Remember the halcyon days of last week when I suggested people should stop getting too far over their skis about Fabio Paratici? There were numerous (stupid) reports in the Italian media that made it sound like Spurs had either offered a major role to Don Fabio at the conclusion of his international football ban, or were planning to. I didn’t really think that was true at the time. Now it looks like it not only wasn’t true, but he’s not going to stay at Tottenham at all.
Sky Sports’ Lyall Thomas tweeted today that the Don has “verbally agreed” to become the next director of football at AC Milan.
If you’re new to Spurs fandom or don’t remember what Fabio’s deal was, he was Tottenham’s sporting director under Antonio Conte, and a former top executive at Juventus. His extensive contacts within Italian football (and the iPhone consistently plugged into his ears) led him to some pretty good signings while at Spurs, including Rodrigo Bentancur, Cristian Romero, and Dejan Kulusevski.
But the flip side of that coin was that Paratici left Juventus under a double cloud of scandal, with reports of his involvement in both the plusvalenza (overvaluing transfer targets to cook financial books) and PRISMA (paying players illegally under the table during COVID-era financial restrictions) scandals. The end result was that he was banned from football for a period of 30 months.
That ban ends in June, and in the meantime Paratici has been “working” as an “informal advisor” to Tottenham as a way to get around the football ban. Now, if Lyall is correct, he’s getting back into football, but back in his home country of Italy.
It makes sense. Italian football is what he knows, and while a return to Juventus is obviously not likely, it does seem appropriate that a club like Milan or Inter would snatch him up. I don’t know for sure whether Tottenham actually wanted to keep him around in some role equal to or under new technical director Johan Lange; what we do know is that they never made him an offer, and now it looks like he’s moving on.
I, personally, was extremely Larry_David.gif about the idea of again covering Paratici’s helter-skelter “scattergun” approach to football transfers (as opposed to the impenetrable black box that is Johan Lange’s methodology) but I will confess that I’ll kind of miss that extremely Conte-esque era of chaos. RIP, Don Fabio and thanks for all the memes.