Sandro Tonali is the latest victim of football’s double standards

The Newcastle midfielder faces an uncertain future with Italian police investigating illegal betting on football and, as Richard Jolly writes, the game’s ubiquity ensures it touches every wider societal issue

Newcastle United’s Sandro Tonali faces an uncertain future (Getty Images)

So Sandro Tonali has provided Newcastle with greater problems than the conundrum of if and how he and Bruno Guimaraes can play together. Not least because there is the very real possibility that the Italian and the Brazilian, some £100m of imported class, may be soon barred from taking the field together. Not, it should be said, by anything Guimaraes has done.

Investigations by the Italian police and the Italian Football Federation resulted in Tonali’s removal from the Azzurri squad. Should he be banned for illegal betting on football, the £50m signing’s season, which began with one of the great debuts in Newcastle history, could be abruptly curtailed. The precedents from Tonali’s homeland are not promising: the Juventus midfielder Nicolo Fagioli will serve a seven-month suspension for gambling on games. In Tonali’s case, there is a significant difference which could increase the sanction: he reportedly admitted to betting on AC Milan matches. Which, as he was their midfield fulcrum at the time, compounds the offence. The maximum penalty possible is a three-year ban.

Tonali may be more symptom than cause of a wider issue, more victim than offender. His agent, Giuseppe Riso, said the 23-year-old suffers from a gambling addiction. If so, he is not alone: so does Ivan Toney. The Brentford and England striker scored 20 Premier League goals last season: he has none so far this season for the simple reason he is mid-way through an eight-month ban for betting, including on his own teams to lose in games where he was not playing.

Toney and Tonali could be faces of football’s double standards. The Premier League will belatedly ban advertising by gambling companies on the front of shirts from the 2026-27 season while Serie A introduced such measures in 2019. But Brentford’s owner Matthew Benham, like his Brighton counterpart Tony Bloom and Stoke’s Peter Coates, made his millions with betting firms.

Swingeing punishments can stem from honourable motives, about a determination to keep the game clean amid the spectre of match-fixing. Those of a certain vintage may wonder if Tony Kay, the gifted Sheffield Wednesday and Everton wing-half, might have been in the 1966 World Cup-winning team: he scored on his England debut early in Sir Alf Ramsey’s reign. Yet he ended up banned for life and sent to prison for betting on Wednesday to lose a 1962 game to Ipswich in which he played (and sufficiently well that he was named man of the match).

If there are significant differences in each case, deliberate underperformance – or even anything with the appearance of it that leads to accusations of spot-fixing or match-fixing – is separate from doing something that, in various ways, an industry long urged everyone else to do and bet on football.

Some of the heftiest bans in the sport can stem from addiction: for those on Tonali’s salary, the financial gains from gambling scarcely seem part of the motivation. It may be false equivalence to suggest that Newcastle’s owners, accused of human rights abuses, have done far worse.

Sandro Tonali faces a lengthy ban from football (AFP via Getty Images)

The game’s ubiquity is such that virtually every wider issue seems to relate to football, sooner or later; for now, only some elements are punishable and it seems plausible that Tonali could receive the sort of suspension that may be incurred for taking banned substances and far lengthier than anything, say, Luis Suarez ever received for any of his on-pitch misdemeanours. The presumption, too, is that a sentence handed out in Italy would still apply in England.

Besides the questions, if that is appropriate, there are more practical issues. Newcastle have barely put a foot wrong in recruitment since their 2021 takeover, spending some £400m but with a remarkably high strike rate. The swoop for Tonali, seemingly out of the blue, had the air of a coup. There may be internal inquiries if they did their due diligence, were aware he had a gambling problem and if not, if they should have been when it could sideline the second most expensive signing in their history for the rest of the season. Research into prospective signings can extend beyond their pass-completion rate but this seems an unwelcome surprise to Newcastle.

Rewind six decades and Everton paid a then British record £60,000 for Kay, whose career was then ended due to his actions while still at Wednesday. More recently, Manchester United granted the £86m winger Antony a recent leave of absence while he addressed allegations of assault from three women. He maintained his innocence but the first incidents date back to his time at Ajax, where he also managed by Erik ten Hag. In short, should they have known? In Newcastle’s case, AC Milan may have had no duty to inform them; Tonali clearly did not, and United have pledged to support him. But when football is such big business, when the sums are so colossal, the factors are not merely moral or pastoral but financial.

Sandro Tonali was sent away from Italy’s squad during the international break (Getty Images)

In the meantime, Eddie Howe’s seemingly ambitious tactical plan, where Guimaraes and Tonali swapped positions, borrowing on the ability of each to operate as a No 6 and a No 8 but requiring an innate understanding, may be put on hold. The theory earlier in the season was that Newcastle needed the earthier values of the homegrown Sean Longstaff in their midfield. When Paris Saint-Germain were demolished 4-1 on a seminal night at St James’ Park, they had all three together.

If Tonali, their summer’s statement signing, is soon sidelined for an extended period, Newcastle will have longer to reflect on what may appear a deceptively auspicious bow, to his eighth-minute goal in the 5-1 thrashing of Aston Villa, to the days when Tonali was rebranded ‘Toonali’. And even a club often called the world’s richest may wonder if they can afford to go for months without a player designed to take them to another level.