Press "Enter" to skip to content

Corruption in Sports: This is how Matches are fixed. UK & France set to help

The United Kingdom’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) says Britain and France have signed a joint agreement to tackle match-fixing and other forms of corruption in sport.

The British and French Governments have agreed to share expertise and best practices which will also target irregular sports betting.

The Declaration of Intention was signed by Matt Hancock and the French Sports Minister, Laura Flessel, as part of the UK-France Summit taking place in Britain.

“The UK and France are steadfast allies in the battle against corruption. Doping and match-fixing scandals have rocked international sport in recent years and it is crucial that we take a global approach, working together to ensure the integrity of sport is upheld. Fans have to be able to believe in fair play in sport and be inspired by the best athletes in the world.”

“Through the work of UK Anti-Doping, the Gambling Commission’s Sports Betting Intelligence Unit and our Code for Sports Governance we are ensuring that our sports bodies are more transparent and uphold the highest standards on integrity and governance. We want to share best practice with other nations and this agreement with France underlines how important it is to work in partnership on the threat of corruption,” Hancock said.

The UK Code for Sports Governance came into force in April 2017 and so far 55 out of 58 National sports bodies in Britain have complied with the code, ensuring more diverse board membership and increased transparency to help fans and participants better understand the decision-making of sports leaders.

Under the new ‘Declaration of Intention’, Britain has also agreed to share with France best practice and expertise gained from hosting the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games and England hosting the Rugby World Cup in 2015.

France will host the Rugby World Cup in 2023 and Paris will stage the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2024.

The DCMS also revealed that the London 2012 Olympics generated over 20 billion U.S. dollars’ worth of trade and investment for Britain, while the 2015 Rugby World Cup, held in 11 host cities across England, set new attendance, viewership, and competition records, generating an additional 1.6 billion U.S. dollars for the UK economy.

The menace of match-fixing

Experts say, some 300 football games a season are fixed in Europe’s top leagues.

“We reckon that around 300 games a year are fixed in Europe,” says Darren Small, Director of integrity at Sportradar, a company that monitors more than 30,000 games across Europe for signs of betting patterns that may indicate a game is fixed.

Former German football manager, Sepp Herberger, once iterated that people go to football matches because they do not know who will win. “I have just watched a match in the almost certain knowledge not only of who would win but with a fairly shrewd idea of what the score would be.”

Usually, if the match-fixers cannot speak to the players, then they cannot arrange a fix. Yet access to the world of the players is closely guarded, not only by the players but also the people close to them.

How then do match-fixers get access to the players?

Tohari Paijan was a player who agreed to play in fixed matches in the Malaysian-Singaporean league. When asked about the methods of approaches, he replied, “Oh no, there was nothing subtle, they would just call us up at the hotel and propose it over the phone.”

This method is also common when access is limited. For example, in the 1990 World Cup in Italy, the FIFA-ranked referees were hidden away in a maximum-security compound used by the Vatican in central Rome.

The phone lines were supposed to be confidential and unlisted, but the referees were receiving phone calls in the rooms from bookies offering bribes. In these examples, because there was so much corruption in the league, in the first case, and access was so restricted, in the second case, the match-fixers had to use fast, direct approaches.

Another method fixers use to get access to players is to hire that access. Hired agents, known as “runners,” are contracted to ensure access between them and the players, or they may even set themselves up as “player-agents” who will represent the players in corporate and business deals.

In the Asian leagues, where corruption is purportedly better established than in Europe, there are series of independent runners who work for corrupt players on each of the teams; these runners would be contacted by potential match-fixers when there is need to establish a fix.

Chin Lai, a former player, who was approached a number of times to fix games also had teammates who fixed games. He claims that runners were ’key’ to the operation. They would make friends with players, figure out which players may be susceptible to bribes, and then introduce them to National-level bookies.

But match-fixing is not only an Eastern European or Asian problem; matches are reportedly being fixed in Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, and Turkey.

A UEFA spokesman stressed that even where there are suspicious betting patterns, it is difficult to find proof that a match has been deliberately thrown.

“Individual football federations do not have the capability to investigate matters themselves – they have to raise it with the police and justice authorities in their own country.”

He added that UEFA was lobbying to raise awareness of the match-fixing threat with criminal justice authorities across Europe.

Facebook Comments
ETN24 - Explaining the News is about putting News in the correct context to promote understanding and education. We believe News should educate, not agitate. Our dedication is to fighting Fake and Sensational News, as well as to keep an eye on the media to ensure our peace and sanity are not sold for traffic.
+ posts