Pellai Betting: “Gambling addiction is the pathology of desire”

Young, rich, famous… yet gambling addicts. The most common question is: why? The arduous answer is entrusted to Alberto Pellai, a well-known writer of over 100 texts, mostly focused on the world of childhood, adolescence and youth. But also a doctor and psychotherapist, as well as a father of four children, therefore with 360 degree expertise and experience on the subject, also seasoned with a great passion for sport. From “Everything too soon” to “My boy. Letter to the real men of tomorrow”, up to “The path of the shells”, stories of mistakes and redemptions, but also advice and reflections that converge on a central concept in the cases that involve today Fagioli and many other colleagues: make your success a consequence of your actions and not the cause.

What drives some of the best young promises of Italian football to delve into the world of betting to the point of being swallowed up by it?

“Gambling addiction is a pathology of desire. You can’t stop desiring something that represents a value for you. The news tells us about young people who have very quickly arrived at having everything in life that a person could desire, and who despite this still direct their desire in a direction that seems impossible to ordinary people, that of further increasing their wealth. This happens because the economic value is an identity value for them: if the value with which the footballers in question measure themselves is that of how much they are valued , or that of the money they possess or the riches they flaunt, it is possible that their desire is centered on that and directed towards that, at the cost of losing everything. This in my opinion is the trigger, hence the entry into gambling addiction by investing energy, time and desire towards something that they consider very important”.

From the adrenaline of a perhaps illegal bet to addiction, the passage is often shorter than one might imagine.

“When you enter the world of betting, it is the system that does everything else: you are hooked through the dopaminergic circuits to a behavior which, precisely because it is regulated by dopamine, the more you repeat it, the more it becomes a fixed and obsessive thought and you would never want to interrupt it. In the end you enter a space in which you believe you can have what you most desire and what satisfies you and instead paradoxically you find yourself trapped in a cage from which you can no longer escape and in which you risk losing everything you had and which allowed you to enter that cage.”

Career at risk due to possible disqualifications, image heavily branded: why aren’t deterrents enough?

“Addiction becomes something that is no longer managed on a cognitive level: you get into it because you have needs that you have not been able to satisfy in any other way, but once you are into it it is as if there were a magnetic field that completely disconnects the principle of wanting, of will, of motivation. Addiction becomes an unstoppable passion, no longer manageable on the level of logic and rationality”.

This story also shows us a great fragility of the person: how can we prevent the risk?

“It seems to me that there is a lot of difficulty in building very young champions who reach the top of the world at the age of less than 20. In my opinion, football should invest the same amount of time, energy and money in educational potential that it invests in the footballing growth of kids And instead there are many agents and few educators in the world of athletes in training, and little reflection on the importance of the “know how to be” of these kids compared to their “know how to do”. With the result that they find themselves driving a Ferrari with the moped license in hand.”

A theme of maturity, but also of ethics and values.

“These kids find themselves, very young and completely unprepared, having to manage sums of money that are unthinkable for professionals in other sectors – let’s also think of doctors who have been saving human lives for 40 years – and they don’t have the ability to use it in a direction that is functional to their real needs of life and growth. A decisive role is that of the family which can act as a great stabilizer, and from before a boy becomes a champion. A good educational project can bring together sporting growth and studies, so that residual energies and free time are dedicated to the development of skills that have a completely different value, to complete your human dimension”. An educational project has a solid system of values, a direction in life, a motivation that orients us, a way of experiencing self-realization and self-satisfaction that directs us towards other things

Is there a way to prevent the problem of the attraction of betting, and above all its drift into gambling addiction?

“Prevention lies in the construction of the person. The cases that have emerged tell us about young adults who need to satisfy real and profound needs in their lives, to which they have given dysfunctional and fictitious responses. They have entered adulthood without having built a competent and solid self-identification. Perhaps greater environmental control and different supervision could have avoided certain drifts, as well as a different group dynamic: a team is such when it knows how to protect a teammate in his aspects of vulnerability and fragility. We are struck from the domino effect that seems to have arisen: it’s as if everyone knew but no one reacted, at least that’s the impression from the outside.”

Is it possible that the virtual dimension, a favorite place for illegal betting, also distances the perception of reality?

“Online is a place of non-control: there are no limits, boundaries, real rules and therefore it unleashes the most impulsive and dopaminergic part of us, and we do the worst. If in real life we ​​encounter some containment, given for example by relationships, from the comparison with the other understood as a natural person, in the virtual world this “edge” does not exist. And therefore losing a million euros on a social level has a very different impact”.

Fagioli was sentenced by sports justice to 12 months, of which 5 alternative prescriptions. A totally new sanction formula, which combines the afflictive part with the re-educational part: what do you think it should consist of? What measures could be effective in terms of re-education?

“The re-education key wants to redirect you towards a different ability to manage the difficulty of living within a reality principle. A boy who loses a million euros in a few months is evidently outside the reality principle, and therefore rehabilitation will go in the direction of reintroducing him in a real world, made up of real people, who have real problems and real challenges and where even money has a real value. The great richness of rehabilitation paths also lies in the relational value with the people you meet, feeling that your value it is not only in the money you earn and that you have to manage but in your being a bearer of social capital. Furthermore, an athlete knows what it means to be a team player, and in this path that awaits him he can bring that value into contexts that cannot be monetised, in which his contribution may not be a victory on the field but a victory in life.”