An Unclosed Verdict: From Mendoza, Football Sees Its Own Child-Safeguarding Gap

Twenty years in prison, plus a permanent ten-year ban on holding any role involving the care, education, or custody of minors. That is the sentence handed down by the Tribunal Penal Colegiado No. 2 in Mendoza, Argentina, on a recent day in August, against the Japanese Catholic religious sister Kumiko Kosaka. The site of the alleged offences was the Instituto Antonio Próvolo — a residential school for deaf students that was closed after denunciations. The victims, according to the case file, were five deaf students. The convicted woman is not in custody. She is barred from leaving Mendoza and has surrendered her passport. The sentence is not final, because defence counsel has announced an appeal. I read this account several times, and what made me stop was not the figure of 20 years. It was the legal status of that figure: a sentence handed down but not closed. The verdict is still suspended between the courtroom and an as-yet-undefined appellate instance — and much can happen inside that suspension. According to the account I have, this is not the first time the case has been brought to judgment. In 2026, the court had acquitted. The Supreme Court of Justice of Mendoza province then reviewed the matter and found that the evidence at the first trial had been analysed in a fragmented manner — that is, the pieces of fact had been viewed in isolation rather than assembled into a whole. The result: the acquittal was annulled, and responsibility was ordered to be re-determined. The prosecution (Fiscalía) and the victims' representatives requested a 22-year term. The court imposed 20 years plus a 10-year ban on child-related professional activity. The two-year gap between the 22-year request and the 20-year ruling is a small but telling signal. It suggests the panel accepted some mitigation argument, or weighted the counts differently. But the larger gap lies elsewhere: between a 20-year sentence and an acquittal just two years earlier, the amplitude is so wide that any hasty conclusion becomes suspect. Three facts belong together. First: the Instituto Antonio Próvolo has been closed. Closing an educational institution is the heaviest administrative measure available — it means the regulator has admitted that on-site oversight failed entirely. Second: a central figure in the scandal was Nicola Corradi, who died in 2026 under house arrest. According to the account, Corradi had links to a similarly named institution in Verona, Italy — the Instituto Próvolo (Verona). One person, two institutions, two countries. That is a cross-border personnel-movement pattern, not two isolated events. Third: the account describes the case as one of the most serious scandals in the Catholic Church in Argentina, with testimony referencing multiple priests, workers, and other persons connected to the institute. Not one individual. A network. Put those three facts together and you get a structure painfully familiar to anyone who has read files on abuse in youth football. I have written about football for more than forty years. I have sat in the meeting rooms of youth academies, read internal reports on background-check procedures, and watched how federations react when a case breaks. And what I have learned — what the data has taught me — is that abuse cases in football are almost never the story of a single bad actor. They are the story of a system without independent reporting channels, without cross-organisational personnel screening, and without any body empowered to close the door before it is too late. Mendoza gives us a model to observe. Let us begin with the most easily overlooked element: the ancillary penalty. The 20-year prison term belongs to the criminal track. But the ten-year ban on child-related roles is the real preventive instrument. The two mechanisms operate independently. A person may be awaiting appeal, at liberty, not in custody — yet still bound by the professional ban. In institutional design, the professional ban is the only instrument that works independently of the speed of the justice system. This is something professional football has learned, but unevenly. A coach under investigation can be suspended from practice immediately, while a criminal sentence takes years. Yet not every federation has an automatic practice-suspension mechanism. Most organisations only have a reactive disciplinary process — meaning they act only after a court decision. And in the interval between denunciation and court decision, the accused may still have contact with children. In Mendoza, the institution was closed. That was a decisive act. But what was the price of reaching that decisive act? According to the account, denunciations had existed for years, and some testimony referenced victims being threatened to prevent disclosure. The case only surfaced with full force around 2026. That is nearly a decade before the first verdict. And after that first verdict, it took another annulment and a retrial to reach the current ruling. A decade, plus one acquittal reversal, plus one pending appeal. This is the timeline I want you to remember, because it explains why "closing an institution" is not the same as "solving the problem". When I look at similar cases in football — youth academies that have erupted in scandal across Europe and South America — I see the same temporal pattern. An initial denunciation appears. No clear action. Victims are persuaded that speaking up will lead nowhere. Years later, a press investigation opens the door. Federations establish inquiry commissions. Personnel are suspended. And then comes a long legal process in which convictions can be reversed on appeal. What Mendoza teaches more clearly than any football case is the reversibility of judgment. The provincial court once acquitted. That verdict was annulled. A new conviction was handed down. That new conviction is now under appeal. Nothing in this chain is an endpoint. Each step is a temporary state. And if an educational institution, a religious order, or a football federation builds its policy on the assumption that a court ruling is the endpoint, that policy is built on sand. I don't watch the player running; I watch the space he leaves behind. In this story, that space is the interval between hearings. That is where the system actually operates — or actually fails. Another element I want to raise, because it is a point any data analyst must state plainly: the sourcing of this account is very thin. Of the information points I read, most carry no specific attribution. Only two judicial bodies are named as sources: the Tribunal Penal Colegiado No. 2 of Mendoza and the Supreme Court of Justice of Mendoza province. The original news outlet is not identified. This does not make the story false — but it means we are working with a reconstruction, not a primary file. There is a dating problem I must flag. According to some information points, the acquittal-annulment ruling is placed in August 2026, while the resulting