The Infront Sports & Media and MP & Silva agencies both reacted angrily yesterday (Sunday) to reports which appeared in the Italian press over the weekend regarding the handling of the 2014 auction for Serie A media rights and alleged occult payments to help out certain Italian football clubs.
In a three-page statement, Infront’s Italian division, Infront Italy, talked of “grave factual errors” in reports which claimed that the agency had favoured the commercial broadcaster Mediaset over its pay-television rival Sky Italia when advising the league, Lega Serie A, in the award of its rights for the period 2015-16 to 2017-18.
Riccardo Silva, co-founder of the MP & Silva agency, which sells the international media rights to Serie A, denied that he had secretly provided Serie A club Genoa with €15m ($16.2m) to enable the club to enrol in Serie A, at a time that its owner, Enrico Preziosi, was struggling to meet the financial security parameters laid down by Covisoc, Italian football’s financial regulator. He said the amount the agency paid the club was “less” than €15m and was part of a normal commercial relationship.
The Gazzetta dello Sport and La Repubblica newspapers published extracts of wire taps from the Milan police investigation into possible bid rigging concerning the award of the 2015-18 media rights for both Serie A and Serie B, and alleged secret financing of clubs designed to circumvent Covisoc’s authority.
The published conversations purported to show that Infront had favoured Mediaset over Sky in awarding Mediaset a package of Serie A ancillary rights, such as post-match interviews. Mediaset had made a higher offer than Sky, but the offer was conditional upon the broadcaster being able to sublicense some of the content. The offer was invalid, the newspapers claimed, as offers for each package in the league’s invitation to tender had to be without conditions.
Infront said yesterday: “It is not true that the ITT for Package C was ‘fixed’ to help Mediaset. Sky had had a year to secure the package, having bid three times without facing competition from Mediaset. Each time its bid was either below the reserve price or below a price which the league had already rejected as being too low.”
The agency said that the sales process was conducted as follows:
“Package C was subject to three bids from May 19, 2014. On each occasion, only Sky took part. Mediaset did not make an offer. After the first tender, when the rights were not awarded to Sky because its offer was below the reserve price, the league reduced the reserve price to ensure a quick sale of the package. Sky then offered zero, but subsequently offered €6m (over three seasons) in private talks (in absence of any Mediaset bid.) This offer was never substantially modified until the final award of the rights.
“A new invitation to bid was made on March 17, 2015. On April 9, the league received the following three-season bids: Sky offered €6.6m, Mediaset offered €8.55m. Mediaset’s bid included the condition that it be able to sub-license rights to Sky. The condition therefore had the objective of sublicensing rights to Sky, in order to share the costs jointly, rather than subtracting the rights from Sky. On April 10, 2015…it was decided that the rights should be awarded neither to Sky nor to Mediaset.”
Subsequently, in private negotiations, Mediaset secured the rights with an offer of €9.34m over three seasons against a Sky offer of €7.2m.
The wire-tap conversations also covered the auction for Lega Serie B, which at the time was also advised by Infront. The agency is alleged to have introduced a clause stating that the winner of the rights to Friday night and Monday night matches had to have a free-to-air channel with at least a three-per-cent share. This would have ruled out Sky’s Cielo channel. An ITT with this clause was initially published on the league’s website but after conversations between Infront and Serie B president, Andrea Abodi, the rights were re-tendered without the clause and were won by Sky.
The newspapers also reported that Silva and directors at Infront were offered a three-per-cent stake worth €25m in Giochi Preziosi, the toy company owned by Genoa president Preziosi, in return for €15m being routed through MP & Silva to ensure the club could enrol in the league.
Silva told La Repubblica: “If someone makes you a business proposition, you can hardly tell him he’s an idiot. In the end, I didn’t take any share. All I did was pay Genoa in advance against its invoices for media rights sales. I do the same thing for lots of clubs in the (English) Premier League.”
Infront confirmed in October that three of its senior managers – Marco Bogarelli, Andrea Locatelli and Giuseppe Ciochetti – were under investigation in the case.