When Rocco B. Commisso completed his purchase of Italian soccer club ACF Fiorentina last summer, he described the deal as “the fastest closing in soccer history.”
Flushed with the excitement of owning a top-flight team in the country of his birth, Commisso, the billionaire president of cable provider Mediacom, spoke passionately about his aspirations to lift the Florence-based club into the league standings. . There would be no shortage of effort to match ambitions, he said at the time.
But like other American owners who have invested in Italian soccer, Commisso, 70, quickly learned that the challenge of managing a team in Italy is a much more difficult task than simply buying one.
Like other American homeowners, for example, he has found his high hopes that a new stadium will become entangled in bureaucracy and nostalgia. But there have also been other, more thorny challenges. After that swift deal to close the deal last June, Fiorentina’s owners uncovered a curious set of deals: contracts signed by former club executives just before the team changed hands.
The deals, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times, effectively granted a soccer agent, appointed in February as part of a money laundering investigation in Spain, permission to find buyers for at least five members. from the Fiorentina list. In exchange, the agent would receive a commission. If Fiorentina refused to complete any deal the agent brought to the club, he would be fined instead.
Indeed, Fiorentina had agreed to download some of its top players for a price negotiated by a stranger, for an amount he had not defined, or to pay the agent a fee if he did not.
“This agreement appears to guarantee a payment to the agency, regardless of whether a transfer is made,” said Roy Vermeer, legal director of FIFPro, the global professional players union. “It is difficult to understand why any club would agree to this.”
The deals are with companies controlled by the agent, Abdilgafar Fali Ramadani, whom Spanish authorities have accused of being part of a multi-million dollar money laundering and tax evasion plan. But they offer another glimpse of the murky realities underpinning the global player transfer system, an industry that is worth more than $ 7 billion a year.
Fiorentina executives declined to comment on the deals, and Commisso was not available for comment, according to a spokeswoman.
“Surely there was a strange relationship between Fiorentina and Ramadani,” said Pippo Russo, a sociologist at the University of Florence who has written books about the role of soccer agents in the transfer system.
For much of the decade before Fiorentina’s U.S. inauguration, the club’s relationship with Ramadani was as close as that between a team and an individual agent. A frequent visitor to the club’s offices, Ramadani, a Macedonian businessman known for his access to some of the brightest prospects in the Balkans, sent several of his clients to Fiorentina, including several who were still in the team’s books when sold Commisso
It was those players, a group that included promising young Serbs like defender Nikola Milenkovic and striker Dusan Vlahovic, that former Fiorentina executives sought Ramadani’s help to unload, even as the team was days away from being sold to new owners. . The connections between the club and Ramadani were so deep that the person who signed the so-called private agreement on behalf of his company, Primus Sports, was Pedro Pereira, a Portuguese talent spotter who once worked as part of the Fiorentina recruiting team.
Pereira declined to comment on their role in the contracts, saying they were subject to confidentiality clauses.
All the agreements were written in the same way, with the only differences being the amount of money or the percentages that would go to Primus Sports. “ACF Fiorentina is interested in monitoring the market in order to evaluate possible opportunities to transfer the player to another club within the territory of Europe and China,” according to the contracts.
Such agreements are not uncommon in soccer; Clubs regularly recruit agents as they seek to download unwanted players or try to raise funds. The curious thing about the Fiorentina agreements, according to the sports lawyers consulted by The Times, was not only the moment, so close to the sale of the club, but also the absence of a wording that stipulates a minimum fee that Fiorentina would accept.
“Such offers will be in line with the market value of the player,” establishes each contract without determining how that value will be determined.
The Fiorentina contracts are just the latest developments related to Ramadani that have caught the attention of soccer officials. According to authorities in Europe, Ramadani and his associates “were part of a criminal network that manages soccer clubs in several countries, including Belgium, Cyprus and Serbia.”
Through the connections, authorities said, the group was able to exploit lax regulations to hide millions of dollars in commissions by moving athletes to what was described as so-called ghost clubs. In doing so, investigators said, agents avoided paying taxes on the payments they received for negotiating the deals.
According to the researchers, soccer agents used intermediary clubs in second and third tier European leagues as intermediate stations in player exchanges. A teenage player bought by a Cypriot team for just over $ 2 million, for example, was sold six days later for more than triple the price. Another player was on the books of the same club for just eight days.
Pantaleo Corvino, the former Fiorentina technical director who signed the contracts with Primus on behalf of the club, said the team’s relationship with Ramadani had greatly benefited the club and its bottom line. He claimed that some of the players Ramadani brought to the club, such as Stevan Jovetic, Matija Nastasic and Adem Ljajic, were later sold for prices that were more than what the team had paid for them.
“What was agreed has always been done within the rules and in the interest of Fiorentina,” Corvino said in a series of text messages via WhatsApp.
Corvino added that the agreement to sell the equipment to Commisso was completed in such secrecy, and so quickly that he did not know that Fiorentina was about to be sold when the agreements with the Ramadani company were signed.
Former Fiorentina chief executive Mario Cognigni said the club had always complied with local regulations. “Please note that throughout my tenure as President of ACF Fiorentina, each transaction has been carried out in the sole interest of the company and duly recorded in the books of the relevant company,” Cognigni said in an email.
While Fiorentina officials declined to discuss the deals, a team spokesperson only said that the team’s previous managers had been replaced. “We would like to inform you that the current management of the club operates with complete transparency and we do not have exclusions to work with any agent who may have interesting players to offer to Fiorentina, as long as all the rules are respected.” spokesman said by email.
The revelations about Fiorentina’s contracts and the close relationship with Ramadani come amid a push by soccer’s governing body, FIFA, to curb the agents’ influence and power. FIFA recently agreed to new rules limiting agent fees and a ban on one agent representing all parties involved in a transfer.
A senior FIFA legal official with nearly two decades of experience in the soccer industry said he has never seen agreements like them.
Vermeer, the legal director of FIFPro, said the union has been open in its opposition to the player transfer market in general. Even before the recent problems – a money laundering and bribery scheme involving a club official in Belgium, huge fees paid to officers revealed in the Football Leaks attacks – came to light, its top leaders had been at the forefront of calls for the system to be overhauled.
“It is completely wrong that the careers of professional footballers can be influenced by financial incentives to third parties,” added Vermeer. “We strongly oppose any agreement that increases this possibility and introduces a conflict of interest in player transfers.”
