Passport scandal rocks Italian football

ROME, OCTOBER 8: Italy's Serie A football league has been rocked by a fake passport scandal just one week into the new season.The scandal ...

ROME, OCTOBER 8: Italy’s Serie A football league has been rocked by a fake passport scandal just one week into the new season.

The scandal centres on the provision of false passports to enable clubs to field non-European players as Europeans, thereby helping clubs overcome the limits on non European Union talent imposed by world governing body FIFA.

The fake passports affair follows allegations of widespread doping in 1998 and other claims concerning the abuse of the system of naturalisation that have tarnished the world’s highest profile league in recent years.

Story continues below this ad

The first indication of the scandal came on September 14 when two Brazilian players with Udinese Silva Warley and Valentim Alberto were arrested by Polish frontier police at Warsaw for presenting fake Portuguese passports.

The Italian football federation and Udine magistrates launched probes into the affair. Then last week a Uruguayan player Alejandro da Silva and Brazilian Henrique Amaral Jorginho were hit with an expulsion order by Udine police for also possessing fake Portuguese passports. “We managed to establish this false identity thanks to the signature of the civil servant featuring on the document,” said Udine prefect of police Giuseppe di Donno.“The Portuguese embassy informed us that the civil servant in question never existed so we therefore treated the passport as false.”

Other players linked to the inquiry are AC Milan’s Brazilian international goalkeeper Dida and the same club’s two Argentinian stars Fabian Ayala and Jose Antonio Chamot.