Carlo Ancelotti's trial begins: he faces nearly five years in prison for tax evasion

12 hours after celebrating Real Madrid's victory over Real Sociedad and reaching the Copa del Rey final, Carlo Ancelotti has sit in the defendant's bench at the Provincial Court of Madrid, where Ancelotti is suspect of committing two tax offenses, amounting to over one million euros. Prosecutors are asking four years and nine months in prison.

The trial has begun on Wednesday, and the Italian manager has plead not guilty, saying that he had never intention of committing fraud against the public treasury, saying that all his tax affairs had been done by his advisors. The Italian manager is charged with evading 386,361 euros in 2014 and 675,718 euros in 2015, his first two years as manager at Real Madrid.

More specifically, Ancelotti is suspect of transferring his image rights to companies based outside of Spain only to evade paying taxes. According to the manager, Real Madrid proposed him that, he then asked his advisor "and after that, I never went into the matter because everything seemed correct to me. I didn't think it could be fraud, although if I'm here, I think things weren't so correct" he added (via EFE).

The trial is expected to last for two days, depending if the defendant reaches an agreement with prosecutors to pay a monetary fine so that he doesn't go to jail, which frequently happens in these type of cases, which aren't uncommon for footballers, as it happened with cases like Cristiano Ronaldo, Leo Messi, Xabi Alonso, and Jose Mourinho.