Beans and the betting abyss: “Boredom ruined me, I disgusted myself”
The interview with Veltroni: "When the 4-5 hours of training are over, a void opens up. The game was a torment, a nightmare"
ROME – Boredom. It was boredom, says Nicolò Fagioli to Walter Veltroni who interviewed him for the Gazzetta dello Sport. The Juventus midfielder has just finished serving his betting ban, and was pre-summoned by Spalletti for the pre-European training camp. And he talks very frankly about the abyss into which he ended up. “When I burst into tears in the match against Sassuolo, it wasn’t just because I had put my team in difficulty, but because at that moment a dark cloud descended, everything seemed negative to me, everything was dark. I had missed a ball, but my most serious mistake was within me. The problem was that I was no longer in control of myself. The game had devoured my life, it had become a torment, a nightmare >”.
“I know that I am a lucky boy, that there are my peers in more dramatic conditions than mine, that I have no right to invoke understanding. But I also don’t want to be hypocritical. I have been swallowed up by a void that does not it looks no one in the face, it doesn’t distinguish by social class, it doesn’t reward or absolve based on talent. I felt suffocated but I couldn’t find a way to get out of it.”
“It all started as a game – continues Fagioli – I bet a lot, but not on my team or on myself. I didn’t want to violate the principles I believe in. I know it seems grotesque that I use this word, but for me It’s important. I thought that playing football and betting, if the two lines didn’t intersect, wasn’t serious. I didn’t affect the results or damage the rights of others.”
Fagioli talks about the footballer’s loneliness: “When the 4-5 hours of training end, a void opens up for you. If you have no other interests, that abyss attracts you. I was bored, It seems absurd but it’s like this. Success is not an armor that resists loneliness, it doesn’t allow you, like armor, to bounce off the stabs of empty time. Think about how many actors, writers, musicians have fallen into addictions even more lethal. Boredom ruined my life. And then every problem, even the stupidest one like an argument or a bad game, I had to compensate for with the adrenaline rushes that the game gave me every time I used it that damn cell phone, every day and many times a day, I felt like I was on the pitch.”