2006 Serie A scandal

The 2006 Italian football scandal, or Calciopoli in the Italian-speaking world, involved Italy's top professional football leagues, Serie A and Serie B. The scandal was uncovered in May 2006 by Italian police, implicating league champions Juventus and other major teams including Milan, Fiorentina, Lazio, and Reggina when a number of illegal telephone interceptions showed a thick network of relations between team managers and referee organizations, being accused of rigging games by selecting favourable referees.

The scandal first came to light as a consequence of investigations of prosecutors on the Italian football agency GEA World. Transcripts of recorded telephone conversations published in Italian newspapers suggested that during the 2004–05 season, Juventus general managers Luciano Moggi and Antonio Giraudo had conversations with several officials of Italian football to influence referee appointments.

The name Calciopoli (which could be translated as "Footballville") is an ironic adaptation of Tangentopoli ("Bribesville"), which is the name that was given to some corruption-based clientelism in Italy during the Mani Pulite investigation in the early 1990s.

On 4 July 2006, the Italian Football Federation's prosecutor, Stefano Palazzi, called for all four clubs at the centre of the scandal to be thrown out of Serie A. Palazzi called for Juventus "being excluded from the Serie A Championship and assigned to a lower category to Serie B with 6 points deducted," without a specific division stated, and for Milan, Fiorentina and Lazio to be downgraded to last place in the 2005–06 championship and relegation to Serie B. He also asked for point deductions to be imposed for the following season for the clubs (three for Milan, and 15 for both Fiorentina and Lazio). The prosecutor also called for Juventus to be stripped of its 2005 and 2006 titles.

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