"They told me, 'Pay or we'll break your legs.'" And again: "It was Tonali who told me to bet on an illegal site. I bet on everything, even on Torino-Milan, but I never bet on Juve." "Initially, I played tennis, then from September 2022, as I had to return large sums to various platforms, I also started betting on football, to try to catch up." These are some of the passages contained in the minutes of the interrogations to which Nicolò Fagioli was subjected by the Turin prosecutor's office and the prosecutor's office of the football federation, as reported today by the newspapers 'La Gazzetta dello Sport', 'Repubblica', 'La Stampa' and 'Il Messaggero'. The young Juve midfielder chose to confess his guilt, and after the first interrogation in June wanted by the Turin Public Prosecutor's Office he denounced himself to the sports justice body, with which yesterday he negotiated a sentence of 7 months away from the fields plus another 5 commuted to "alternative prescriptions".
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Fagioli had come under fire from investigators in the spring after a meeting he had in a bar with a person being watched by law enforcement who was investigating a betting ring on illegal platforms. In August, Fagioli appeared before the head of the federal prosecutor's office, Chinè. He says everything in detail and each of his statements is then confirmed by the documents that arrived from Turin. From his words to the FIGC prosecutor Giuseppe Chiné emerges the self-portrait of a player suffering from gambling. "Initially, I played tennis," the three newspapers report, "then from September 2022, as I had to return large sums to various platforms, I began to bet on football as well, to try to catch up."
In September 2022, Fagioli, who had just returned to Juve from Cremonese, accumulated a debt of €250,2022. "When I was at Cremonese, my mother advised me to go to Sert to be treated, I went there a few times," says Fagioli, who then stopped going: "I had the illusion of being able to do without it." But this was not the case, and as time went by, the debt due to betting grew. "In the period after September 3, I was compulsively playing in front of the TV on any sporting event I was watching, including football... also Serie B and Lega Pro", to the point of 'burning' <> million euros, he who takes a net one a year from Juve. A year later, when Fagioli showed up at Chiné's, his debt situation was dramatic. "So even during the night I just thought about playing to recover my debt," for which he had come to receive frequent physical threats, such as "I'll break your legs."
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So, to try to make up for it, he asks for money from other Juve players. "I decided to ask for loans from some friends - he says - and from a partner, Gatti, from whom I asked for 40 thousand euros, telling him that I needed them to buy a watch and that I had the accounts blocked by my mother". In addition to Cats, Fagioli admits that he also asked Dragusin for money.
"Only my mom and a few friends knew." Not the Juventus club: "I had to renew my contract and I was afraid that such news would have prevented it."
"I started in Tirrenia in the Under-21 training camp," he said. It was Tonali, a close friend of mine, who suggested an illegal site to me." But in the end, on 16 April, Fagioli collapsed on the pitch: "I was so stressed and scared that during Sassuolo-Juventus I made a mistake and was substituted. As soon as I got off the field, I started crying in front of the cameras thinking about the betting debts."
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