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ОглавлениеCROOKED BUSINESS: FOOTBALL’S CORRUPTION AND THE HISTORY OF TECH
Remember what our friend said after trying to work with a revered English football institution: ‘I can do business with stupid people, and I can do business with crooks. But I can’t do business with stupid people who want to be crooks.’
Crookery has always been part of the football business. Powerful older men – working alone, or with friends – have traditionally run clubs and federations.
Their personal status encourages a sense of entitlement. The sums of money they handle have grown fast. They still mostly make decisions quickly and secretively. Their organizations have rarely had serious regulation. That creates opportunity.
Some types of corruption are eternal. However, each era also generates its own new crimes. The nature of football’s scams has changed over time as technology changes. Here’s a quick history of football crookery, and our views on why it has proved so hard to stamp out.
Before television discovered the game, football was a cash business. Every week, thousands of people would pay a few pennies each at the turnstiles, leaving the club with a large pile of cash on Saturday evening to be taken to the bank on Monday morning. This was a perfect opportunity for a money launderer. He might be a criminal who ran protection rackets, or perhaps a local business owner (a restaurateur, say) who didn’t like paying tax. All the launderer needed to do was deposit as much cash as he wanted into the football club’s account, claiming it was the gate receipts. If he was the chairman or some other club official with the power to sign cheques, he could then use the club’s account to pay himself or an associate a sum for services. Hey presto, the money was laundered. And since most football clubs were unprofitable, they didn’t pay much tax.
Clubs therefore attracted some unsavoury characters (not to mention egomaniacs) as well as the close attention of the tax authorities. Still, this was mostly small-time crookery – a few thousand pounds here or there. The club’s business was limited by the size of the stadium. The amount of cash deposited in the bank had to be credible.
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Then, in the 1970s, TV entered football. The device’s first big impact was on the finances of FIFA. The global authority had always been a tinpot outfit. It had little power over clubs, which were mostly regulated by national federations. All FIFA had was the World Cup, and for decades that only generated peanuts. In 1970, the year of possibly the greatest World Cup ever played, FIFA’s total declared income from all sources was just 1.5 million Swiss francs (then a little over £150,000).
But television transformed football. Between the early 1970s and 1990, the number of TV sets multiplied twenty times in Africa, ten times in Asia and four times in Latin America, writes David Goldblatt in his history of football, The Ball Is Round. The World Cup grew into arguably humanity’s biggest party, watched from the Cook Islands to Iceland.
And so the rights to screen and sponsor the World Cup became ever more valuable. But the tiny FIFA set-up of the 1970s lacked the nous to market them. When João Havelange became FIFA’s president in 1974, the organization’s Zurich headquarters employed just twelve staff members. Horst Dassler, whose father had founded the boots manufacturer Adidas, a much larger operation, bought many of the rights directly from FIFA. Dassler paid Havelange kickbacks, and the Brazilian flew suitcases of cash first-class between Rio and Zurich. Nobody troubled him. Few journalists covered sports administration. Switzerland continued to treat FIFA as the sort of little not-for-profit sports association that it used to be, almost like a village hunting club. No wonder dozens of other sports federations right up to the International Olympic Committee found Switzerland a pleasant place to do business. Many of them became as corrupt as FIFA, albeit with less money.
The beauty of FIFA’s business is that it’s a monopoly. There is only one World Cup (nobody has ever credibly attempted to start a rival event) and only one global football association. Moreover, FIFA generally recognizes only one national association per country, and so in a sense it’s a monopolistic association of monopolies. And a basic principle of economics says that monopoly creates profitability.
FIFA’s revenues from TV and sponsors rose from $308 million in the four-year cycle to 1998, to $5.7 billion in the four years to 2014. This happened not because FIFA was run by geniuses, but because in an interconnected world ever more people from Shanghai to San Francisco wanted to watch World Cups.
What to do with all this money? FIFA has few costs of business, beyond the first-class flights and traditionally secret salaries of its officials. To organize a World Cup, it needs to do little more than let the host lay on some football matches. The host pays for the stadiums; FIFA takes almost all the income from TV and sponsors. That’s what you call a business model.
So the FIFA president’s main challenge is to get himself re-elected. His main weapon: FIFA’s revenues.
