Don’t make him a pariah, send him to visit football clubs up and down the land

The picture that emerged of england striker Ivan Toney yesterday when the written reasons for his eightmonth ban from football were released by the FA was of a man in thrall to an illness, an illness fed and watered by the sport that has exiled him.

Toney deserved to be punished for his 232 breaches of gambling regulations and the details of the offences he committed shone a light on a seamy football sub-culture of deracinated young men awash with disposable income and free time, bombarded by betting adverts, ripe for exploitation.

Toney was diagnosed with a gambling addiction by a psychiatric expert as part of the investigation into his gambling activities, which only heightens concerns about the mixed messages being sent to players who have been running out on to the pitch with the names of gambling companies on their shirts and on perimeter hoardings at every ground.

There was nothing in the written reasons, sobering and extensive though they were, to change the mind of those who continue to feel that the punishment meted out to Toney — particularly the ban on even training with Brentford for the next four months — is not just harsh but counter-productive.

Some greeted the revelation in the written reasons that Toney had bet on his own team to lose 13 times with the horror such a statement would usually deserve. except, in Toney’s case, he wasn’t actually playing for his ‘own team’ when he gambled on them.

When Toney bet on Newcastle to lose, he was out on loan at Wigan. On the couple of occasions he bet on Wigan to lose, he wasn’t even in the matchday squad, let alone on the bench or in the team.

he broke the rules. he shouldn’t have been betting on football at all. he should have known better. And, again, he deserves to be punished. But let’s not try to make this seem worse than it was by pretending he could have influenced results.

More than 60 years ago, english football was rocked by its last great betting scandal. Sheffield Wednesday players Peter Swan, Tony Kay and David ‘ Bronco’ Layne each bet £50 on their team to lose at Alf Ramsey’s Ipswich Town in December 1962 at odds of 2-1. each man played in the match and although they claimed to have tried their hardest and Kay was judged the game’s outstanding player, Wednesday lost 2-0 and the three men made a £100 profit. When their crime was exposed, they were banned from football for life.

Betting against your own team is, rightly, an emotive subject because it raises the possibility that a player could have thrown a match.

It strikes right at the heart of the legitimacy of the game and that is why such swingeing sanctions were visited on Swan, Kay and Layne, however excessive they seem now.

Toney’s offence is not remotely comparable. Toney did not bet against his own team in any matches he was in a position to influence. That is the key to that particular strand of the offences he committed.

he deserves a ban, certainly. however strange it may be that football encourages betting with one hand and throws up the other hand in horror at the reality of it, Toney knows the rules.

There are those who argue that if Manchester City are found guilty of some of the 115 charges levelled against them by the Premier League, they should be spared punishment because they play beautiful football but rules in sport don’t work like that.

It is, though, legitimate to wonder whether Toney’s punishment could have been handled more imaginatively and more constructively.

What is the point of banning him from training for four months when isolation is one of the reasons he is in this situation in the first place?

Toney’s ban should be half what it is. And instead of making him a pariah, the FA should make him serve part of his ban by including him in a gambling task force, visiting schools and football clubs up and down the country and warning them of the misery that can be caused by betting on football.

There are more positive ways of making an example of him than casting him into a wilderness.

That’s why england manager Gareth Southgate struck the right note earlier this week when he questioned the sanctions that had been visited on Toney.

‘I don’t like the idea that we just leave somebody so they are not allowed to be a part of the football community,’ said Southgate.

‘I don’t think that’s how we should work, I don’t think that’s how the best rehabilitation programmes work.’

Toney made mistakes and now he is suffering for them but the quicker he is rehabilitated and the more he can do to educate others not to follow the same path, the better.