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.
* * *
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