In 1998, when Havelange retired, FIFA’s congress in Paris elected Joseph ‘Sepp’ Blatter as his successor. The president of each national football federation has one vote in congress, Montserrat in the Caribbean (population: 4,900) the same as China. Many presidents proved corruptible. David Yallop, in his 1999 book How They Stole the Game, recounts how the emir of Qatar (then a little-known country) flew $1 million in cash on a private jet to Paris, where twenty voters each seem to have been handed envelopes stuffed with dollars.
That election set the template for Blatter’s rule. He passed on chunks of TV money to national and continental football barons. This was typically veiled in the language of ‘development’: a grant, often handed over personally the night before a FIFA presidential election, was supposedly meant to fund facilities in the official’s country. But if the official slipped the money into his jacket pocket, nobody would complain. In return, the happy officials voted for Blatter. Corruption was FIFA’s system.
The organization’s bribe-taker-in-chief was the Trinidadian Jack Warner, an alcoholic’s son who had risen from college teacher to global football powerbroker. Warner put together a block of thirty-one mostly tiny Caribbean national associations. In a congress of a little over two hundred countries, this was often the swing vote. And so Warner and his friends filled their pockets. Banned for life from football, he lives prosperously in Trinidad while the FBI battles to have him extradited to stand trial in New York.
His biggest paydays came when FIFA’s executive committee (Exco) got to choose a World Cup host. Indeed, for many Exco members, bribes were the main point of choosing a host. The tradition of exchanging hosting for bribes probably goes back to the mists of time. However, we know that Germany in 2006, South Africa in 2010, and multiple bidders for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups paid members of Exco to vote for them. (Only Brazil in 2014 didn’t have to stump up, simply because there were no other bidders.) The Exco members who took bribes didn’t necessarily do what they had promised, but that’s the risk every bribe-payer runs. In 2010, Exco chose Russia as host for 2018 and Qatar for 2022. Of the twenty-two men who voted on those bids, as of July 2017, seven had been charged or accused by US authorities of criminal wrongdoing; another, the German hero Franz Beckenbauer, is under criminal investigation in Switzerland and Germany regarding his country’s 2006 bid; Spain’s Angel Villar was arrested in an anti-corruption investigation; and five others have been sanctioned by FIFA’s own ethics committee. Meanwhile Havelange resigned as FIFA’s honorary president at age ninety-seven after new revelations about kickbacks. He died in 2016, aged one hundred.
Qatar undoubtedly sprinkled money and favours on some of these men, but so did the Western bidders. They just took care to sprinkle legally. England’s bid, for instance, paid various sums into Warner’s pet projects. He knew nobody was going to monitor how he spent the money.
None of this corruption was particularly secret. Yallop’s book appeared in 1999 (Blatter sued), and journalists, led by Andrew Jennings, have been revealing wrongdoing at FIFA since the 1990s. Yet, for most of the time, they were ignored.
At dawn on 27 May 2015 it briefly looked as if the old FIFA system was crumbling. Swiss police working with the FBI raided Zurich’s five-star Baur au Lac hotel and arrested seven senior international football officials. ‘Some of them were led out of back doors into waiting cars, and shielded from photographers by thoughtful hotel staff holding Baur au Lac bed sheets in front of them,’ writes David Conn in The Fall of the House of Fifa. One FBI official spoke of ‘the World Cup of fraud’.
The dawn raids felt reassuring: the American global police officer, though getting doddery, still seemed able to enforce international legal norms.
But FIFA signalled almost immediately that it intended to soldier on unchanged. Days after the raids, while FIFA officials were shredding documents at headquarters, the seventy-nine-year-old Blatter was re-elected to his fifth presidential term in an election out of a Ruritanian farce. Some delegates photographed their supposedly secret votes for him as proof of loyalty. They liked his patronage system, and they didn’t see anything wrong with it. After all, for most of them, it was how business and politics had always been done in their own countries. In much of the world – especially the developing world – crookery is normal.
It should be said that developed countries produce crooks, too, and fraud is not just about developing nations. According to the FBI, there were about 6 million criminals involved in ‘white-collar crime’ in the US in the period 1997–1999. There is no sign the numbers have fallen since. No wonder many football officials who are accused of fraudulent activities by Americans and Europeans dismiss this as just Western double standards.
In fact, Warner’s main partner in football’s criminal underworld was the fantastically obese New Yorker Chuck Blazer, who ended up living the grand life on an entire floor in Trump Tower in New York, with one apartment exclusively for his cats. His party ended one day in 2011 when the tax authorities tapped him on the shoulder as he trundled his mobility scooter down East 56th Street. Soon he was back on FIFA’s luxury-hotel circuit, but now as an FBI informer wearing a wire in a key fob. Blazer died disgraced in 2017.
