Abstract Aims We evaluated the potential role of the triglyceride–glucose index (TyG index) as a predictor of diabetes in a White European cohort, and compared it to fasting plasma glucose (FPG) and triglycerides. Methods 4820 patients of the Vascular-Metabolic CUN cohort (VMCUN cohort) were examined and followed up for 8.84 years (± 4.39). We performed a Cox proportional hazard ratio with repeated-measures analyses to assess the risk of developing type 2 diabetes across quartiles of FPG, triglycerides and the TyG index (lnfasting triglycerides (mg/dl) × fasting plasma glucose (mg/dl)/2), and plotted a receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve for discrimination. Results There were 332 incident cases of type 2 diabetes involving 43,197.32 person-years of follow-up. We observed a progressively increased risk of diabetes in subjects with TyG index levels of 8.31 or more. Among those with normal fasting glucose at baseline, < 100 mg/dl, subjects with the TyG index in the fourth quartile were 6.87 times more likely to develop diabetes (95% CI, 2.76–16.85; P for trend < 0.001), as compared with the bottom quartile. The areas under the ROC curves (95% CI) were 0.75 (0.70–0.81) for TyG index, 0.66 (0.60–0.72) for FPG and 0.71 (0.65–0.77) for TG, in subjects with normal fasting glucose (p = 0.017). Conclusions Our data suggest that the TyG index is useful for the early identification of individuals at risk of type 2 diabetes. The TyG index seems to be a better predictor than FPG or triglycerides of the potential development of type 2 diabetes in normoglycemic patients.