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The inconsistencies in Osimhen's transfer were similar to those in the Juventus deals that got them docked 15 points, and they have been fortunate to get away with it
Victor Osimhen has been in spectacular form for Napoli in the 2022/23 Serie A season, scoring 12 goals in 14 games as the Naples club storm to a possible first Scudetto since Diego Maradona played at the stadium now named after him.
Osimhen’s exploits and those of his teammates have led to Napoli opening a nine-point gap at the top of Serie A, making them a shoo-in for the title, but if they had the same luck as Juventus, they might have seen that dream of a first Serie A title since 1990 go up in smoke.
Napoli, Juventus and the Plusvalenza scandal
Napoli, Juventus, and several other Italian clubs were investigated for similar transfer activities that amounted to illegal capital gains or ‘Plusvalenza’ in Italian
While Juventus were investigated for several transfer deals, Napoli’s investigation centred around the deal that brought the Nigerian sensation to the club from Lille.
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The clubs have been accused of fanciful accounting practices that amount to cooking up capital gains by misrepresenting the value of assets owned by the club and selling those assets for inflated values to balance the books.
Odd circumstances around Osimhen’s Napoli transfer
In the 2020 summer transfer market, Napoli reportedly paid €70 million, a club record, to Lille for Osimhen’s signature. However, it was not the fee that immediately raised eyebrows, but rather the players who went in the opposite direction from Napoli to Lille.
As part of the deal, Napoli sold four players to Lille for a total of €20 million, but the price that Lille ‘agreed’ to pay for Napoli’s quartet, appeared to be far above the value of the players involved.
Lille signed goalkeeper Orestis Karnezis, defender Claudio Manzo, and forwards Luigi Liguori and Ciro Palmieri from Napoli for a sizeable amount of money, even though all four had combined for nine appearances for Napoli’s senior team.
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Even more ridiculous was the fact that all nine of those appearances were made by goalkeeper Karnezis, who was not even the most expensive transfer on the list.
Karnezis was signed by Lille for a reported €5.13m despite his market value at the time according to Transfermarkt being €500k. Ligouri was signed for €4m and Palmeri for €7m, despite both being valued at €75,000 at the time of the signing.
Manzo, who commanded the relatively modest fee of €3.87m, is a player so obscure that he does not even appear on the Transfermarkt database.
If the youngsters were prodigious talents who were the result of incredible scouting by Lille, then paying well over the odds for them might have made some sense, seeing as they could eventually turn a profit for the French club.
But as it turned out, all three outfield players were at the French club for only a year before being released from their contracts, and returning to Italy with clubs in Serie D, three tiers below Serie A.
A potential Napoli 'Plusvalenza'
None of the four players ever commanded transfer fees after the fees that Lille paid for them. Karnezis the goalkeeper was the most successful of the four transfers, making three appearances for Lille before dropping to the reserve team after one year and retiring from football two years after leaving Napoli.
The €20 million fee paid by Lille for these four players meant that Napoli only actually paid €50 million to the French club for Osimhen, who would still be recognised as a €70 million asset, giving the current Serie A champions a potential capital gain, or plusvalenza if you will, on the Nigerian’s transfer.
Why Juventus were docked and Napoli were not
When the matter initially went to court, all the clubs involved, including Napoli and Juventus, were cleared of any wrongdoing because the courts ruled that there was no ironclad way of proving a player’s value had been inflated to create a capital gain.
They believed that the only true value of a player was the one agreed to by a buying and selling club.
However, Juventus’ case was appealed on the grounds of new evidence in the form of taped recordings where the club’s bigwigs were heard speaking about deliberately inflating player values for capital gains.
The fallout of that appeal led to Juventus being docked 15 points in the 2022/23 Serie A, which saw them drop from third on the table to 10th.
Fortunately for Napoli, no such appeal has been made to reopen their ‘interesting’ Osimhen transfer, but if they ever suffered the same fate as Juventus, that would surely spell the end of their invigorating Scudetto charge that has taken Europe by storm.
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