Developed countries often appear cleaner than poor ones. But that’s partly because their forms of corruption tend to be legal rather than illegal. In the US, for instance, a former Congressman will lobby Congress for whatever company or country will pay him; meanwhile in a poor country, a politician pockets an illegal bribe. When Westerners watch FIFA, they see egregious forms of illegal corruption that (they often forget) were commonplace in their own countries in the nineteenth century, but have now been mostly wiped out. And frankly, with the election as president of a frequently bankrupted billionaire who allows his children to run his business while he runs the country and refuses to acknowledge conflicts of interest, the US’s grip on the moral high ground is becoming tenuous.
Blatter resigned as FIFA’s president in June 2015, only four days after being re-elected. The pressure from the media, the FBI and Switzerland (fed up with being embarrassed by FIFA) had become unbearable. Six months later he and UEFA’s president Michel Platini were jointly banned from football. Their falls were in character: Blatter, who doesn’t seem to have taken overt bribes himself, was found to have paid Platini two million Swiss francs. The Swiss claimed the money was for work that Platini had done for him thirteen years earlier. Platini doesn’t seem to have had the sense to realize that there was anything wrong with the transaction. Blatter’s demise felt cathartic, like the tumbling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Iraq in 2003. But this time, too, it turned out that the US hadn’t restored a rules-based international order.
In February 2016, FIFA’s congress elected as president another Swiss bureaucrat, Gianni Infantino, after he told the 209 national federation presidents, to loud applause, ‘The money of FIFA is your money!’ Most of these people had repeatedly elected Blatter and were still around, still keen on patronage. As we write in 2018, the FBI and Swiss police continue to investigate. However, FIFA has barely reformed, Qatar and Russia keep their World Cups, and Western countries seem powerless to force change. In fact, the shift of power from the West to the Gulf countries and Russia manifested itself in FIFA before it hit geopolitics.
Most of the heat is now off FIFA itself. Almost no journalists cover the organization full time. The US may pipe down about reforms now that it hopes to host the 2026 World Cup with Mexico and Canada. The Trump administration doesn’t seem hugely bothered about foreign corruption.
In any case, US power has declined since 1999, when American authorities pushed the International Olympic Committee to reform after its Salt Lake City bribery scandal. The IOC listened then because at the time more than 60 per cent of its income came from US TV and sponsors. By contrast, FIFA’s revenues today are spread worldwide. Sure, the federation has found sponsors harder to come by lately, what with all the scandals, and two straight World Cups being scheduled in unsexy non-democracies. But that won’t bother FIFA much, because it’s still a low-cost monopoly producer.
Reforming FIFA would have been quite easy had there been any will to do so. We know a lot by now about how to clean up organizations. For instance, you need an ethics unit that can investigate wrongdoing and is not under the president’s control – which would imply a big change from the Blatter-era FIFA. The problem is that nobody on the outside has the power to change the organization.
For all this catalogue of misdeeds, football probably isn’t an unusually corrupt sector by global standards. It might actually be cleaner than most, simply because journalists follow football. Criminals prefer to do their work when other people aren’t watching. That’s why most burglaries happen at night. So the corrupt will tend to prefer less transparent industries than football. If we studied other organizations in as much detail as we have scrutinized FIFA, we would probably find at least as much corruption.
HUMAN TRAFFICKING
‘Cloughie likes a bung,’ Alan Sugar told the High Court of England and Wales in 1993. Sugar’s former manager at Spurs, Terry Venables, had told him so.
A ‘bung’ is football slang for an illegal under-the-table payment to sweeten a deal. The court heard that when Brian Clough bought or sold a player for Nottingham Forest, he expected to get a bung. In a perfect world, he liked it to be handed over at a lay-by. Clough denied everything – ‘A bung? Isn’t that something you get from a plumber to stop up the bath?’ – and was never prosecuted.
Bungs are one of football’s eternal forms of corruption. They have probably been around since the dawn of the professional game, and they still persist. An investigation by the UK’s Daily Telegraph newspaper in 2016 found that eight Premier League managers were willing to take bribes to facilitate transfers. This corruption happens not because some people are bad, but because the transfer system is evil. It’s essentially a system of human trafficking, which gives many people the right to control where a player works. Imagine for a moment that this applied to your own career. Imagine that if you wanted to change jobs, your employer could stop you moving for up to three years. In the meantime, it could threaten to make you do a job well below your qualifications, which could make your skills atrophy. These are the conditions under which footballers work.
