Former Tottenham midfielder Gica Popescu has been sentenced to prison for three years for tax evasion and laundering of money.

His former team mate Gheorghe Hagi has said that he would not attend Romania’s international matches in person. He has said that he had no intentions or desires to go and watch the matches of the national team while his former team mate Gica Popescu was behind bars. Gheorghe is a midfielder who was at its best at the world cup of 1994 and also told the local media that the local football authorities had not doing anything much considerable to save and help the former captain of Romania. Not watching the international matches in solidarity is a form of his protest.

Some of the Romanian team members along with Gheorghe had gone to pay a visit to Gica. They wanted to express their best wishes and support on his birthday. Gica has been sentenced in prison for a term of three years and a month. As told by a former defender for Romania, Daniel Prodan, he was very happy to see them and know that they were there for him. It was a way of showing and telling him that he has not been forgotten and that they were all there right beside him. Gica had a very flourishing career. He had been named the player of the year in Romania six times. It is believed that soon he was also going to become the president of the domestic football federation. He was among some of the favorites. It has come to the news that Gica along with seven more people were connected to the game that was guilty of damaging the state. It was almost a sum of 1.7m Euros in unpaid taxes and hand in hand several clubs had lost 10m Euros. This was because the officials had registered false sums of money for the transfers of almost 12 players between the time period of 1999 and 2005.