Old Lady’ were in 3rd position prior to the penalty, which will now move them down to 10th on the log.
The punishment follows the resignation in November of the club’s board of directors, which included president Andrea Agnelli and vice-president Pavel Nedved who was an iconic player at the Turin club.
Juventus has vehemently denied any wrongdoing and is planning to challenge the ruling.
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In response to the verdict, the club’s lawyers said:
“We are waiting to read carefully the reasons for filing.”
The statement further added: “We believe that this is also a blatant injustice towards millions of enthusiasts, who we trust will soon be remedied in the next degree of judgement.”
The FIGC has also hit Agnelli and the club’s former chief executive Maurizio Arrivabene with two-year bans.
The club’s former sports director Fabio Paratici, now Tottenham’s managing director of football, has also been banned for 30 months.
In a probe that began in April 2022, the Turin-based team was first found not guilty.
And in December 2022, the probe was restarted and focused on “revenues from player registration rights” between 2019 and 2021.
Juventus had been enenmeshed in similar situations and was once relegated to the Serie B but remarkably, most of the star players at the club remained loyal and went through the ignominy of going down a step down.
The club was promoted after just one season in the lower rungs of the football pyramid.
Izuchukwu Okosi is a Nigerian sports and entertainment journalist with two decades of experience in the media industry having begun his media journey in 2002 as an intern at Mundial Sports International (MSI) and Africa Independent Television (AIT), owners of Daar Communications Plc.
In October 2004, Okosi joined Complete Communications Limited, publishers of Complete Sports newspaper and Complete Football magazine as a reporter and later script writer for the Complete Sports studio.
He worked there for 13 years until October 2017.
Okosi also worked various times as Correspondent, Content creator and Editor at Sports Market International Magazine, Opera News, All Nigeria Soccer Media and Iconic Media Watch.
He also undertook freelance writing gigs for some local and international organizations.
Okosi is a member of the Actors Guild of Nigeria (AGN), Association of Movie Producers (AMP), Association of Voiceover Artistes of Nigeria (AVOA), Sports Writers Association of Nigeria (SWAN) and Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ).
He has been part of cast in some Nollywood movies and radio dramas including Blood Money 2, Scores To Settle, Dead End 2, Another Campus Tale and Battle Line.
Aside mainstream media and the entertainment industry, he has interests in scouting/unearthing of talents in the sports and creative sectors, exports business and property development.
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