TGI’s Italian Job: The ISG Split and the Money Trail That Never Went Away

The Italian money trail

The story starts on 15 October 2018.

Gabriele Gravina, then president of Lega Pro, signed a five-year agreement with ISG worth €250,000 per season. Simon Burgess signed for ISG. The work covered analysis of Lega Pro’s media platform, anti-piracy systems, sponsor searches and the development of a new league-owned platform.

Gravina resigned from Lega Pro the next day. One week later, he was elected president of the Italian Football Federation with 97.2 per cent of the vote. His successor later cut the value of the ISG agreement, first to €160,000 and then to €75,000. The timing and terms of the original deal were reconstructed by Calcio e Finanza and other Italian outlets.

Between November 2018 and April 2019, Lega Pro reportedly paid ISG €250,000.

In June 2019, ISG entered an agreement worth approximately €212,000 with Ginkgo Investment Ltd, a British company connected to communications executive Gianni Prandi. The stated work included analysis that investigators and later judges considered difficult to reconcile with ISG’s own expertise and technology.

Three months later, Ginkgo paid roughly £180,000, then worth about €205,000, into a chain involving the auction platform Wallector and the Italian company Mizar. The payment secured an option to buy Gravina’s collection of rare books. Between November and December 2019, Mizar made five transfers to Gravina totalling exactly €200,847.

The purchase of the collection was never completed. Ginkgo did not recover the option payment.

The arithmetic is hard to ignore:

€250,000 left Lega Pro. Approximately €212,000 moved from ISG to Ginkgo. About €205,000 entered the book-option chain. €200,847 reached Gravina.

One similar number proves nothing. Four similar numbers, moving in sequence through connected contracts after the first payment under an agreement signed on a departing president’s final day, demand an explanation.

That is also broadly the prosecution theory. Italian prosecutors alleged that the Lega Pro money was routed through corporate intermediaries before returning to Gravina in disguised form. The criminal allegation publicly reported is self-laundering, not a final finding that ISG or TGI paid a bribe.

The trail first reached criminal prosecutors through Italy's National Anti-Mafia Directorate. Giovanni Melillo, the national anti-mafia prosecutor, passed the material to ordinary prosecutors after financial work inside the directorate identified possible non-mafia offences. Melillo later stressed that the alleged conduct had nothing to do with organised crime, and Gravina is not accused of mafia involvement. The significance is procedural: material developed inside the anti-mafia directorate was considered serious enough to be forwarded for a conventional criminal investigation. ANSA reported that referral.

Gravina denies wrongdoing. His lawyers say the book arrangements were genuine, documented and separate from the Lega Pro contract. They have also attacked the origins of the investigation and the conduct of Emanuele Floridi, the former close collaborator who first supplied information about the transactions.

But Floridi’s account did not remain an unsupported accusation. Contracts, bank transfers and testimony from former Lega Pro officials independently supported important parts of the chronology. When Rome’s review court considered a prosecution request to seize €140,000, it rejected the idea that Floridi’s evidence could simply be discarded because of his later hostility towards Gravina.

The court refused the seizure because it found no present danger that Gravina would dissipate his assets. It did not acquit him. In its provisional assessment, the court described the ISG-Ginkgo contract as insubstantial, questioned why Ginkgo abandoned the option money and characterised ISG’s output for Lega Pro as “stereotyped periodic reporting”. Reporting on the order says the judges regarded the alleged operation as sufficiently plausible for the preliminary legal test, while stressing that this was not a determination of guilt.

The investigation was transferred from Rome to Sulmona in February 2025 because the decisive bank account was in Castel di Sangro. The case is now ongoing in Sulmona.

The books and the flat

There were two book options, not one.

The first involved Marco Bogarelli, one of the most influential figures in Italian football media rights and the former head of Infront Italy. In June 2019, Bogarelli agreed to pay €350,000 for an option over Gravina’s collection.

At Gravina’s request, the money reportedly went directly to the bank account of the daughter of his partner, Lorenza Tella, towards the purchase of a €650,000 apartment in Milan. Gravina and his partner were reported to have guaranteed part of the financing. The option was cancelled and the €350,000 was later repaid.

The second option was the Ginkgo-Wallector-Mizar arrangement. That payment was not recovered, and €200,847 reached Gravina. Reporting based on the seizure papers says prosecutors believed some of that money was then used in connection with the borrowing needed to unwind the earlier apartment financing. Il Fatto Quotidiano reconstructed the transfers.

Together, the two options totalled about €555,000. That is probably the origin of the industry recollection that roughly €600,000 was paid “for the books”. It was not one payment, and the first amount was returned. But the repetition is striking: two large deposits, two failed purchases, the same collection and a direct connection to the apartment.

Floridi reportedly told investigators that the books remained in Gravina’s study. SportsGlare has not verified the separate claim that police physically discovered and inventoried the collection during a home search. These were options rather than completed sales, so Gravina retaining most of the books is not proof of a sham by itself.

Context changes the question. The collection was used twice to justify large movements of money. Neither purchase completed. One deposit was retained. And the retained amount was almost identical to the money that had moved from ISG to Ginkgo after ISG was paid by Lega Pro.

Bogarelli was everywhere

Bogarelli is the connective tissue running through the Italian story.

