The Seven Secrets of Why There Will be Match-Fixing at the World Cup - Part 2
Match-fixing has a long, ignoble history at the FIFA World Cup. The fixers are intelligent, well-resourced and well-connected. Some of the football officials are deeply corrupt.
There have been fixers coming to almost every FIFA international tournament since at least 1991. They have approached hundreds of players, coaches, and referees.
In 1995 at the World Youth Championship in Doha, Qatar. Two young Portuguese players had been invited up to a room to discuss an interesting proposition by two attractive young Malay women. When they got there, they discovered a pile of money on the table, three “well-known fixers,” and a group of players from the Cameroon team. The organizers of the tournament escorted the fixers to the airport and let them go - it would have been “too embarrassing” to have the scandal revealed.
Same story, thirteen years later. Women’s World Cup in China. Wilson Raj Perumal, one of the minor players of the big match fixing world was there. He approached some of the Ghanaian national team players. An honest player reported him. He was detained by the police - and, then escorted to the train station and told to leave town. It, of course, would have been “too embarrassing” to put him on trial. Pity. It might have spared a whole host of trouble at later tournaments.
Ten years later, at the 2018 World Cup in Russia there was the outlandish game between Japan and Poland. The last twenty minutes were a travesty of fair play. There was a result that benefited both teams so virtually no player crossed the half-way line with the ball. The fans booed and jeered. A third team - Senegal - was sent home because it did not qualify for the next round.
A skeptic will point out that this was not fixing by a criminal match-fixers just a couple of teams arranging the result of the game to their own mutual satisfaction. Fair point. But the endorsement of corrupt play speaks to the level of governance inside Gianni Infantino’s FIFA. For Japan, who took part in this shameful fix, advanced to the next around because of newly instituted FIFA Fair Prize Rule. They had less yellow or red cards than Senegal - who were eliminated from the tournament.
There are lots of other cases. The former FIFA security head Ralf Mutschke admitted that fixers have been at most of the tournaments to the German media. His honesty probably helped him be ushered out of the building.
It makes no sense.
Why are there fixed matches at the world’s biggest sporting tournament? The games are worth billions of dollars in sponsorship. The stadiums are usually jammed and billions of people around the world watch the games. Before I show you the whys and hows of match-fixing: let me take a moment to explain how I come to my knowledge of what is actually happening at these big football tournaments.
Who I am
I loathe self-promotion so I ask the reader’s graciousness for the next couple of paragraphs. However, I have just done a couple of interviews with major media and realized as I was speaking to the journalists that they did not know my background.
I am the world’s expert on match-fixing in international football. I was an investigative journalist with Canada’s top-rated investigative documentary program - the fifth estate (akin to Panorama or 60 Minutes). I worked in a number of conflict zones, including Kosovo and Iraq. Got my doctorate on a scholarship at the University of Oxford where I had the honour of working with the British Royal Academy member Professor Anthony Heath and one of the world’s top academics in the study of organized crime - Diego Gambetta.
As part of my doctoral research I infiltrated a major match-fixing gang based in Singapore/Thailand/Indonesia. They travel the world fixing the big international sports tournaments. I followed them as they corrupted matches at the World Cup. My two books on the subject are international best-sellers in twenty-one languages and the research helped catalyze over thirty-four national police investigations.
I know match-fixers. I have seen these guys work. Match-fixers will be at the 2026 World Cup in North America.
In the first part of this series we examined three secrets: the tournaments are designed to have dead rubber matches - games where it really matters to only one team that it wins; a lot of the players are under-paid: and many players, coaches, managers and officials are gambling addicts.
In this second part of the series lets get inside that match-fixing world. There is much nonsense and speculation about match fixers but here are two more secrets about this world of corruption.
SECRET 4: The Fixers are intelligent and very well connected
But then in that situation, you just got to manage your fear: and with a prayer and a bit of luck, you can get through it… when we got to the bar, it was just full of kids, 18 to 25, I would say at least 30 of them laptops out…. And these guys were just putting up online gambling sites. They were building the site, adding the banking systems to them, and then launching them online. (They would do one a minute)… Then you wonder why there are 10,000 gambling sites online… They didn’t interfere with me. They let me talk to these young guys. Two of them spoke English very well… One had been educated in America, at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) a major university and he was sort of the guy that was controlling it all.
Interview with Former Match-Fixing Investigator on his visit to the headquarters of a Triad match-fixing-gambling location.
There is an entire “sports integrity” industry based on the monitoring of bets to detect whether there is corruption going on. I will write more of this industry and why it cannot detect fixed matches at the World Cup in Part 3 but for now, realize that the fixers have many contacts inside that industry.
They understand the integrity algorithms and place their bets so that the market cannot understand what they are doing. This is not just the work of a hotshot MIT graduate in the back of a bar, it is the same strategy the big professional gamblers like Tony Bloom, the owner of the English Premier League team Brighton and Hove Albion, uses when he places his bets.
The bookmaking world is not populated by saints or sheep. There are lots of workers at bookmakers (legal and illegal) who if they see a big punt by a known professional gambler or match-fixer would rather duplicate and get the money, than notify the authorities.
“You better get a bullet proof fucking vest“
There are lots of ways of fixing the gambling market so it does not realize that a fix is going on. Much of my conversations with fixers concerns those tactics rather than how to bribe players or referees. Getting players and referees to under perform is relatively easy. Heck! A lot of time you don’t need to convince them. Because the fixers have access to some extraordinary powerful people.
