FINANCIAL MELTDOWN LEAVES FORMER SERIE A GIANTS PARMA IN RUINS
Crippling debts of £145m Team bus repossessed Players not paid for months Club set to be dissolved
THE dirty linen was out in public long before t he l ocal launderette cut off Parma’s credit and told the players to wash their own kit from now on.
By that point, on Wednesday evening, the team bus had already been repossessed, £ 400,000 of medical and gymnasium equipment was gone in a bailiff ’s van and an advert had appeared online. It showed a picture of a bench from the dressing room at the Stadio Ennio Tardini — or lot No 7, if you prefer.
It will be auctioned with a base price of £1,465 on March 5, with the money going to the creditors of this broken club. ‘Sometimes it feels like football is having a joke with us,’ says Nicolo Babris, the editor of parmafanzine.it.
Moments earlier, Sportsmail’s taxi arrived at the club’s training ground and Babris’s was one of 25 faces pressed against the windows. They have been patrolling the gates f or days, a mixture of journalists and supporters usually in place from 8am to 8pm.
‘ We thought you might be Manenti,’ he says. Manenti is Giampietro Manenti, the unpopular new club president, though he is not the most responsible for the £145million of debts that smashed this club into pieces. Players and staff have not been paid since the summer; many creditors have waited longer than that.
Those debts meant last Sunday’s game against Udinese was postponed because Parma could not pay their stewards. This weekend’s game at Genoa will go ahead but the players are likely to pay for their own hotel. Manenti made late arrangements for a coach after the squad spoke publicly about pooling their cars.
These are bleak, rotten times for the club at the bottom of Serie A and it’s about to get worse. The mayor of Parma has been demanding a meeting with Manenti but the latter keeps cancelling.
Administration appears certain and the local press predict this club will soon be dissolved and re-formed in amateur football.
There are fears that Parma, remarkably, might even have to pull out of the league midway through the season.
‘Of course you wonder how this mess was allowed to happen,’ Babris adds. ‘We had a good and sensible club not very long ago. Look what these people did to us.’
The story, in the first instance, goes back to the Nineties. Parma had been delightfully successful through the whole decade, picking up four European trophies as well as three Italian Cups and finishing runners-up in Serie A.
Their squad included Gianluigi Buffon, Fabio Cannavaro, Lilian Thuram, Ariel Ortega, Juan Sebastian Veron, Faustino Asprilla and Hernan Crespo.
When they were beaten by Rangers in the Champions League in 1999 it was a big result for the Ibrox side. No one predicted how much the clubs would have in common down the line.
For Parma, the route from the Champions League to here is odd and mysterious. When Tommaso Ghirardi bought the club for £21m during the 2006-07 season, the club’s gross debt was a manageable £12m. Since then Parma have acquired a barely believable playing staff of 240 players, with the vast majority out on loan, i ncluding Gianni Munari and Daniel Tozser at Watford.
The Parma view has long been that ‘this is the project’ without detailed explanations of how the business would work, though it is understood the plan depends on paying little and sending players elsewhere to be developed.
If the player comes good, the club can sell for profit. If not, the overheads per player are relatively low. However, as one well-placed source put it: ‘These were not just young players who would be very cheap with potential — some were 27, 28, 29, 30. These players will cost the club more money.’
The scale of the operation was reported in 2013 by Italian newspaper La Repubblica, who calculated more than 300 transactions had taken place for only £5.5million. The club has previously been described in the same pages as a ‘cattle market’.
‘Like everything else, there has been no transparency,’ Babris says. To that end, it is unclear how much that unique business model might be responsible for the mess the club finds itself in. The source added: ‘It is hard to say, but the feeling is that these transfers have really not been good.’
SIGNS that something was s eri ously amiss financially only came in t he summer. Having finished sixth i n Serie A l ast season, Parma were prevented from taking part in the 2014-15 Europa League because of an unpaid tax bill of €300,000.
Ghirardi huffed and puffed but had no answer. In December, having run up such monstrous debts, he sold the club to Albanian businessman Rezart Taci for €1. Captain Alessandro Lucarelli claimed the squad felt ‘betrayed and taken for a ride’ by Ghirardi.
Taci never met the players and also sold the club for €1 after less than two months as owner. In came Manenti and one of his first encounters with the squad proved memorable. ‘He showed us a bank document stating there was €100m available to invest in Parma,’ said Lucarelli. ‘We had some doubt.’
So far Manenti has offered only excuses for repeatedly missing meetings with Mayor Federico Pizzarotti, who said: ‘The rapport with Manenti is beyond repair.’
Public prosecutors have set a date of March 19 for a bankruptcy hearing and the seizures of property continue most days.
On Wednesday, a member of club staff entered the training ground with two bags of toilet rolls, understood to have been bought with a collection from the players.
The misery is all around this once big club, including the gates of the stadium which carry the banner: Chiuso per rapina. In English, ‘Closed for robbery’.
Crespo, the club’s youth coach, s ummed it up. ‘ We are in shambles,’ he said. ‘It’s difficult to see the club in this state. We’re having to take showers with cold water and my players have got ill.’
Emails to the club have gone unreturned, though Sportsmail has been told by a source that there might be a good reason — the company that leased Parma their computers and printers recently reclaimed the equipment.
Dirty laundry is the least of Parma’s problems.