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News coming out of Turin over the weekend is that current Juventus manager Andy Banks has launched an attack on the FFO FA after he and Juventus felt wronged during the auction of 19 year old Brazilian G_Moscardo.
The rules of the auction state that bidding starts at £25,000,000 and to beat the current bid, the new bid must be an increase of AT LEAST £1,000,000.
Early on in the bidding war, which has now lasted almost a full week, Manchester United & Juventus battled it out from £75,000,000 to £118,000,000 until the likes of Manchester City & PSG got involved on Friday.
The controversy started shortly after Juventus’ 3-0 win over Italian rivals Inter Milan, when the bidding was at £125,000,000 in which PSG had made from their £129,699,998 budget. This meant that a bid from someone of £128,699,999 would rule the former French super power out of the race as they’d not be able to make the increase of £1,000,000.
This is exactly what Juventus manager Andy Banks did, tabling a bid of £128,699,999 only to be told by the FFO FA that a brand new rule, made up on the spot, was in force where clubs had to make a bid that was rounded up to the nearest million pounds and if they wanted to rule PSG out of the running they’d have to spend another £300,001 to do so.
Juventus officials met this news with furious anger and publicly stated that they’d stick with their current bid and they expected it to be accepted. The FA stuck with this rule (Checks notes to see if they’ve changed their minds again…..no) and stated that the bid by Juventus would be rounded DOWN to £128,000,000 rather than up to £129,000,000.
This news allowed FA favourites PSG to swoop in and bid £129,000,000 meaning that if Juventus wanted to outbid a club that they felt they had already taken out of the running, they’d have to bid £1,300,001 more than they had previously bid.
Juventus manager Andy Banks was said to be beside himself at the news and is said to be considering his position at the club. Juventus have banished all outside media and are said to be only dealing with representatives of the club from now on.
With both Manchester clubs still within a chance of outbidding Juventus, this could all be for nothing but for now it’s the talk of the town.
Here’s what the Juventus manager had to say on the matter:
“The FA are a joke. To bring in a feature like this with rules that just don’t make sense and that change with the wind is laughable.
Earlier in the week we had the catastrophe that saw the FA yo-yo between clubs being able to sign 1 and then 2 players from the auctions, only for them to revert back to 1 after pressure from PSG again and now this nonsense.
How a club can plan for anything in these leagues is beyond me as the rules get cloudier and cloudier each week.
It seems to me that the FA only cares for the likes of Real Madrid, Manchester City, PSG etc as they’re forever passing favourable laws which help those clubs stay at the top while screwing everyone else beneath them.
I for one, if still in employment with a football club will be taking each rule change with a pinch of salt, knowing it may change at any minute.
We will be asking for clarification on every event, every auction, every rule introduction/change because of we don’t do this, we open ourselves up to this kind of mess where we are shown the huge flaws in the system.
We will now take the weekend to discuss where we go from here.
We will hand the bidding process over to a representative of Juventus and they’ll take things from here. Goodnight!”