Dani Alves, the former Barcelona star handed four-and-a-half-year prison term for rape

Dani Alves, a Brazilian football player, was found guilty and given a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence for molesting a woman in a Barcelona nightclub in 2022.  

Thursday's ruling by the top court in Catalonia, Spain, also mandated that Alves, who had insisted all along that the intercourse was consensual, give the victim $150,000 euros ($163,000). 

The Provincial Court of Barcelona said in a statement, "The sentence considers that it has been proven that the victim did not consent and that there is evidence, in addition to the plaintiff's testimony, to consider the rape proven."  

Alves was to serve nine years in prison, according to the prosecution. Appealing the verdict is possible.  

The 40-year-old former Barcelona defender was arrested in January last year and has been held on remand since then. 

The case has attracted significant attention not only because of Alves’s profile but because gender violence has become an increasingly dominant topic in Spain’s public discourse. 

It has been one of the most high-profile trials in Spain since a law was passed in 2022 that made consent a key element in sexual assault cases and increased the minimum prison time for assaults involving violence. 

Alves’s lawyers were not immediately reachable for comment. 

“We are satisfied as the sentence recognises what we’ve been saying all along: that the victim was telling the truth and that she suffered,” lawyer David Saenz told reporters outside the courthouse, adding that his team would still analyse whether the sentence corresponds to the gravity of the crime. 

Alves won more than 40 trophies for Brazil and clubs that included Barcelona, Sevilla, Juventus and Paris St Germain. After his arrest, he was fired by his then-employers, the Mexican club Pumas UNAM.