Two days ago Massimo Cellino was dragged into the mire of football corruption after accusations levelled at him by the Telegraph and their ‘Football for Sale’ investigation.
Big Sam Allardyce was brought down by it, in the process losing his job as the England manager after just one game. Then the newspaper teased out a Twitter post saying that three Championship teams had staff involved in the investigation. In all honesty Leeds United fans feared the worst, it wasn’t beyond the bounds of probability that their club would be involved.
Those fears were confirmed later that evening as the newspaper released an online article that named Leeds United’s owner Massimo Cellino as one of the trio of shame. The Leeds supremo was accused of being willing to sell 20% of the club to the Telegraph’s ‘undercover investors’ as a way of circumventing the FA and FIFA’s rules on third-party ownership of players (video – below).
https://twitter.com/backup3333/status/781250036801961986
Leeds United, and in all fairness a large number of their supporters, debunked the accusations insisting that no FA or FIFA guidelines or rules had been broken by what Cellino was saying on the Telegraph’s released video. These parties have said that in no way is the maverick Italian guilty of attempting to circumvent the guidelines that mean that only clubs can profit from players and not third-party individuals.
This is something that Cellino himself strenuously denied in the Italian press and to La Gazzetta dello Sport today in an article entitled ‘Breaking, kickbacks scandal: Cellino defends himself: I am not corrupt.’ In the summary article Cellino says: “I have not committed crimes. I have not been corrupted. I have only mentioned a corporate strategy.”
It is unclear at the moment what, if any, action the footballing authorities can take on what Massimo Cellino says on the Telegraph video – with what he does say not breaking any rules as such. Of course he still faces an FA investigation over the disputed accusation that he agreed a £185,000 illegal payment to a non-registered agent in the deal that took Ross McCormack from Elland Road to Fulham in the early days of his ownership of the Whites.
This is an allegation also augmented by further allegations that Leeds United broke third-party ownership rules with the loan deal that brought Brazilian Adryan to Elland Road via Cagliari and Flamengo. Leeds United’s owner is also currently still involved in a high-profile criminal trial in Italy with charges of embezzlement and fraud on the menu.
With it seemingly being a case of nothing to declare on the Telegraph story and Cellino’s ‘involvement’, that could be a silver lining against the above gathering legal clouds.