The transfer system allows their employers to extort a fee for letting them move. That doesn’t happen in any other industry we know of. When a player changes clubs, his agent and club manager (and who knows who else besides?) might dip their paws into the deal. The money that these criminals siphon out of the game is money that ought to go to the employee. And if the player’s interests clash with theirs, he risks being mentally or physically abused. Workplace harassment is inevitable in a system that treats players as tradeable commodities.
The way to end these horrors is to close down the transfer system. FIFPro, the international players’ trade union, has asked the European Competition Authority to do exactly that.
Some people will retort that making every player a free agent every day of his career would only serve to make multimillionaires even richer. But in fact, most players aren’t rich. A majority of FIFPro members earn less than £50,000. Many earn much less. So don’t think of Messi or Ronaldo, but of struggling family breadwinners in Poland or Croatia with short careers.
Some fans fear their clubs would collapse without income from transfers. However, the reality is that a large fraction of the money simply circulates among the big clubs, as Stefan pointed out in a study commissioned by FIFPro to support their case.
If the transfer system is abolished, there will be far fewer opportunities for stealing. True, if all players become free agents, some will move even more often than they do already. However, others will prefer the stability of staying with the same club as long as they are fairly treated. No longer will agents and managers have an incentive to move players in order to make some illegal cash in hand.
The transfer system seems necessary because it is familiar, while abolishing it seems like a step in the dark. We don’t think abolition is nearly as risky as it sounds. But that is beside the point. Football’s system of ‘buying’ and ‘selling’ players is unjust.
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Match fixing was a well-known problem of the Olympic Games (original version) over 2,500 years ago. However, many people believe that this ancient scam has gotten a boost from the internet. Online betting sites have made it easy for punters to bet on any match anywhere on earth. Meanwhile, since about 2000 the giant gambling nation China has joined the global economy. The relatively small and regulated pre-internet world of sports gambling has become ‘a jungle with no borders, populated by tens of thousands of operators’, says the IRIS think tank in Paris.
In fact, sports gambling is now a bigger business than sport itself. The industry’s estimated total value – counting both legal and illegal gambling – is ‘anywhere between $700 billion and $1 trillion a year’, Darren Small, of betting and sports data analysts Sportradar, told the BBC in 2013. As we’ve seen, the total revenues of European clubs in 2014–2015 were about £15 billion. In short, there’s much more economic power in the betting market than in the football market.
But before we go any further, first a caveat. Stefan and Simon disagree a bit on match fixing. Simon is inclined to think it’s a big problem for football. Stefan thinks it’s a stain on the game’s reputation, but not an existential threat.
One thing we agree on is that buying off your opponents in order to win (fixing to win) has always been common in football. One of the Bundesliga’s most famous scandals broke in 1971 when the president of Kickers Offenbach played a tape at a garden party on which several players were heard offering to lose games for money to fix the league’s relegation struggle. In 1993 Marseille was stripped of its first ever Champions League title for fixing a domestic league game so as to rest players for the final. And arguably the biggest match-fixing scandal of this century was Italy’s Calciopoli scandal of 2006, in which Juventus was found guilty of fixing referees and rival teams in order to win titles.
There’s a long history of fixing-to-win allegations associated with the World Cup. Most of us remember South Korea versus Italy at the World Cup 2002. The Ecuadorean referee Byron Moreno gave the South Korean hosts a penalty, disallowed an apparently good Italian goal in extra time that would have won the match, and then gave Italy’s Francesco Totti a second yellow card after a collision in the South Korean penalty area. From a distance of 35 yards, Moreno was sure that Totti had dived. South Korea beat a very good Italian side 2–1.
Afterwards Italy’s minister for public offences, Franco Frattini, called Moreno ‘a disgrace, absolutely scandalous’. The Gazzetta dello Sport newspaper said he was ‘the worst referee, ever’. Soon afterwards, a set of new public toilets in Sicily was named after him.
Some Italians alleged that FIFA needed South Korea to reach at least the semis, in order to keep South Korean interest in the tournament alive as long as possible. Moreover, this was part of the well-known longstanding global conspiracy against the Italian people.
Many outsiders at the time thought the Italians were overdoing it. There have been weirder refereeing performances – for instance, the one by Egyptian Gamal Ghandour when South Korea beat Spain in the next round. Moreno seemed just your common-or-garden incompetent home ref.
