At least for the upcoming season, Barcelona won’t be left out of the Champions League. UEFA has not officially informed the Catalan company of the decision on its participation in the next edition of Europe’s top competition, but the two inspectors charged with investigating by the governing body of European football have found no reason to punish the Catalans for doing so, according to club sources on Friday a so-called Negreira case.
The decision is a relief for the company, which had qualified first for the next Champions League by winning the league. The corruption scandal jeopardized Barca’s participation in the major European club competition – something not seen since the 2003/2004 season – and the corresponding revenue that was sorely needed for such a financially strapped club.
Aleksander Ceferin, UEFA President, had declared just over a month ago that the Negreira case was “one of the most serious” he had seen in football, although despite this fact he finally accepted that Barcelona participate in the Champions League The regulations allowed the European organization to ban the Barcelona branch for a year. Article 4.g of the UEFA Disciplinary Code states: “If UEFA, based on all the circumstances and the information available, comes to the conclusion to its fullest satisfaction that a club has been directly and/or indirectly involved since the entry into force of Article 50 ( 3) of the UEFA Statutes, ie from 27 April 2007, for any activity aimed at arranging or influencing the outcome of a match at national or international level, UEFA shall declare that the club concerned will not take part in the competition may. This ban is for one season only.”
According to legal sources familiar with the proceedings, the fact that the inspectors have not come up with a proposal that Barcelona should not participate in the next Champions League goes against the spirit for which the rule was created, which is to preserve the image and integrity of Barcelona of the competition without the need for final judgments in the ordinary judiciary. The mere fact of having paid €7.3 million to the former vice-president of the Technical Committee of Referees of the Spanish Football Federation since 2003, and to stop paying him after he left office in 2018, is reason enough to condemn Barcelona, say same sources. UEFA’s decision sets a precedent. From now on, violations by clubs for sports corruption may no longer be immediately punished if it is predominant that there are final judgments.
Another problem would have been that UEFA would have excluded Barcelona from the next Champions League and the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne (CAS) would have approved the club because it could not prove that the money received from Negreira was used to buy the arbitration influences. . According to other sources close to the defended case, there was a high probability for Barcelona that the TAS ruled in their favor.
key meeting
Exclusion from the Champions League would have been a huge setback for Barça, who are already set to suffer 55m losses from the move to Montjüic due to the Camp Nou remodeling. Furthermore, the club has a normal imbalance of 200m and its debt is around 1,400m gross while it has to reduce 200m from a payroll of 625. In statements made to TV3 last Thursday, the President of Barcelona, Joan Laporta did not hide the persuasion work that has been done in these months to convince UEFA, whereby it was important to show the economic efforts that Barcelona are making with the undergoing cutbacks that have resulted in some of its stars being ditched from across the club’s departments. “I had face-to-face meetings. And the explanations I gave were understood. They wanted to use the Negreira case to keep us out of the Champions League. But we cannot be judged before we have judged ourselves,” Laporta defended. A campaign that the Barca president dismissed as unfair because, as he assured, “there was no corruption in arbitration”.
Laporta’s meetings and discussions with Ceferin have borne fruit, as has the shift towards a less bellicose stance on the Super League. When Turin’s Juventus announced a month ago that they would request a meeting with Real Madrid and Barcelona to inform them of their intention to abandon the groundbreaking project, Barça’s statement reflected no defense against the competition of which it is the founder this had been the case on previous occasions. The letter also noted that if the Court of Justice of the European Union rules on whether UEFA and FIFA are abusing their dominant position as organizers of international competitions, the club will decide whether to remain in the Super League. Barcelona now seems closer to the Champions League than the Super League.
Osasuna makes allegations
Osasuna yesterday submitted the allegations to the UEFA Appeals Committee to avoid being banned from the Conference League after his application for involvement in match-fixing in the 13/14 season was rejected.
In his plea, Osasuna defends that the current executives are not responsible for the events for which several managers and two Betis players (Iván Amaya and Xavi Torres) have been convicted. Furthermore, they add that it was the club themselves who filed a complaint following the recorded confession of then-manager Ángel Vizcay.
At the Rojillo club they are not optimistic. They have not yet requested a hearing to speed up the process and allow them to appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) as soon as possible. This court will initiate an expedited procedure to have the matter resolved before the start of the competition. The precedents in the TAS also make Osasuna pessimistic.
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