Soccer giants Juventus were on Friday night demoted to Italy's second division along with Lazio of Rome and Fiorentina and stripped of its last two league titles over a major match-fixing scheme.
Rome's sports tribunal judges also inflicted a 44-point penalty on AC Milan, meaning the club will be prevented from taking part in next year's European tournaments and will have to start the next Serie A season with a 15 point penalty.
Juventus, the club most heavily involved in the scandal, loses last season's and this season's league titles and was handed a 30 point penalty. Lazio and Fiorentina will start the next season in Serie B with a 7 point and 12 point penalty respectively.
PHOTO: EPA
Judges also convicted a number of club managers as well as referees and Italian Football Federation officials. The main man in the affair, former Juve director Luciano Moggi, was banned from soccer for five years.
The sentence, though more lenient than what prosecutors had asked for, was set to revolutionize Italian soccer for years to come.
It came just five days after Italy's World Cup victory and was likely to seriously damage Italy's chances of hosting the European Championships in 2012.
Juventus, which is considered Europe's fourth-richest club, will miss out on receipts from their Champions League appearances -- estimated at around 50 million Swiss francs (US$40.5 million) -- as well as lucrative television and sponsorship deals worth hundreds of millions of euros.
Moreover, the 30-point penalty means the Turin club will face a major challenge trying to return to Serie A. Juventus had never before been relegated in their 108-year-old history.
The verdict was also expected to spark an exodus of star players as the relegated clubs will find it difficult to honor their expensive contracts.
Juventus alone had no less than eight players taking part in Sunday's World Cup final, five for Italy and three for France.
In all, 13 of the 23 players who formed part of Italy's World Cup squad belonged to clubs involved in the scandal.
Among those tipped to leave are Juve's Fabio Cannavaro, Gianluca Zambrotta and Gianluigi Buffon, Fiorentina top striker Luca Toni and possibly also Milan's Andrea Pirlo, Gennaro Gattuso, Alessandro Nesta and Brazilian ace Kaka.
Top clubs like Chelsea, Real Madrid and Manchester United are all expected to seek their services in the coming season.
All of the match-fixing allegations, which revolve around a series of wiretapped conversations involving club managers and referee selectors, date back to the 2004-2005 season.
Moggi and Juve chief executive Antonio Giraudo, who have both resigned over the issue together with the whole club board, were accused of creating a powerful and vast organization designed to control the selection of referees assigned to the team's matches.
According to judges, Moggi imposed his choices on referee selectors Paolo Bergamo and Pierluigi Pairetto. In return, Moggi promised to foster the career of obliging referees like Massimo De Santis thanks to his connections within the FIGC.
Fiorentina owners Diego and Andrea Della Valle were accused of agreeing to submit to the so-called Moggi system to avoid relegation and of fixing five key Serie A matches.
Lazio, which like Fiorentina also risked relegation during the same season, were similarly accused of buckling under Moggi's pervasive influence. According to judges, owner Claudio Lotito obtained favorable referees for four of its Serie A games.
Milan were found guilty of entertaining unsavory relations through manager Leonardo Meani, which led to the help of match officials in at least one game.
Some politicians had called for an amnesty in view of Italy's World Cup victory, but judges ignored their requests.
A total of 25 people, including club managers, soccer federation officials and referees, were indicted on charges of sporting fraud and unfair behavior.
Juventus was the only club to admit to unsportsmanlike behavior by contacting refereeing officials but denied all allegations of actual match-fixing.
Convicted clubs now have three days to appeal the verdict, with a final decision due before July 25, the day Italy must register its clubs to take part in European events at the ruling body UEFA.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier