R&S credits on footballers' diets: investigation of 33 British clubs

The difficulty of interpreting the bottlenecks to obtain tax credits - to be benevolent - or the thousands of ways to collect public money without merit, contrary to what one is led to believe, are not an all-Italian peculiarity, on the contrary.

This is demonstrated by the litigation opened by the tax authorities of His Majesty King Charles, sovereign of the fair play empire and former Duke of Edinburgh, against a Scottish football club with a discreet coat of arms, Dundee United, a premiership team best known for the nicknames of its players (The Terrors) and fans (The Arabs). A case that arose after the Crown's Revenues & Customs agency became aware of the peculiar reasons that allowed the club to collect £1.27 million in Research & Development tax credits without title, says the Revenue.

The club's consultants, the Glasgow-based Zlx company tracked down by the investigative journalists of the Times, allegedly convinced the professional team's administrators that a24% of the footballers' time/work - i.e. pay - is in fact a laboratory not so much of ideas, but of data about their physical activity, nutrition, calorie consumption, performance enhancement etc. An all-round scientific laboratory, so much so that it also involves the time/work of the team's cooks, 80% of which would be science-oriented - and therefore translated into more prosaic R&S credits.

This narrative, however, is not believed - not at all - by Her Majesty's Revenue, according to which the R&S programme must fit into a field of scientific uncertainty such that an expert in the subject cannot easily resolve it - and obviously find a verifiable, testable scientific solution that produces progress for the community, and not instead a mere fiscal return for the club.

The recourse to fanciful claims (assuming they are proved to be such) would not, however, be a distortion of the Terrors alone. The persistence of the Times' journalists, who in the face of collective silence have invoked the Freedom of Information Act (Foia), has revealed that the matter is in the eye of the storm of the British fiscal authorities, involving 'at least 33 professional clubs' of the four founding federations of the world's most popular game, for amounts that at the moment would exceed the £17 million erroneously posted to R&S.