The Guardian Footballer of the Year is an award given to a player who has done something truly remarkable, whether by overcoming adversity, helping others or setting a sporting example by acting with exceptional honesty. Fabio Pisacane is our inaugural winner.

“It’s an illness that strikes one person in a million,” says Fabio Pisacane, breaking eye contact for a moment to glance down at the floor. “But it’s serious stuff once you have it. Even with treatment, it will take its own course. You have to touch the bottom. Once you touch the bottom, either you start to get better or it’s all over.”

He is talking about Guillain-Barré syndrome, a condition which occurs when the immune system attacks the peripheral nervous system – causing severe muscle weakness and paralysis. Pisacane was 14 when he was afflicted by it, losing all movement in his limbs before his breathing deteriorated to the point where he had to be intubated. He spent more than three and a half months in hospital, including 20 days in a coma.

If that was Pisacane touching the bottom, then this September he arrived at the top – making his Serie A debut with Cagliari at the age of 30. The climb between was hardly uneventful. In April 2011 he won national recognition for reporting an attempt by the Ravenna director Giorgio Buffone to bribe him to throw a match in the third tier.

For perseverance through adversity, and for carrying himself with integrity, Pisacane is a deserving winner of the Guardian’s inaugural Footballer of The Year award. Even if he himself is still faintly bemused by the idea that anyone would consider his story worthy of celebration.

“Honestly, nothing that I do is done to be an example to people,” he says. “That’s not part of my being. I’m quite a simple guy. I think that I have a bit of humility and the humility that I have does not make me think that others should look at me as an example.”

And yet, the more one learns about Pisacane, the harder it is not to feel inspired. His path to a career in professional football ran at a steep gradient to begin with. Growing up in Naples’s tough Spanish quarter during an especially tumultuous period, he was surrounded from a young age by opportunities to get mixed up in less nourishing pursuits.

“I was born in 1986, so I lived through the biggest Camorra feud in my neighbourhood,” he recalls. “It went from maybe 1990 to 2005. One time I was playing football and they killed someone five metres away from us. We all stopped for a moment and then we went back to playing. The ugly thing is that it had become almost normal.

“There’s no point hiding the fact that, growing up in a context like that, you can find yourself mixed up in dynamics you would not want to be a part of. Football took me away from that sad reality a little bit. But a lot of my friends, from matches played out in the street, unfortunately they did take that route. Some are dead because they got killed.”

Fabio Pisacane made his Serie A debut in September at the age of 30. Photograph: NurPhoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images

He speaks in matter-of-fact tones, his voice soft but never trembling. These traumas are simply truths that he has lived through. There is no fresh pain in the recounting.

Pisacane is adamant that he was no more talented than his peers but simply more fanatical about football. He was the kid who would find excuses not to see his friends in the evening so as to get a good night’s sleep before a morning kickabout.

He did sometimes put his life at risk but not for any criminal pursuit. “This? It’s from the street,” he says, grinning broadly in response to a question about the scar beneath his left eye. “My neighbourhood is full of alleyways that cut across each other. I was always chasing through them after a ball. One time a moped was going past and hit me right in the face. The scar is where I got hit by the fender on the wheel of a Vespa.

“My mum always says that there’s a point on my body where, if you stick your finger in just right, I would come completely unstitched. My body is full of stitches – even my ear, look. If I shave my head, I would have another 10 or 11 scars you could see on my head. All of them caused by my fearlessness.”

That same mindset can only have served him well for what came next. Spotted by scouts from Genoa at the age of 14, he left home and moved hundreds of miles away to join their academy. He had been with them for barely a month when his world fell to pieces.

“At that age it’s the same every morning: you wake up, you have to go to school, you go to take your pyjamas off,” he says. “But this time my arms did not respond. I woke up and went to take my shirt off, but my arms just stayed hanging like this.”

He leans forward in his chair, limbs limp as they were back then. “It’s one thing to think about that, to say it even, but to experience it is very different. You go out of your head. I understood immediately that something dramatic was not right. My father came to Genoa and together with the club we went to the hospital in Savona.”

If I shave my head, I would have another 10 or 11 scars you could see on my head.

Doctors performed blood tests and a spinal tap before Pisacane’s diagnosis was confirmed. Although the majority of people eventually make a full recovery from Guillain-Barré syndrome, it is far from guaranteed. As Pisacane’s condition deteriorated, his father was informed that he might die.

