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,
