UEFA informed the Osasuna board of directors this Friday that its inspectors have recommended the expulsion of the Navarrese team from the next edition of the Conference League as a sanction for match-fixing in 2013.
After receiving the report from the two members of the UEFA Control, Ethics and Disciplinary Committee in charge of reviewing the case, this body announced the opening of a disciplinary file against the Navarrese club, as reported by La Vanguardia on May 7.
The UEFA inspectors consider that the ruling of the Supreme Court that condemns several former directors of the rojilla entity is sufficient reason to exclude Osasuna, nine years after the events, from European competitions. It was last January when the Supreme Court sentenced the president of Osasuna, two directors and the manager at the time for the crimes of misappropriation, documentary falsification, accounting crime and sports corruption. It was proven that those involved agreed with two Real Betis footballers with influence in the locker room to pay them 650,000 euros to beat Valladolid. It was the 2012-13 season.
Osasuna, which argued before UEFA that the club itself appeared as a private accusation against the managers accused of match-fixing, still has the possibility of presenting new allegations before the Appeals Committee before a final ruling is made.
The Navarrese club affirms in a statement that it does not share the criteria of UEFA, for which it will appeal to the Appeals Committee and announces that it will fight legally, “until the last consequences, to defend its rights”, understanding that it is being denied “the right to participate in European competitions that has been fairly earned on the pitch.”
“Strong with the weak and weak with the strong, the UEFA courts have not wanted to take into consideration that it was the Spanish courts themselves who have literally declared that Osasuna has been the victim of the diversion of money carried out by some of their former directors behind the back of the highest governing body of the entity, the Assembly, and the control mechanisms of the club itself”, Osasuna emphasizes.
With this decision, he adds, UEFA “intends to punish Osasuna again in the figure of its current managers, who are precisely the ones who filed a complaint in court, beginning the legal proceedings.”
“Perhaps we are facing the only known case in the recent history of European football in which a club prosecutes some of its former managers, who are currently pending prison terms,” ??explains the rojillo club.
It is the new board of directors, a club that “today their accusers would not resist in an exemplary test” and a fans “who lived with anguish the near disappearance of their team, who are being punished today,” Osasuna indicated in his release.
In Osasuna’s opinion, the message transmitted by UEFA “is, without a doubt, counterproductive for football and for those entities that, faced with the risk of being penalized by the highest body in European football, now choose not to attack frontally corruption in the world of football “Osasuna understands that this cannot and should not be the objective pursued by UEFA,” he adds.
After highlighting that “the damage to the entity’s image is very serious”, Osasuna regrets that this damage has also occurred “with the silence of the main Spanish football organizations, including the RFEF”. He also denounces “continuous self-interested leaks, on a national level, to certain media outlets and journalists to build a story that sacrifices the weak to favor the strong.”
“We are prepared for the worst, but not to set aside the motto that has accompanied us in the reconstruction of the club for the last nine years: Osasuna never gives up,” says the Navarrese club, which announces that it will defend its rights and those of his hobby. “With the same zeal with which they cheer us on every weekend, with the same effort with which our players and coaching staff have deservedly earned their place in the next edition of the Conference League,” he underlined.
In this sense, he concludes his statement by stating: “We believe so much in what we do, and in how we do it, that we cannot allow Club Atlético Osasuna to be used, with the acquiescence of those who in 2014 looked the other way, to solve the problems other people’s problems.”
The first club to benefit from this measure would be Athletic Club, eighth-ranked in the League, which would take the vacant place left by Osasuna as soon as the UEFA sanction is officially confirmed.
The second club that can make a favorable reading will be FC Barcelona, ??investigated for the Negreira case, with very similar characteristics to the Osasuna case. And it is that UEFA sets a clear precedent by not sanctioning or opening a file on the Pamplona club until justice has finished its work without a possible option of appeal, that is, through the final ruling of the Supreme Court.
In this way, the Barça team could play in the Champions League next season since the Negreira case is still in court. In the conversations between Joan Laporta, president of FC Barcelona, ??and his counterpart at UEFA, Aleksander Ceferin, the former always asked him precisely to let the Spanish justice act and respect the presumption of innocence before intervening.
