UEFA announced this Thursday that it has launched an investigation into Barcelona for a “potential violation of its legal framework” with the so-called Negreira case that is being investigated by the Spanish courts. One of the sanctions that could derive from said investigation is the exclusion of the Barcelona club from the dispute of any European competition during the next season, including the Champions League, as a disciplinary measure until the situation is clarified in court.
UEFA is a private body and does not need a final criminal sentence to carry out its sanctions if it considers that a club may affect its reputation or its image. In fact, there are precedents for clubs that have been left out of Europe due to corruption cases.
The best known case is that of Italian football, which was blown up shortly before the start of the 2006 World Cup in Germany. Some wiretaps uncovered a large network of corruption in Calcio that mainly involved the then general secretary of Juventus , Luciano Moggi. In these conversations, Moggi asked the referee designator of the Italian federation that “favorable and sympathetic referees be assigned to them” for some of their matches. It turned out that Juventus was not the only club involved. Fiorentina, Lazio and Milan were also part of all this purchasing network. They were all sanctioned.
Juventus were stripped of their last two league titles (04-05 and 05-06) and they were relegated to Serie B. Also Fiorentina and Lazio, although in their case, after filing several appeals, they managed to maintain the category. UEFA was indeed intratabñe. Both lost the right to play in European competition the following season.
Finally, Milan started the 2006-2007 tournament with eight fewer points. After appealing, he was able to play in the Champions League in the 06-07 season and would end up winning it.
In 2013, UEFA left Fenerbahçe without European competitions for two years for considering their match-fixing activities proven, focusing on the Turkish Cup final in 2011. UEFA’s decision was delayed. The irregularities began in the 2010-2011 season and the Turkish team spent more than two years without sanction, until 2013.
Next May will be the 30th anniversary of the historic Olympique de Marseille, which won a double in France. The Marseillaise team won the League title ahead of PSG and Monaco and managed to lift the only Champions League that, to date, appears in their showcases. He did it after beating Fabio Capello’s Milan in the final.
A few months later, it was revealed that Marseille had bought a league game against Valenciennes by paying money to two of their players to let them win the game. The French Football Federation withdrew the League title from him and suspended his participation for the French Cup 93-94. For its part, although UEFA did not withdraw the European title, it did not allow him to play in the European Super Cup or the next edition of the Champions League.
In 2009, UEFA banned FK Pobeda from Macedonia for eight years without playing in European competitions for “failing to comply with the principles of integrity and fair play under article 5 of the UEFA disciplinary regulations for manipulating the result of a match.” He was referring to the match played in the qualifying phase of the 2004 Champions League that ended with Pobeda’s 3-1 defeat against Armenian FC Pyunik.
The same fate befell the Albanian club KF Skënderbeu, which UEFA excluded from all European football competitions for the next ten years for match-fixing in March 2018. The CAS confirmed the sanction issued by the UEFA Integrity Panel.
UEFA suspended Anderlecht in 1997 for an alleged bribery of the Spanish referee José Emilio Guruceta in the 1984 UEFA Cup semifinal against Nottingham. The European body said in a statement that the decision was adopted for “ethical and moral reasons by the facts of 1983 and 1984 related to the bribery of arbitrators”. However, on July 22, 1998, the CAS did agree with the Belgian club and declared the decision issued by the UEFA Executive Committee null and void.
