San Jose, Costa Rica
the goalkeeper Keylor Navas (PSG, France) he lost a defamation lawsuit he filed against two former Costa Rican football leaders, although he will receive about $ 5,000 in civil reparations, a San Jose court ruled on Friday.
Navas, along with Bryan Ruiz (Alajuelense) and Celso Borges (Deportivo La Coruña), had sued leaders Adrián Gutiérrez and Juan Carlos Román to say in an interview that the players threatened to lose games to fire the then tic coach, the Colombian Jorge Luis Pinto in 2014.
The alleged threat would have occurred at a meeting of which “there are no acts, it was not transmitted, there were only footballers and managers,” the court said, according to the newspaper La Nación on its website Internet.
Navas ‘lawsuit is based on an interview granted by Gutiérrez in 2018, where he explained the players’ alleged intentions on their return from the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, against their coach.
According to La Nación, the court found that the leaders made a “prohibition error”, that is, they acted thinking that the comments they made were not illegal.
Navas and his colleagues, who admitted to disagreeing with Pinto over an apparent excess of hard hand, denied plotting against him.
The leaders’ claims were ratified at trial by former Costa Rican football president Eduardo Li, who mentioned an alleged clause in the contract that allowed Pinto to be fired if he lost 3 consecutive games.
He went so far as to say that Navas and his colleagues threatened to lose these three games.
For his part, the Colombian DT, who testified via the internet as a witness at the trial, explained that he warned Li of the players’ intentions. But, according to the portal crhoy.com, he denied having signed a contract with this clause.
Eventually, the court agreed to the original contract, and did not find the one asserted by Li.
“What Li denies is the existence of the clause and such a clause did not exist in the contract,” the court determined, which recommended prosecuting for “lying under oath.”
The former head of Costa Rican football was already involved in a corruption scandal that affected FIFA, and in 2017 he was disqualified for life for holding office at the institution.
Despite losing the lawsuit, the court recommended that Navas and his colleagues receive the equivalent of $ 5,000 each, as civil reparation, far less than the nearly $ 60,000 they had initially requested.