But three months after the World Cup, the Ecuadorean FA gave Moreno a twenty-match ban for allowing thirteen minutes of extra time (when he had signalled only six) in a Liga de Quito–Barcelona Guayaqil match. In those thirteen minutes, Quito scored twice to win 4–3. The match also featured two controversial penalties and two sendings-off. At the time, Moreno happened to be running for a spot on Quito’s city council.
Freshly returned from his ban in 2003, he was suspended again after sending off three Liga de Quito players in a match. He then resigned from refereeing, saying, ‘I’m leaving through the front door with my head held high. I prefer to die standing up than to live kneeling down.’
In 2010, he suddenly popped up again at JFK airport in New York. After landing ‘visibly nervous’, Moreno was arrested when a customs official found ‘hard objects on the defendant’s stomach, back and both of his legs’. Italy’s least favourite ref was carrying ten plastic bags of heroin. He was sentenced to thirty months in a New York jail, but was released after twenty-six due to good behaviour.
Few media noticed his arrest. Nonetheless, this looks like an interesting story about how World Cups sometimes work. Nor was Moreno necessarily an isolated case. In 2012, a Chinese referee named Lu Jun was sentenced to five and a half years in jail for taking nearly $130,000 to fix seven league matches. Hardly anyone abroad paid any attention. However, Lu Jun had refereed two games at the 2002 World Cup. Football’s routine match fixing and FIFA’s endemic corruption may be shaping outcomes of the game’s biggest tournament.
But in recent years the focus of concern has shifted away from fixing-to-win towards fixing-for-gambling. Fixing-for-gambling, too, has a long history in sports. In baseball it goes back to the Black Sox scandal of 1919 and even beyond, while any serious basketball fan has heard of the City College of New York point-shaving scandal of 1951. One of football’s earliest betting scandals, in 1962, involved three players from Sheffield Wednesday making sure they lost a game they were already expected to lose. Two facts stand out: the fix only came to light because the fixer (Jimmy Gauld) later sold his story to a newspaper; and the amounts paid to the fixers were tiny by modern standards. They only needed a small bribe because players back then earned little more than skilled labourers.
It’s still cheaper to fix badly paid players and referees. (It’s easiest of all to fix those who sometimes earn nothing at all, such as the many players in small national leagues whose wages are routinely paid late.) There’s been a lot of evidence in recent years of gambling fixes happening at lower levels of the game. Wilson Raj Perumal from Singapore became notorious in 2011 when he was arrested and served time in a Finnish prison for fixing local games. He later co-authored a book explaining how fixes work, and pointing out the large number of meaningless friendly internationals played in obscure countries in front of tiny crowds. These games, he claimed, were largely vehicles for illegal Far Eastern betting syndicates.
But if big-name players have financial problems, they too can be targeted by fixers. Gambling addiction is an ancient problem in English football – just read Paul Merson’s memoir How Not to Be a Professional Footballer. In fact, fixers corrupted the German second-division side Vfl Osnabrück after first helping its players run up gambling debts.
Even some players at World Cups – many of whom are middlingly paid journeymen – might not be immune. Simon was in the stands in Cologne at the World Cup 2006 when Brazil beat Ghana 3–0, and never for a moment imagined he was watching a fix. But Declan Hill, author of The Fix, the seminal book on match fixing and someone whose research we take very seriously, produced a pile of evidence to suggest that Asian gamblers meeting in a KFC in northern Bangkok bribed the Ghanaians to lose by more than two goals. FIFA never even investigated his allegations, which the Ghanaians denied.
Hill says that if you are a criminal looking for a money-making scheme, football gambling is now a relatively safe option. The online betting market is global, liquid and almost anonymous. Whereas smuggling drugs or people can get you shot or jailed, match fixing almost never does. As a bonus, it’s a handy way to launder money. If fixers do it right, they will bet tens of thousands of dollars on a game – ideally spread over various bookmakers – without anyone noticing anything strange.
Hill goes so far as to say clubs themselves are now fixing games for gambling purposes. A club will decide: we’ll lose on Saturday by more than two goals, or our striker will get sent off, or we’ll concede a first-half penalty. It bets on that event, and its winnings help balance the budget. For some of Europe’s indebted clubs, match fixing is part of the business plan.
