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Massimo Cellino is a businessman who lives in Miami, so he has to act the part. He likes to live life on the edge and sometimes his relationship with the law is the same. Just check his ‘controversies’ section on Wikipedia if you don’t believe me. So when he saw a rare opportunity to make a few million euros off the back of Sandro Tonali’s £100m move to Tottenham, he grabbed it by the horns like one assumed Massimo would have when confronted with Modicana cows of his native Sardinia during his youth. Despite plunging Brescia into bankruptcy last summer and refusing to grant the ‘phoenix club’ the rights to the Rondinelle’s famed crest and V-shape shirt pattern, the considerable solidarity payment owed to the defunct Brescia from Tonali’s big move was enough to awaken Cellino from his, erm, traditional afternoon slumber. The new club, Union Brescia, had no claim to the sum of around £3.5m because they were formed after the city of Brescia’s mayor Laura Castelletti allowed Feralpisalo, a club with almost zero fans, to relocate to the city and play at the Mario Rigamonti stadium. It’s a move that nobody but me is calling The Reverse Pete Winkelman. Steel magnate Giuseppe Pasini stepped in to give the city a team, even if it wasn’t their 114-year-old beloved club that developed Andrea Pirlo, and at one point even had both Roberto Baggio and Pep Guardiola in the same side. Cellino kept Brescia’s official registration number when the club went bankrupt, so the sale of Tonali prompted him to reactivate it last month, with the stated aim of restarting the ‘real’ Brescia from Terza Categoria, Italy’s eighth tier. When asked if he had reactivated Brescia’s registration to scoop up the Tonali cash, Cellino said: “No. I would have received the compensation anyway. I didn’t reactivate the registration number for this reason. Time will tell.” Well, you’ve convinced me, Massimo. After all, you’ve always been in it for the love of the game and nothing else. The drama with Brescia all began when the club purchased tax credits from a third party in order to reduce their annual tax bill, a common practice in Italy. The credits turned out to be fraudulent and the seller was later arrested amid allegations of ties to a Russian organised crime group in Cyprus. Without the tax credits, Brescia lacked the funds to deal with their mounting debt, which had risen to almost €20m by the time Cellino reactivated the club’s registration last month. Brescia were effectively liquidated last summer and the subsequent relocation of Feralpisalo all but confirmed the ‘old’ Brescia was dead, but the wheels of justice move slowly in Italy, which is to say they’re almost perpetually at crawling pace. The formal, legal liquidation process of the club may never have actually seen the inside of a courtroom were it not for Cellino’s desperation to resurrect the old Brescia. Triggering the registration for 2026/27 required Cellino’s team to prove that the club could function from the eighth tier and restructure debts to avoid having to repay all creditors at a rate they couldn’t possibly afford. They managed to reduce Brescia’s repayable debts to €6.5m, which would have been mostly paid off with the Tonali money — apparently. Cellino also registered an Under-16 team in the youth league, just to show how serious he really was about taking Brescia back to their rightful place, and hoovering up a few million euros. He certainly wasn’t going to take the Tonali money and declare bankruptcy (again) in a year’s time. Spurs manager Roberto De Zerbi is a lifelong Brescia fan, his father was one of the ultras leaders in the 1980s and is well regarded around the club. Spending £100m to take Tonali, the best Brescia academy graduate since Pirlo, maybe he secretly hoped that his boyhood team might benefit from the money — but the Bankruptcy Court of Brescia had other ideas. His proposal was outright rejected and the old Brescia were formally liquidated on Cellino’s 70th birthday. “I spent my birthday surrounded by lawyers preparing the appeal,” he said. Cellino contends to this day that the decision to liquidate Brescia in summer 2025 was unfair because he was “deceived” by the fraudulent tax credits. As we learned at Leeds, due diligence isn’t really his bag. One final roll of the dice when a sniff of money came along, a year after walking away from Brescia as the club initially folded — how very Massimo. The Tonali cash will now go into a FIFA pot, which one can only assume Gianni Infantino might need for certain reasons in the coming months. Cynically rinsing something for all it’s worth is only cool if you’re Max Gradel, someone we actually like. “I wouldn’t even consider working in football again,” Cellino told Il Giorno, repeating his tired old shtick whenever he gets into trouble. “Too much has changed — uncertain owners, sporting directors who earn a fortune, overpaid players. I wouldn’t know how to do it anymore.” Fans of Leeds, Cagliari and Brescia would say he never knew how to run a football club in the first place. ⬢