Former Real Madrid coach Carlo Ancelotti has been sentenced to one year in prison and fined €386,361 by a Madrid court. He was found guilty of failing to pay tax on his image rights revenues from the 2014 financial year. However, he had previously been acquitted of a similar charge related to the 2015 tax year.
Ancelotti, who managed Real Madrid twice between 2013 and 2025, left the club at the end of its 2024-25 La Liga season to take charge of Brazil’s national team. The Italian coach was charged in 2020 with failing to pay around €1.62 million in taxes from his image rights.
The court found that Ancelotti had declared himself as a tax resident in Spain and listed his residence as Madrid, but failed to include the relevant income from his image rights in his tax returns. The Spanish Public Prosecutor’s Office had sought a prison sentence of four years and nine months, as well as a fine of €3.2 million.
Ancelotti defended himself, saying that he never intended to defraud and claimed it was Madrid’s obligation to withhold the correct tax from his image rights income. He testified that he negotiated a contract worth €6m net annually over three years with Real Madrid, which he believed was normal practice for coaches at the time.
The court heard from five tax experts as witnesses during the trial, but ultimately found Ancelotti guilty of tax evasion. The sentence is unusually lenient, as it’s rare for Spain to enforce prison sentences of under two years for non-violent and first-time offenders.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6320182/2025/07/09/carlo-ancelotti-tax-real-madrid