Nevermind About the Match-Fixing, Or: Another Win for Falsini and Pantanelli

By: Martha | September 12th, 2007

Pantanelli and Cruz Gianluca Falsini and Armando Pantanelli are having quite a summer. First, they were frozen out by Catania (Pantanelli has since moved to Avellino in Serie B) and not even allowed to train with the rest of the squad, then they actually won the lawsuit they brought against the club for the Shocking!Treatment they received, and were restored to normal training as a result.

Then, to make matters worse, they were accused of match-fixing after a pair of highly suspicious matches in which goalkeeper Pantanelli made egregious errors that just happened to pay off people who had bet heavily on odd results. (Falsini didn’t actually play in the matches, but he allegedly bet on them both and won money thanks to Pantanelli’s sudden attacks of uselessness.) Oddly, no formal charges were brought, but the papers reported the accusations, and an investigation did take place.

To make matters worse, shortly after the match-fixing issue came up, Falsini received a death threat. And when I say “death threat,” I mean “two guys walked up to him after training and told him they’d kill him if he didn’t leave the club.” Seriously. That should really help Catania fans improve their reputations, huh? Falsini went to the cops and filed a complaint, though since the two men were described as “unidentified,” I don’t know what good he thought was going to come out of it.

Now, though, Falsini and Pantenelli have won again: Not only are they both still alive, but also the investigation concluded that neither man did anything wrong, and the duo has been officially cleared. (Apparently the convergence of Pantanelli’s sudden bursts of suckage and large bets was pure coincidence.) That said, it’s hard to imagine those sweet, loving Catania fans will forgive Falsini no matter what the facts are, and he’s surely working on finding a way out of the club, ideally to a team that never, ever has to travel to Sicily.