A new scandal in Italian football: at least three players, including two from the national team, are accused of having bet on football matches on pirate sites. The affair caused a stir in Italy.
Imagine that in the middle of a gathering of the French team, the police arrive at Clairefontaine and ask to question, for example, Adrien Rabiot and Benjamin Pavard. The equivalent arrived last week in Italy. As the Nazionale prepared a series of qualifying and delicate matches for Euro 2024, the Guardia di Finanza arrived at the team’s training center. And two stars, Sandro Tonali and Nicolo Zaniolo, had to leave the group and leave their cell phones to the police.
They are accused of having bet on matches on clandestine sites. But for civil justice, their case is secondary. In this file, which has been open for a long time, investigators are mainly looking to get their hands on bigwigs of the Mafia. On a sporting level, the matter is serious. They risk three years of suspension. Both players now play in England but until last year they were at AC Milan and AS Roma.
At the origin of the scandal, a paparazzo who feeds social networks with more or less reliable revelations. An unsavory man, very well established in the world of football and who did a few stints in prison. We wonder how many names will emerge over the weeks… The first to come out was that of a player from Juventus Turin, Nicolo Fagioli. He admitted the facts and his collaboration with the courts will allow him to see his suspension sentence reduced. We take the same path for Sandro Tonali, one of the two players on the Italian team.
The symptom of a gaming addiction
The question that comes to mind is: what on earth are players who win hundreds of thousands of euros going to do on sports betting sites? The answer is gaming addiction, “ludopatia” in Italian. Fagioli admitted in court to having had debts of up to three million euros.
A federation of associations specializing in social action is warning of the explosion in the practice of games of chance among young people. She takes the example of the year 2021: nearly 1.4 million new accounts were opened by 18-24 year olds, according to this federation. Football pros combine risk factors: young people, boys, with very poor money management education…
A specialist on the subject, who supports one of the footballers, recalls in the press that scientists place addiction to games of chance in the same category as drugs.