The Brazil coach and former Real Madrid manager Carlo Ancelotti has been given a one-year prison sentence and a fine of almost €400,000 (£345,000) after a Spanish court found him guilty of one count of tax fraud.
Ancelotti – who managed Real Madrid from 2013 to 2015 and between 2021 and 2025 – appeared in court in Madrid in April to stand trial on charges of defrauding Spain’s tax office of more than €1m (£836,857) in undeclared earnings from image rights in 2014 and 2015.
Prosecutors, who had sought a jail term of four years and nine months, alleged that the 66-year-old former Chelsea and Everton manager used shell companies outside Spain to create “opacity vis-a-vis the Spanish treasury … concealing the real beneficiary of the income from the exploitation of his image rights”.
They said the 66-year-old, one of the most successful managers in football history, failed to pay more than one million euros due to undeclared earnings in those years, seeking four years and nine months’ jail against him.
Ancelotti denied having intentionally committed fraud at his highly publicised trial in April, saying he never realised a scheme allowing him to collect some of his salary in image rights would see him pay less tax. He claimed “never thought a fraud could have been committed,”
The court handed him a sentence of 12 months and a fine of €386,000 after ruling that he had committed “an offence against the tax authorities”. He was cleared of the 2015 charge, saying it could not conclude “beyond reasonable doubt” that his fiscal residence for that year was in Spain.
Ancelotti showed a “conscious desire to evade the payment of taxes on the income obtained from the exploitation of his image rights, through artificial mechanisms”, the court wrote in a ruling.
“The actions are blatantly fraudulent and the structures used do not conform to a real economic logic. The deliberate concealment of income through opaque structures and entities in tax havens proves a fraudulent intent,” it added.
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Despite the custodial penalty, the Italian manager will not spend any time behind bars as non-violent, first-time offenders given sentences of less than two years are rarely sent to prison under Spanish law.
Ancelotti, has thereby joined the list of high-profile football figure to be pursued by Spain’s tax authorities.
In July 2016, Lionel Messi and his father, Jorge, were sentenced to 21 months in prison for evading tax on Lionel’s image rights during his time at Barcelona, with more than €4m owed in back payments.
Six years ago, Cristiano Ronaldo admitted committing tax fraud while playing for Real Madrid and agreed to pay an €18.8m fine after striking a deal with prosecutors and tax authorities in return for a 23-month suspended prison sentence. In February 2019, José Mourinho was given a one-year suspended prison sentence and agreed to pay €2.2m in fines after admitting tax fraud while he was the manager of Real Madrid.
The following year, the Atlético Madrid forward Diego Costa paid a fine of €543,208 after pleading guilty to defrauding the tax authorities of more than €1m by not declaring payments of more than €5.15m from his 2014 move to Chelsea.