ITALY SPORTS AUTHORITY CANCELS 15-POINT PENALTY FOR JUVENTUS, ORDERS NEW TRIAL

In a case involving the club’s transfer activities, Italy’s top sports body on Thursday ordered a football court to reconsider its earlier decision docking Juventus 15 points in the current Serie A season.

With eight games remaining in the current campaign, the choice moves Juventus from seventh to third in Serie A, with 59 points, 16 points behind champions Napoli, but back into the lucrative European Champions League qualifying spots.

The most successful football club in Italy, Juventus, contested a judgment Italy’s football court handed down in January after examining how the club and many other teams handled player exchange agreements. This led to the Sports Guarantee Board of Italy’s decision.

Juve was found guilty of having “systematically altered accounting documents… from at least the quarter ending March 31, 2019, to the quarter ending March 31, 2021” by the FIGC appeals court in January.

The offenses concerned transfers “aimed at making financial results look better than they were in reality” totaling about 60 million euros ($65.7 million) in “phony capital gains” from those transfers, according to the appeals court.

Eleven former and current Juventus directors, including former Chairman Andrea Agnelli, a prominent member of the family that controls Juventus through their investment business Exor, were also given lifetime bans from holding office in Italian sport by the court.

Inter and Milan, who will face off in the Champions League semifinals, slip to fifth and sixth, respectively, as a result of this decision. Right now, neither team will participate in the Champions League in 2019. It must win this season in order for it to compete in Europe’s top club competition.

With 56 points from 30 games, Jose Mourinho’s Roma are fourth in the Serie A standings.

After consecutive losses to Lazio and Sassuolo, Allegri’s seventh-placed team has slipped back in the last two weeks in the race for a European spot. It will face a Napoli club that is still reeling from its Champions League elimination in its upcoming game.