Maybe, but Stefan argues that fixing-for-gambling is not a simple, costless or risk-free business. First, you have to work with accomplices (the players or referees) who have by definition shown themselves to be untrustworthy. Second, the fixers have no legal comeback if the fix fails. This often happens – the best-laid plans, etc. What if you just can’t find a way to let in that crucial fourth goal? It’s almost impossible to fix all twenty-two players and the referee, so you may find some eager young thing scoring an inconvenient goal.
Third, the return on a successful fix might be small. The easier the fix, the more likely the game’s outcome was anyway, and so the worse the betting odds. You can bet on whether the sun will shine in California tomorrow, but if you win you won’t make much money. Fourth, if you fix the outcome to be something that no one expects then the players or referee making the fix happen will charge a high price for the risk (reducing your profit), and the chances that the fix will be detected are greater. That means that you might get nothing. Legal bookmakers do not pay on fixes, and we doubt that collecting is easy in illegal markets when the bookies suspect they have been conned.
Fifth, though the internet has made fixing easier, it also makes it easier for the good guys to uncover fixing. Legal bookmakers have big incentives to find and stop fixes. Their business relies on punters believing that the outcomes of sports events are uncertain. Moreover, in many fixes the legal bookmakers are the victims. So legal bookies – helped by gambling radar services – are always on the lookout for suspicious betting patterns. There are also amateur sleuths looking for illegal patterns in the data of online gambling sites such as Betfair. In 2017 three academics – Christian Deutscher, Eugen Dimant and Brad Humphreys – caused uproar in the German parliament when they published a working paper claiming to have statistical evidence that there were irregular betting patterns associated with two Bundesliga referees officiating between 2011 and 2015.
Here’s a story which nicely illustrates Stefan’s and Simon’s contrasting positions on the problem. In spring 2011, somebody whose name and job we are not allowed to mention (because he is terrified of match fixers) showed Simon a legal gambling website offering odds on the next weekend’s Serie A matches in Italy. ‘What strikes you about those odds?’ he asked.
‘That everyone already knows two results already,’ said Simon. For Chievo–Sampdoria, so much money had been bet on a tie that you earned almost nothing for correctly predicting that result. And for Brescia–Bologna, almost the whole market had bet on a home win. That weekend, lo and behold, Brescia beat Bologna and Chievo–Sampdoria ended in 0–0. ‘Exactly as predicted’, reported the newspaper Corriere della Sera. ‘Zero–zero, zero real chances, zero desire to harm the opponent, zero anything’.
Had the fix worked? From the fixers’ perspective, probably not. Rather, technology worked. Legal bookies had discovered the fix from betting patterns, and the fixers probably won’t have made money out of it. If this is what usually happens, then fixers will go out of business. On the other hand, it still appeared that a fix had taken place. Spotting odd betting patterns is not enough to prove a fix in a court of law and so if there was a fix, the fixers escaped unpunished.
Neither fixing-to-win nor fixing-to-gamble is easy to stop. The media find any kind of organized crime difficult to cover. Tracking down match fixing is time-consuming, and few media organizations nowadays can afford to finance long investigations. Given fixers’ connections to the underworld, an eager journalist can get hurt. It’s also hard to find proof, and even if you do, libel laws in some countries would stop you publishing it.
The authorities likewise struggle to do much. Hard evidence of fixing usually requires intricate international cooperation. Europol, the European police agency, explained in 2013: ‘One fixed match can involve up to 50 suspects in 10 countries, spanning different legal frameworks and definitions of match-fixing and betting fraud.’ Given the complexities involved, the police have other priorities. A Western European policeman – one of the very few working on match fixing in his country – told us he had neither the budget nor the contacts to travel to China to investigate a case.
Sport’s governing bodies do little better. Most major associations (FIFA, UEFA, the FA, the German DFB) have their own match-fixing units, but like the police and media, they rarely find evidence that would stand up in court. Sylvia Schenk of the anti-corruption NGO Transparency International says that governing bodies worry more about scandals than problems, and because match fixing is rarely revealed, it rarely produces scandals. Anyway, as we’ve seen, sporting authorities are themselves often corrupt too.
Nonetheless, there are ways to fight match fixing if the will to do so is there. The internet has spawned more gambling, but it has also created more data to reveal fixes. Some federations have set up anonymous hotlines for whistle-blowers to report match fixing. There is also some official ‘match-fixing education’, which teaches athletes to avoid any contact with gamblers or illegal bookmakers, because even friendly conversations can lead to crime. One practical step is to assign referees to games at the last minute, so that it is harder for fixers to get to them. All these things are being done. However, it’s almost impossible to say how effective they are.
