Norwegian club Bodo/Glimt on Friday filed a police report against AS Roma’s assistant coach Nuno Santos. This comes after a scuffle between Santos and Glimt’s head coach Kjetil Knutsen following a UEFA Europa Conference League quarterfinal first leg match in Norway on Thursday. The home side won 2-1, having already humiliated Jose Mourinho’s team 6-1 in the group stages of the competition last October.
According to SuperSport, UEFA has since launched an investigation of the incident. Roma’s captain Lorenzo Pellegrini said after the match in an interview that Knutsen “attacking” Santos was an insult to the competition.
However, the home side conter-accused the Italians of “bombarding media with falsehoods”, claiming instead that Knutsen was the one who was attacked. Managing director of Bodo/Glimt Frode Thomassen said in a statement:
“The club sees no other choice than to report Nuno Santos to police based on the physical assault on Kjetil Knutsen. This is a systematic provocation, manipulation and finally an exercise of physical violence.”
The club also said that a video it had seen proved the attack, and that UEFA make it public so that the public saw it and made its own mind up.
Knutsen alleged:
“Everything culminated in a physical attack on me in the player tunnel. He grabbed me by the neck and pushed me into the wall. It is only natural that I then had to defend myself.”
Roma later released a statement, but did not give their own version of events, just saying that the club “has always conducted itself in a manner that upholds the values of fair play and sportsmanship”.
The statement also read:
“The club has total confidence that Uefa and its various bodies will ultimately establish with clarity and precision where responsibility lies for the events that occurred.”
