Tottenham issues statement on Paratici, basically says nothing

Following this morning’s bombshell breaking news that Tottenham Hotspur Managing Director of Football Fabio Paratici had his football ban expanded to all of global football by FIFA, reports had emerged that FIFA’s decision had blindsided Spurs’ leadership, and was a completely unexpected development.

This afternoon, they issued a statement saying just that.

Following media reports today regarding the FIFA Disciplinary Committee decision to extend worldwide the sanction imposed by the FIGC Federal Court of Appeals on Fabio Paratici on 20 January 2023, the Club made urgent enquiries to FIFA.

FIFA has late this afternoon responded to us in writing notifying us today, Wednesday 29 March 2023, that a decision has been made by the FIFA Disciplinary Committee to extend the FIGC sanction worldwide.

This committee deliberation has been taken with no advance notice to any of the parties involved. We are urgently seeking further clarification from FIFA as to the details of the extension and its variance from the FIGC sanction.

We should like to make clear that when Fabio conducted the interview on Club channels yesterday neither he nor the Club had any indication of this decision being made by FIFA, based on the fact the the FIGC sanction was taken on 20 January 2023 and remains subject to an Appeal on 19 April 2023.

We shall update on this matter in due course.

This statement is notable in that it’s the first time the club has publicly commented on Paratici’s sanctioning by the FIGC for his involvement in the Juventus “plusvalenza” scandal. It’s also notable (kinda) in that it doesn’t really say anything at all.

In fact, the statement more or less takes FIFA to task for not giving the club any advance notice that this decision was coming, which explains why the club released the video of Paratici stream-of-conscious rambling about the club’s future from his Italian hotel room yesterday. FIFA probably should’ve informed Spurs privately that this was coming, but they didn’t because FIFA is run even more poorly than Spurs are at the moment.

It doesn’t really change much, though. Paratici is still globally sanctioned from participating in football pending appeal, and the appeal will happen on April 19. Tottenham also should have had a contingency plan for just this sort of eventuality, though perhaps they did and if they were caught so entirely by surprise as it sounds like they were, it might have just taken this long for the lawyers and PR people to come up with a plan.

(I still think they should just sack Paratici and move on.)