sentence is reported as current. If 2026 is correct, the timeline has a gap. If another date is correct, an information point has been mis-transcribed. Either way, the chronology cannot be fully trusted until verified. I raise this not to diminish the seriousness of the case. I raise it because it is my working principle: numbers do not lie, but they know how to keep silent. And a silent figure — a silent date — is a figure that needs to be questioned. Now to the part I consider most discussable, and it is uncomfortable. The account of the Mendoza case frames this verdict as a historic milestone. Administratively, that holds. A religious sister convicted of child sexual abuse at a Catholic institution in Argentina is a rare precedent. But the very act of framing creates a blind spot. The blind spot is this: when we frame a verdict as "historic", we inadvertently reinforce the feeling that the problem has been resolved. That justice has been done. That the door has closed. But the sentence is not final. The convicted woman is still outside. The appellate hearing has not taken place. And a precedent only has real value when it becomes a reference point for subsequent cases — which we cannot yet know. In football analysis, I see this phenomenon constantly. A team wins three in a row, and the media calls it "peak form". But look closely at the data, and those three games may have been against weak opponents, with scorelines shaped by error. Four weeks later, the team loses four straight, and the media calls it a "crisis". Both readings are wrong. The truth lies in between: that team is an ordinary team. The Mendoza case is the same. The 20-year sentence is not the endpoint of the story. It is one data point in a long, continuing sequence. I want to offer another contrarian point, and it will please no one. In child sexual abuse scandals, the public tends to focus on individuals. A nun. A priest. A coach. An academy director. Individual focus creates a sense of satisfaction — a face to assign guilt to, a name to denounce. But the structure of these scandals is not individual. It lies in the absence of independent reporting channels, in a culture of silence maintained by institutions, in the rotation of suspected personnel from one institution to another instead of suspension. In Mendoza, Nicola Corradi appears at both the Próvolo Institute in Mendoza and the Próvolo Institute in Verona. That is a pattern of cross-national personnel rotation. In football, this pattern exists in the form of youth academies with partner networks across multiple countries, allowing coaches, assistants, and support staff to move across borders without any shared screening mechanism. A person leaving one institution under suspicion can be hired at another in a different country — where the file does not follow them. This is not a hypothesis about any specific incident. It is structure. And structure is something organisations can change. One of the most effective mechanisms I have seen in sports governance systems is a cross-national practice registry: a list of persons banned from child-related roles, shared among national federations. When a coach is suspended by federation A, federation B knows before signing a contract. This mechanism exists, but only in a handful of federations. Most operate on trust — meaning on the assumption that no one cross-checks. Mendoza shows the cost of not cross-checking. There is something I want to say to sports journalists, because I have been in this trade for nearly half a century. When a story like this lands on a sports reporter's desk, the natural reflex is to exclude it. "This isn't football." That reflex is reasonable if you are handling a league report. It is not reasonable if you are handling policy. Football federations around the world have child-safety departments. They have child-protection specialists. They have internal investigation procedures. Those departments and specialists need to read rulings like the Mendoza one — not because they are connected to the case, but because the legal structure of the case points to where their own procedures can break in the same way. Three structural lessons from Mendoza. First, the professional ban must operate independently of the criminal process. If a coach is only suspended after a final criminal conviction, he can still have contact with children throughout the proceedings — and in Mendoza, those proceedings lasted nearly a decade. Second, closing one institution does not mean protecting children from other institutions. Personnel move. In football, a coach suspended at one academy can find work at another — often in another country — within months. Cross-border screening is a precondition, not an option. Third, and this is the hardest point, decisions rendered in a courtroom can be reversed. In 2026, this person was acquitted. Two years later, she was sentenced to 20 years. If an organisation builds policy solely on the legal outcome at a single moment, that policy is not durable. Child-safety policy must be built on the preventive principle — protecting children even before a conviction, and maintaining protection even if a conviction is reversed. I have spent most of my career analysing football by counting what can be counted: passes, presses, distances between lines. But there are things in football you cannot count with numbers. You cannot count the children who stayed silent because no one asked. You cannot count the times a denunciation was filed away in a drawer. The uncountable things are often the most important. So what is the question for football? The question is not whether a particular federation is connected to a particular case. The question is: if Mendoza happened inside a football academy — if a coach, an assistant, an institution manager committed similar acts against five young deaf players — how long would the system take to respond? If the answer is "nearly a decade", we have a problem. If the answer is "it depends on which country the person is in", we have a problem. If the answer is "we will act when there is a final conviction", we have a bigger problem. I follow matches as an analyst, and my method has always been to cross-check before speaking. In this case, I must acknowledge that the sourcing remains thin. There is an unresolved date. Further verification is needed before firm conclusions. But there is one conclusion I am ready to offer now, because it does not depend on contested details. A system that only begins protecting children at the moment a court ruling exists is a system that has abandoned children during the longest period of all — the period before the ruling exists. Football can do better. Not by writing yet another new regulation, but by moving the moment of action forward — before a conviction, before a formal denunciation, at the stage of personnel screening and the design of independent reporting channels in every academy. In Mendoza, one door has closed. But the question remains open. And it is waiting for football to answer.