Bogarelli spent more than a decade at the centre of Infront Italy. He had co-founded Media Partners, which Infront acquired in 2006, and became president of the Italian business. Infront's records show that he left the group in November 2016; when he died in 2021, Infront described him as its former president. During his tenure, he helped build the commercial ecosystem in which ISG grew its Italian business. ISG said at the time that it and Infront Italy had spent almost two years developing Serie A's international presenting-sponsor product. The partnership placed regional betting brands into match graphics and virtual inventory across international broadcasts.

After Infront, Bogarelli and Giuseppe Ciocchetti operated through 2MG. By 2018, 2MG was advising Lega Pro. Bogarelli sent Gravina a media proposal that anticipated a new platform and projected significant returns. Reporting on the investigation says 2MG then supported the appointment of ISG.

Bogarelli also funded the first €350,000 book option. He reportedly introduced ISG to Ginkgo, the company that received approximately €212,000 from ISG before almost the same sum entered the second book-option chain.

None of those relationships proves a criminal agreement. Taken together, they place the same small group around the Lega Pro contract, the media plan, ISG, Ginkgo, both book options and the apartment financing.

The relationship did not disappear with Bogarelli. In October 2025, TGI and Infront announced a global commercial partnership to sell the international virtual inventory of Infront-contracted Serie A clubs. Infront said the agreement followed several years of successful project-based co-operation.

The names changed. The commercial circle remained remarkably familiar.

TGI was already beside ISG

TGI did not acquire ISG until August 2022. That distinction matters. There is no public evidence that TGI signed the Lega Pro agreement, authorised the Ginkgo contract or knew about the book-option transfers.

But the equally convenient idea that TGI first met ISG during acquisition due diligence is wrong.

On 8 October 2018, one week before the Lega Pro agreement, ISG announced that it had increased its shareholding in Supponor, the advertising-technology company with which it was building its rights business.

On 6 March 2019, Supponor announced a €4.5 million funding round. It described both ISG and TGI as strategic partner companies investing new capital. TGI later confirmed that it had been a Supponor shareholder since 2019 and had collaborated on several projects.

That announcement came before the June 2019 ISG-Ginkgo agreement and before the September book-option payment.

It does not prove TGI knew about the money trail. It proves that TGI and ISG were already commercially linked inside the same strategic technology investment while the key transactions occurred. The 2022 purchase deepened an existing relationship. It did not introduce two strangers.

TGI initially bought 55 per cent of ISG. Its accounts record consideration of roughly £56.2 million. In 2024, after Gravina’s formal investigation and the ISG allegations had become public, TGI exercised an option to acquire another 20 per cent for approximately £28.3 million.

TGI did not retreat when the Italian questions surfaced. It invested more.

The cash moved upwards

ISG was not a marginal subsidiary. It became a major source of cash for TGI’s British holding structure.

TGI UK Holdings received more than £51 million in ISG dividends across 2022, 2023 and 2024. During 2024, ISG also advanced almost £19 million to its parent. The balance still owed by TGI UK Holdings stood at approximately £15.8 million by June 2025 and carried interest at seven per cent.

The loan agreement contained a sharp trigger. If ISG ceased to be a TGI subsidiary, the outstanding amount and accrued interest became immediately payable.

The July 2026 transfer should therefore have forced a repayment, waiver, amendment or offset. The public filings do not disclose which occurred.

The final ISG accounts approved under TGI ownership also reveal that the relationship had deteriorated. Revenue fell 31 per cent in the year to June 2025, while operating profit fell almost 70 per cent. The directors said that operational and technology-investment decisions made according to wider TGI group priorities were not fully aligned with ISG’s standalone requirements and had a material impact on performance.

That is polite accounting language for a serious internal conflict.

At the same time, TGI's private-equity owners had reportedly appointed Rothschild to explore a sale or other strategic options for the wider group. That process was unsuccessful and later collapsed, a story SportsGlare will examine separately. For this investigation, the directly documented point is that ISG's directors said wider TGI group decisions materially hurt ISG.

Then, in July, TGI handed its entire holding back to Burgess and Ragan.

The filings do not reveal who won that fight. They show who had already been paid.

Not a clean break

It would be convenient to frame the separation as TGI distancing itself from a problematic business. The chronology does not permit it.

TGI was commercially linked to ISG during the 2019 period. It bought control in 2022. It received tens of millions in dividends. It increased its stake after the Gravina investigation became public. It borrowed millions from ISG. It integrated ISG into its brand and used the company’s Italian record to promote the wider group. It later formalised another major Italian partnership with Infront.

Only after ISG’s accounts recorded that TGI group decisions had materially damaged the business did the two sides separate. Even then, the exit was not announced or explained.

ISG now markets itself again as an independent operator. TGI's websites, meanwhile, have continued to display ISG material and references to TGI Sport Rights after the change of control.

Perhaps this is simply a corporate divorce conducted in private. Perhaps the founders bought back a damaged business on terms both sides preferred. Perhaps debts and assets were neatly settled away from public view.

But a company that spent roughly £84 million building a 75 per cent stake does not normally surrender it without a story. A holding company owed nearly £16 million by the subsidiary it is losing does not normally omit the settlement from the public narrative. And a business at the centre of an unresolved Italian money trail does not become less worthy of scrutiny because its owners fell out.

The company questioned in Italy was not discarded when the questions emerged. It was bought, expanded, rebranded, used as a cash engine and then quietly returned to the same founders who had run it throughout.

The unanswered question is no longer just what happened to Lega Pro’s €250,000.

It is what TGI knew, what TGI gained and why, after years of standing beside ISG, it suddenly wanted out.