Tonali Banned

Why Are We Punishing Someone for Having Some Self-Belief?

B. N. Dent

Before getting into the crux of this article, let me transport you into a different life and reality. A life where you are a boy at Shore who is a pivotal member of the mighty 14Ds football team. Yet you are in a reality, identical to our own, except for the fact that sports betting is available. This means that anyone can bet on any GPS game being played on a Saturday. Keep this reality in mind as you read on.

The first three games of the season have already rolled around, and let’s just say that the 14Ds are off to a beautiful start. The defence is impenetrable. The passing is crisp and accurate. The finishing is sharp. And with the telepathic level of chemistry displayed by your team, spectators would’ve thought you were related by blood. With this impeccable form in the back of your mind, and next weekend’s fixture against Riverview looming ever nearer, your mind begins to formulate some ideas. You’ve had some success betting on the 8ths footy, but you feel that your position holds far more untapped profitability. You know that it is illegal to bet on your own team, but you wouldn’t be fixing the match and betting on yourself to lose. Instead, you would be backing your own team to win, hedging your bets in good faith. You have a battle with your own morality, eventually convincing yourself that it is a sound decision. You place the bet, and it pays. Weeks later, however, an irregular surge is observed in your level of tuckshop spending. The dots are then connected, and you are convicted of your crime.

Quite a rollercoaster couple of weeks in that alternate reality, but now you are back. I hope that, from the scenario above, you can now understand why betting and sporting organisations across the globe prohibit players from betting on the outcomes associated with themselves or their own team. For the case of betting on a loss, the rationale behind banning this is lucid, as it is far easier for players to intentionally throw a game. However, the reasoning relating to why players cannot bet on their own team to win is less clear. Organisations equate this scenario to that of insider trading, whereby players will have greater information than the public (the predominant demographic they will be betting against), thus gaining an unfair edge and creating an imbalanced playing field. Most organisations even take it one step further, forbidding players from betting on any fixtures in the league they are a part of.

Recently, Newcastle United player Sandro Tonali has been involved in what has been labelled as the biggest betting scandal to impact Italian football in 40 years. Just less than a week ago, the 23-year-old Italian footballer was officially slapped with a ten month ban from football at all levels, including professional and international. Specifically, he had violated betting rules in place by the Italian Football Federation. Under investigation, he was found to have been placing bets whilst playing for his former teams, these being Brescia and AC Milan, respectively. He bet through illegal sports gambling platforms, including ‘Betart’ and ‘Icebet’, which he thought were untraceable. Thankfully, he never bet on his teams to lose, meaning there was no element of alleged match-fixing, for which the penalties would have been far more severe. Unfortunately for Tonali, he also failed to come forward about his illegal actions prior to being caught, which increased the degree of punishment. 

Sandro Tonali thinking about whether the bet he placed is going to pay.

Tonali had only recently signed for Newcastle in July of this year for 70 million Euros, thus monetarily becoming the most valuable Italian player ever. With this in mind, Newcastle fans have been devastated over the past week as they will be deprived of a star player needed to fix what has been a less than ideal start to the season for the club. On another note, some fans and other media outlets even suspect something fishy, in that Tonali’s former club, AC Milan, may have known about his eventual conviction and therefore decided to sell him with this in mind. Although the dates of these events are suspiciously close, I think that this is a bit of an outlandish claim as AC Milan would be exposing themselves to an unnecessary degree of risk. Then again, with all of the corruption that has surrounded football over the past decade, especially with regard to FIFA, it would be unwise to rule this out as a possibility.