Sandro Tonali betting scandal pushes boundaries of sympathy for him and Newcastle

Sandro Tonali might be addicted, but surely not to betting on his own team, and Newcastle really should have smelled a rat. They won’t find much sympathy here…

Sandro Tonali’s a bit f***ed, and Newcastle are almost certainly very f***ed off, not with their player – for whom a reported betting addiction is enough to merit compassion rather than condemnation – but with the club who couldn’t sell him fast enough in what was considered quite the coup for the Magpies over the summer.

‘Toonali is here!’ crowed the Newcastle TikTok-er after the club agreed a £55m fee with AC Milan for their star midfielder. He had played a big part in Milan’s run to the Champions League semi-final with an all-action style, punctuated by quality, that was deemed ideal by Eddie Howe for Newcastle.

What was already thought to be an excellent signing before he had played a game for Newcastle was confirmed as a stroke of genius during his Premier League debut; Tonali scored after six minutes in the 5-1 win over Aston Villa and ran the game at St James’ Park. ‘How have we pulled this off?’ wondered an army of Toon fans.

How indeed? Reports at the time of his transfer claimed Milan were ‘forcing out’ Tonali to balance the books. Newcastle met their asking price and off he went. Tonali apparently ‘broke down in tears’ at the thought of leaving Milan, where he wanted to ‘stay for the rest of his career’.

If Milan really did need to sell players to get themselves into the black, why didn’t they sell anyone else? If they were desperate enough to show their young, homegrown future captain the door, why did they not push for more money from the richest club in world football in the year of £100m midfielders? Balancing the books doesn’t typically involve spending €40m than you make.

There will be little sympathy for the Public Investment Fund of Newcastle, a) because they’re the Public Investment Fund, and b) because they would have smelled a rat had they done their due diligence rather than revelling in a deal that was too good to be true.

Ironically, there will be more sympathy for Tonali than the club he’s screwed with his antics. Like Ivan Toney, the 23-year-old is protected by the shield of gambling addiction. “He is playing the most important game of his career, that of gambling addiction, but I am sure he will win it,” his agent said, to obsequious well-wishing and an absence of admonishment.

It’s a damaging and very real addiction, and we have no reason to doubt the veracity of Tonali’s claim. But we haven’t heard anything to suggest Tonali was addicted to betting on his own club’s games and doubt whether that very specific form of narcissistic gambling exists. That is a crossed line.

There will be sympathy for Newcastle for being blindly ambushed by this furore, and sympathy for Tonali for falling foul of a disease that makes criticism impossible for fear of the condemners becoming the condemned. In both cases, the sympathy should have its limits.