On Wednesday afternoon, Zdravko Mamic, considered the most powerful figure in Croatian football, was found guilty on a set of charges that includes making illegal personal profits on player transfers from Dinamo Zagreb. The county court in Osijek ruled that the players in question, namely Luka Modric and Dejan Lovren, were unlawfully paid 50% of the transfer fees that Dinamo received for their services from Tottenham Hotspur and Lyon respectively, only to forward most of that money to Mamic, who was a Dinamo executive at the time, and his family.
So how they do it?
Mamic signed personal contracts with many players during their early development years, obliging them to share their earnings with him. In most cases, those players were represented by Mamic’s son Mario, a licensed agent. Meanwhile, acting as club executive, Mamic would put clauses in the players’ contracts specifying the split of any transfer fees between them and the club. Once they received that money, they would pay Mamic off.
That much has not been disputed, even by Mamic’s defence. What the prosecution set out – and, according to the court ruling, managed – to prove was that in the case of Modric and Lovren those clauses were added and backdated after the players had been sold.