To pull off a fix at the World Cup takes at least a couple of million dollars in ready cash. The players want to be supplied with hundreds-of-thousands, if not millions of dollars (the purported price for two Brazilian players in the 1998 World Cup Final was $5 million). So the fixers need financial backers: people who can move millions of dollars around the world quickly. Around this time, May-early June, the fixers are going to meet their potential investors.
I was present for some of the discussions of who would bankroll the corrupt World Cup matches. The discussions of who their potential investors would be was absolutely mind-boggling: Malaysian Royalty, Singaporean businessmen, Thai politicians and generals. I have never publicly mentioned their names because I have no proof that any of them were actually involved. (The details are with two different lawyers and will be published if anything happens to me). However, someone supplied the fixers with the ready cash that they needed and the World Cup fix happened.
This is unsurprising as the men (and occasionally women) running the Asian gambling world are some of the most powerful people in the society. Bruce Grobbelaar, the former goalkeeper of Liverpool met and took money from Asian match-fixers. He was arrested but never convicted of match-fixing. On the recorded tapes that The Sun newspaper had of his conversations with his “best friend” were descriptions of his trips to play in football tournaments in Malaysia and meetings with the very top people who ran both the country and the gambling syndicates.
Because then you’re fucking him around, and he won’t like it, and he’ll tell his Short Man . . . and then you get the chop and then you better watch it. You better get a bullet proof fucking vest, then . . . That’s how fucking big it is . . . This is how fucking dangerous it is . . . When you’re playing with fucking dangerous men, its fucking dangerous…”
There is an idea among many western academics and journalists that the illegal Asian market is run by a network of small, seedy men at the local news stands. To be fair, their delusions are helped because every four years or so, just before the World Cup, Interpol (the international police agency) helps organize a round up of stand-up guys who take the blame in a theatrical law enforcement exercise of cleaning up the illegal gambling market.
It is all play acting.
The gambling market is run by very powerful people who are never arrested. Sometimes, according to the gamblers and fixers, they are the local police chiefs whom Interpol might be dealing with! The fixers are well-known in this gambling world. They could be arrested in minutes if people were serious about solving the problem but they are not because the fixers have very good relations with these powerful people. They also know many of the National football Association and FIFA officials who run the World Cup.
SECRET 5: The Fixers Know the Officials
Hill: How much trust do you have in the national federations?
Answer: (laughter) We will be honest – sometimes they are the problem! In some cases the leagues run the federations – and the leagues are run by the clubs. So there is a conflict of interest right there. And we know that in some of the places there are irregularities in the leagues…In fact, unless you want to get killed – I would avoid Romania, Ukraine and Turkey. Very dangerous places the mafia runs the place.
Confidential Interview with Senior European Football Officials
A necessary note - not every FIFA, UEFA or national football association (FA) official is corrupt. There are many, many good people in these organizations: administrators who genuinely care about international sport and the good it can bring to societies. Many of them are my sources. They are furious about this kind of corruption.
However, the linkages between officials in some football associations and the match-fixers runs very deep.
In 2022, a series of photos were released by the Bulgarian media outlet The Bureau for Investigative Reporting and Data that show some of the extent of these connections. The photos showed the match-fixer Dan Tan at his annual New Year’s party in Singapore. There were lots of pretty girls and the President of the Bulgarian Football Association Borislav Mihaylov They were also purportedly in business together with a company that arranged a match so bizarre that it had to be annulled. FIFA declared that no national football officials had been involved.
If this story is true - and Mihaylov died last month - then it is matched by the fixers connections at the World Cup in South Africa in 2010. I did a series for the New York Times with a series of confidential reports that showed not only were the fixers orchestrating a series of fixed friendly matches just before the start of the tournament featuring teams that were to play in the World Cup. The fixers were helped by officials inside the South African Football Association.
Geddit?
The world’s biggest sporting tournament - worth billions of dollars - and some of the same officials that organizing the tournament were working with fixers.
That level of collusion was surpassed with the Zimbabwean Football Association. The levels of corruption were so high in that FA the fixers organized a tour of Asia by the national team. During some of the matches, the fixers would come into the dressing room and coach the players on how to perform the fixes that they needed.
It will be the same in this upcoming World Cup tournament. Lots of the FIFA and FA officials are deeply honest and committed to the good of the game but in the 2026 tournament there will be officials whose level of honesty would curl your hair. Look, FIFA was an organization named by the Southern District of New York Court (the place where Mafia groups go on trial) as an organized crime racketeering unit. Since then, one of its top officials - Patrice-Edouard Ngaïssona who helped organize the Club World Cup - has been criminally indicted for war crimes, including summary executions, torture, and sexual offenses.
This week (May 19), theNew York Times published an article about the current Head of Conmebol (the organization that runs South American football) and a key ally of Gianni Infantino, secretly being investigated for stashing away millions of dollars of the remission funds sent back to the organization by the US Department of Justice after the racketeering court case.
The investigation is “secret” because that is the way that FIFA, now, conducts its investigations. No details are revealed or even, in some cases, that an investigation is going on!
My colleague Miguel Maduro of the Catolica University in Lisbon and the former Head of Investigations at FIFA, is quoted in the article, saying, “There’s no transparency whatsoever in how the ethics committee handles complaints, and often no final resolution… Instead of dismissing the complaint or acting on it, they simply many times keep it there and no one knows what they will do.”
With an organization like FIFA running the tournament, is it any wonder that the match-fixers will be there?
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Stay tuned for Part 3 of this series - The Seven Secrets of Why There Will be Match-Fixing at the World Cup - We will explore why no one stops the fixing.
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Thank you for writing this Declan...superb as always...