He was the owner of Buffon, a cocaine doping took him away from football and he ended up selling pizzas

In 1996, Italy became champion of the U21 Euro Cup after winning the final against Spain in a duel that was defined by penalties and that had goalkeeper Angelo Pagotto as the great star of those auctions by drowning out the shouts of goal from none other than De La Peña and Raúl González. The young promise of Sampdoria relegated Gianluigi Buffon himself to the bench of the substitutes, who would later become a legend of his country and who currently continues to tackle at Juventus. 

“At that time, Buffon was not yet what he became then. He was a few years younger, they preferred me. But he and I were the predestined, the strongest goalkeepers of the moment”, he recalled this weekend in dialogue with La Gazzetta dello Sport in an interview that toured the planet. It is that what Pagotto did not know at that time was that in his destiny there was no written glory beyond that night and that an ordeal would soon begin that would take him away from football and his dreams.

The great leap to fame in Serie A

After the consecration in the Euro, his name aroused the interest of great teams and after discarding the offer from Juventus, due to the competition he would have had for the position, he opted for Milan: “I don't know if I was wrong or not. In hindsight, it might have been better to go there. My agent and I made several evaluations: the alternative was Sampdoria, Zenga was at the end of his career and I would have had more space, at Juve I would have had to sweat my work”.

In 1996 he then joined Milan where he played some games after his arrival due to the personal problems that Rossi, the starting goalkeeper, was going through, but with the passage of time he left on loan to other clubs to add more minutes. He thus wore the shirts of Perugia and Empoli, among others, until in 1999 came the break of his life and his career.

The beginning of the end of his career

A urine test after a game tested positive for cocaine and started the scandal: “In those years you could still ignore a doping test and if I had a bad conscience I probably would have done it. But he was calm, so much so that he had tested negative in the previous week's test in Parma and also in the following week's in Padua. Only in the intermediate stage after Fiorentina was I positive, strange…".

To this day, Pagotto insists on his innocence, even at that time he suffered a severe penalty for not accepting his guilt. After that, the world of football closed its doors: “I spent two years in Liguria with my mother in the hotel that we had opened. She believed me. There were days when she couldn't get out of bed alternating with nights at the disco. She had started a wild life. When I realized that the situation was getting out of control, I looked in the mirror and started off. I am not ashamed to say that I received help, I could not have done it alone against depression”.

He returned to play, tested positive again and began working as a pizza maker

The Italian returned to the courts later in clubs such as Triestina, Arezzo, Torino, and Grosseto, among others, but in 2007, in a match corresponding to the second division, he again tested positive for cocaine. “Yes, I knew it would happen sooner or later. He had no more adrenaline in the field and looked for it in cocaine. I started to be in bad company, they made me feel like a protagonist. I could have finished my career better, I had also already signed with Salernitana".

This time he pleaded guilty and after an appeal he was able to reduce an initial sentence, which was for life, to eight years without being able to play professionally, which forced him to retire since by the end of the sentence he served 41. Pagotto has them. He then arranged to earn a living and La Gazzetta dello Sport recounted that he worked as a pizza maker in Germany, where he was able to exploit the culinary knowledge he had learned from his family.

This's how Angelo Pagotto played