Timeliness, not absolute certainties. The troubles of sports justice, explained by a sports judge

The important thing is to hurry. And never mind if in the end sports justice risks becoming a bit like a lottery. “Absolute certainties slow down”, much more important is “timeliness”. It is one of the cardinal principles of the sporting system: he reiterated it yesterday Mario Luigi Torsello, during a speech at the University of Salento. Torsello knows about sports justice, he is not only a professor but also a judge, and what a judge. He is the president of the Federal Court of Appeal, the same one that imposed the recent 15-point penalty on Juventus, in the capital gains case, going beyond the request for 9 points made by the agent Chinè.

“First of all I say that I don’t want to speak specifically about the case of capital gains. We will speak on a general level”, began Torsello, before delving into the cornerstones and values ​​of justice in sport. Words that explain well with which method the evils of the ball are judged. Sports justice is autonomous, underlines the professor, as sanctioned by the Constitutional Court: “The autonomy would therefore be based on the principle of subsidiarity evoked by the constitution. Subsidiarity can enable private individuals to be the source of the law”. While all members of the federation “accept submission to the internal organs of justice” and do so “as a spontaneous act of joining the sports community”. And here the problems begin.

Because, continues Torsello, “the sports justice code adapts to the general procedural principles, but not as an automatic transposition of these institutes otherwise it would lose its peculiarities, such as timeliness and speed coessential to sports justice as the processes must be fast and immediate“. In order to guarantee certainties in terms of sporting results, therefore for the athletes’ market, as well as for the fans, is the reasoning.

In fact, however, the non-automatic transposition can translate into a sort of arbitrary procedural selection: regardless of how one thinks it, and the recent ruling on Juve gives evidence of this, the danger is that of initiating only partial proceedings, which they draw from the ordinary, penal dimension, only for some aspects. That is, those available when sports justice is activated. In the case of capital gains, the federal prosecutor has reopened the provision on the basis of evidence produced by the prosecution of the Turin trial, which has yet to begin. In short, without the defense being in any way valid, which instead in sports venues has been relegated and reduced to a couple of hours of speeches. A matter of timeliness, indeed.

“Absolute certainty would slow down the sporting process, unlike what the principle of timeliness provides. The main purpose of the sporting judge is to affirm the principles of loyalty and transparency and therefore the bodies must consider the formal rules less stringent than the substantial ones that embody these values”. As if to say, if there are no specific rules, interpretation is fine. This is one of the main perplexities reported by Juventus, whose sentence was not based on certain parameters, but rather on an independent calculation by the judging panel. And this also applies to the size of the fine.

The explanation for all this lies, as Torsello explained to the students, in the fact that “our principles are loyalty, probity and correctness and the judge has the power to identify and punish existing facts”. The professor defined it as a sort of “blank clause” granted to sports judges, who in the end, can “configure as a violation of the principle of loyalty and correctness a conduct that does not autonomously result in a case of disciplinary offence”. It comes naturally then, and it is a general consideration that goes far beyond the trials of recent months, the difficulty for a football club in juggling the rules. How far can a judge’s discretion go? When a behavior that until the day before was considered lawful goes beyond the rule and can therefore be sanctioned?

Questions that would deserve an answer, and immediately indicate the urgency of a reform, feared too often and never, at least for now, really discussed. Judge Torsello undoubtedly deserves the credit, with his lesson, for having highlighted the main troubles of sports justice, the distortions that derive from it. Of having indicated from within the weaknesses of a system that needs to be reviewed to be credible. The problems of football also come from here, from a justice that doesn’t work, sometimes resulting uncertain and thus discouraging investments and programming. Otherwise, and it has already happened, the risk is that of identifying a culprit, a scapegoat, and pretending to have solved everything. While the Italian balloon continues to slowly deflate.