By Chris Wright
Consider this your bi-weekly “Parma are circling the drain” update.
Over the past month or so we’ve heard how the penniless club have been sold for €1 twice in as many weeks and how they’ve begun to chuck their dressing room furniture up on Ebay in a bid to raise a few pennies here and there.
Lest we fail to mention that the Ducali have also had points docked and even been forced to postpone two recent league games as they weren’t able to afford adequate stewarding.
The lastest chapter in the continuing plight of Serie A’s slowly disintegrating bottom side (now 16 points adrift) is that their new chairman, Giampietro Manenti, the white knight who was apparently going to swoop in and pull them back from the brink, has been arrested in Italy on charges of money laundering.
According to the BBC Sport, prosecutors have accused Manenti of being part of a failed credit card hacking scam which involved the use of stolen or cloned cards.
Manenti was supposedly in the process of agreeing a deal to pay off Parma’s £72.4million debt, but any transfers into the club account have been foiled after he was one off 22 people across the country arrested for their alleged involvement in a scam to rip off £3.24million and disguise the money as “revenue from sponsorships or gadget purchases”.
Presumably at the end of his tether by now, Parma’s general manager Alessandro Melli recently described life at the Ennio Tardini as something akin to a scene from ‘Night of the Living Dead’.
“It seems like we are zombies,” he told CNN. “We are working without knowing where we are heading.”
Down the toilet, it would seem.