Azzurri boss Antonio Conte found himself in the headlines for all the wrong reasons this past week when the attorney general of Cremona, Roberto Di Martino, officially demanded that he stand trial in ordinary justice for allegations of match-fixing during the 2010-2011 season as manager of Siena. It is only the latest chapter in a long and strange story that says little about Conte and much about the Italian sporting justice system.
Conte was first named as a suspect in the ongoing “Calcioscommesse” (“Football betting”) match-fixing investigation in 2012, just after his triumphant first season at Juventus, when Siena midfielder Filippo Carobbio pointed the finger at his former coach and declared that he had been involved in the corruption.
Carobbio, who was at the time under investigation as a major player in the scandal, was reportedly offered a lighter sentence in exchange for the names of other involved parties as part of a plea deal. He still received multiple suspensions from football totaling two years and two months and is currently under investigation for charges of criminal conspiracy, but the addition of a name as prominent as Conte’s rocketed the case onto the front pages and made Carobbio, to say nothing of the Cremonese prosecutor Di Martino and FIGC attorney Stefano Palazzi, household names.
The charges against Conte amounted to “omessa denuncia” or “failure to report”, alleging that he was fully aware of illegal activity going on in his team – players agreeing to fix matches and throw results for the benefit of the gambling rings that controlled them – and yet did not report the crimes to authorities.
Failure to report is a difficult charge to prove, as it rests on having conclusive evidence that the accused was definitely aware of the crimes being committed. In the absence of such evidence, it becomes a matter of the accused’s word against the prosecution’s. In Conte’s case, that is exactly what happened.
Carobbio claimed that before two games, Novara-Siena and Albinoleffe-Siena, Conte had been contacted by club officials who asked him to draw the game so they could make money on a bet. Conte then, according to Carobbio, gathered his players together for the pre-match team meeting and informed them that “the result was taken care of,” instructing them to play for a draw.
Unfortunately for Carobbio, the 23 other players on Siena’s roster were individually contacted for their testimony, and every one of them refuted the claims that Conte had told them to draw the games. Each team member except Carobbio asserted that such a thing had never taken place. It was no longer one man’s word against another, but one man’s word against 24 others.
It quickly became clear, however, that the prosecution was much more inclined to believe Carobbio than anyone else. As the case proceeded, Conte’s lawyers convinced him to compromise on a plea deal, which in the Italian sporting justice system is not an automatic admission of guilt. The aim was to get the case over with as quickly as possible and minimize the potential damage done by what Conte’s lawyers viewed as a highly biased court.
In a sense, that aim was accomplished. The sentence was brought down swiftly. Conte was sentenced to ten months suspension for failure to report, later reduced to four months on appeal. Charges against Novara-Siena were dropped but the sentence was not modified. Conte spent the first half of his second season in charge of Juventus watching the games from an enclosed media box high in the stands, frequently pacing back and forth or grimacing like a lion in a cage.
That Albinoleffe-Siena was the target of an attempted fix is not in dispute. The published motivations of the sporting justice’s Disciplinary Committee go into great detail about the actions of the involved Siena players, Carobbio chief among them: who went where, who said what to whom, who did what. Conte is absent from these detailed descriptions, and features in the final two paragraphs: where it is asserted that “It is truly highly unbelievable that Conte would be unaware of the actions of his colleagues, due to the involved role he played at the center of the club….to hypothesize that the members of his technical staff or his team could make these decisions without Conte’s knowledge is not objectively credible.” This is the basis of the suspension handed to Conte and the now-famous phrase “Non poteva non sapere,” he could not have not known.
The problem is, of course, without solid evidence of collaboration – an email, a text, an intercepted phone call – this type of motivation for a sentence is the opposite of objective. It is circumstantial, it is based on opinion and inference, it depends on the personal biases and “hunches” of those administering the law. According to these standards of objectivity it would be equally valid to argue his innocence based on his well-known fanatical drive to win every game, his tendency to still be wildly animated on the sidelines shouting instructions and encouragement at his players even in the 93rd minute while up 4-0, and the depressed mood he has admitted he suffers for several days after a defeat. It is, at least in this writer’s opinion, highly unbelievable and not objectively credible that a man of Conte’s character would knowingly collaborate with match-fixing and agree to play for a draw.
In the nearly three years since the investigation was opened, no new evidence has surfaced to definitively link Conte to any of the crimes committed. No member of Siena, Albinoleffe, Novara or any other team has come forward with further accusations against him. The manager of Albinoleffe, theoretically in the exact same position as Conte, was never charged with failure to report or any other accusation.
Two months ago Hristiyan Ilievski, one of the leaders of an East European betting ring that was heavily involved in creating the 2012 scandal, turned informer and recounted in great detail to investigators how the scheme was set up and who was involved from each team: Conte was never once mentioned.
And yet, this past week, Cremona attorney Di Martino requested that Conte’s case be sent (along with 103 others) for judicial review in the court of ordinary justice. All the charges relating to the Novara-Siena match were dropped, as was a charge of criminal conspiracy. The remaining charge, for Albinoleffe-Siena, however, was elevated from failure to report to outright sporting fraud, an active attempt to alter or fix the results of a match ahead of time.
And yet – and yet! – no new evidence is presented. Di Martino himself makes no reference to any new information in his public accusation: instead, he claims that, in failing to prevent the attempted fix from occurring, Conte violated “the moral responsibility of the coach to safeguard and control the actions of his players,” a reference to a general FIGC code-of-conduct rule that was never previously invoked in any stage of the trial – and apparently applies to none of the other coaches of any of the other clubs involved in Calcioscommesse. In attempting to support a charge of sporting fraud, the prosecutor of Cremona can only put forth a feeble and subjective case for inaction in the face of the crimes of others. An inaction for which, whether it was truly deliberate or not, Conte has already paid the penalty.
The cumulative effect produced by Di Martino’s pronouncements is one of a man increasingly desperate to preserve his credibility and grasping ever more frantically at ever-more-distant straws. It has not gone unremarked that without Conte as the “marquee attraction” for the case, most of it would long ago have been consigned to the back pages of the newspapers and Di Martino would likely have remained a fairly obscure regional attorney.
It may be as long as six months before an audience is granted for both Conte and his prosecutors to plead their respective cases before a judge, and some time after that we will know if the case will indeed proceed in ordinary justice. Until then, a debate will continue about whether Conte should resign his position, what his legal situation means for the imperiled image of Italian football, and maybe – dreaming isn’t a crime, after all – what needs to be done to fix the sporting justice system in Italy.
The post Antonio Conte and Calcioscommesse: The Story So Far appeared first on Italian Football Daily.
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