The boy himself was initially protected from that verdict but certain truths became hard to avoid after he was moved full-time into the intensive care ward. His father stayed with him throughout. Pisacane also credits a volunteer, Giorgio, who would come to wash his feet and keep his spirits up by bringing in food from outside.

Football was the furthest thing from his mind. “In those moments when I thought I might not be able to make it, the only thing I thought about was my family,” he recalls. “That was the only thing that tormented me. I didn’t want to leave them behind.”

Pisacane calls himself “a little bit” religious. Among his many tattoos is one of a pair of hands clasping rosary beads: an acknowledgment of how faith helped him through. Most of all, though, what he has is a fierce belief in destiny.

“I always say the illness didn’t come to kill me. If it had come to kill me, then I wouldn’t be here talking to you. The illness came to give me something good.”

Fabio Pisacane grew up in Naples but was spotted by scouts from Genoa at the age of 14. Photograph: Enrico Locci/Getty Images for the Guardian

Even after he awoke from his coma, a long course of rehabilitation lay ahead. It would be weeks before he could walk unaided, let alone play football. Pisacane insists he felt no urgency. All he cared about was getting his life back. Once that had been achieved, football naturally followed.

Genoa took him back into their youth system and from there he proceeded down a career path common to many footballers in Italy – bouncing between loans, co-ownerships and other short-term deals at a series of lower league clubs.

He was playing at Lumezzane, in the third tier, when Buffone asked him to help fix a game. The phone call arrived out of the blue, although the two men knew each other from Pisacane’s one season at Ravenna.

Even now the question of why anyone would think he might agree to such a deal continues to vex him. Was it because of that scarred face, the rough edges and tough guy swagger that Pisacane still carries as the legacy of growing up in a hard place at a hard time? The money on offer was substantial – €50,000 was close to a year’s salary – but there is a strain of genuine hurt in his voice when he discusses it.

“I told him: ‘I don’t do these things,’” he says. “He kept saying things to make me accept but at a certain point I put the phone down, went to the club and said everything. They went to the sporting courts and we reported it all. Even now, though, at several years’ distance, I understand making that report is not something that helped me to live very well.”

Invited to expand on that last point, Pisacane replies: “You won’t please everyone when you do the right thing. But in the end the thing that matters is my conscience. My conscience tells me to stay calm. And that’s why I am calm.”

Buffone was arrested and suspended from involvement with Italian football, his case one of several to be successfully prosecuted in the sporting courts as part of what became known as the Calcioscommesse scandal. Pisacane was rewarded with an invitation to join a training session with the Italian national team.

Through adversity he began to climb the football pyramid. Pisacane helped Ternana to win promotion to the second tier in 2012, then promptly tore a cruciate ligament. Once recovered, he moved on to Avellino and Cagliari. It was with the latter that he won a Serie B title this May.

When his top-flight debut finally arrived, at home to Atalanta on 18 September, one more cruel twist lay in store. Midway through the first half a penalty was awarded against Pisacane for a challenge he had made some distance outside the area.

“If I had thought, that day: ‘This stuff always happens to me,’ then maybe the ball would have gone in,” he says. “But sometimes positive thinking can help you to nudge good luck or bad luck into a different direction.”

The suggestion that external events can be affected by one’s thoughts will be a claim too far for many. One way or another, though, Alberto Paloschi did miss the ensuing spot-kick and Cagliari roared to a 3-0 win.

For once Pisacane could not maintain his composure. During a post-game interview he suddenly broke down into tears.

“I am not someone who makes plans for my emotions,” says Pisacane when the contrast between this moment and his otherwise stoic demeanour is put to him. “I’m spontaneous. Often my spontaneity and my impulsive being has led me to make errors as well.

“It’s normal that, after the match, I started to cry, because the journalist touched the right nerves. Maybe he got inside me and I exploded. I didn’t think about being in front of the cameras. I was exactly what everybody saw: a guy who had been through a lot to reach that day.”

He is a guy who is doing his bit to make it easier for others to follow his path, setting up a volunteering association, Pisadog, in Naples which aims to help talented kids from poor backgrounds find places at football schools; a guy whose career deserves to be celebrated, even if he does not understand why.