Study on Italy, opaque ownership increases criminal risks in football

Football clubs with opaque ownership are three times more exposed to sporting penalties and over nine times more exposed to criminal investigations and charges. This is the conclusion of the study 'The dark side of the ball: crime, financial misconduct and opacity of club ownership in football' by Francesco Addesa, senior lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and Michele Riccardi, professor of criminology at the Catholic University and director of the Transcrime research centre.

The research, published in the Journal of Economic Criminology, analyzes the ownership of over 250 Italian Serie A, B, C and D companies, verifying the relationship between corporate transparency, financial irregularities and judicial matters.

In the 2025-26 season, 27 subjects were identified at the top of the ownership chains that do not allow us to trace the natural persons who hold the ultimate economic interests, making use of structures that extend along 62 jurisdictions, of which 26 of the 30 considered to have the greatest financial secrecy according to the Tax Justice Network. Twenty of these exercise direct or indirect control over Italian football clubs. A phenomenon that also affects the smaller series and sees a significant presence of US investors.

The research followed 265 clubs starting from the 2022-23 season, verifying penalties, exclusions from the championships and judicial events that emerged in the following three years. Companies with opaque ownership have a frequency of penalties of 29.4% compared to 9.7% of transparent structures, exclusions from championships of 29.4% compared to 12.1% and are linked to criminal accusations or investigations against top management in over half of the cases (52.9%), compared to just 5.6% of other teams.

"An opaque property does not constitute an offense in itself" however "our study suggests a close relationship between opacity, administrative offenses and criminal risks", says Riccardi, according to whom "companies already in financial difficulty could attract opaque investments" while "the entry of capital of unknown origin could contribute to generating financial irregularities and instability".