The Seven Secrets of Why There Will be Match-Fixers at the World Cup: Part 3 - No one is stopping them
The match-fixers were at the last men’s FIFA World Cup in America. They will be back. There are more teams. The gambling market is larger. And no one is stopping them.
It was - theoretically - the second most important game at the tournament: The 3rd place match on July 16,1994. The game was between Sweden and Bulgaria. It was a historic occasion. Neither team had ever or would ever climb so high in world football rankings. In both countries, even now, there is nostalgia for the golden tournament of these glory teams.
The match-fixers were there.
The night before the game, Uncle Frankie, an Indonesian-Chinese match-fixer who transformed the world of sports corruption by getting on planes and doing internationally what was common practice in Asian tournaments - fixing them.
He met some of the Swedish players at their hotel. Uncle Frankie invited them back to his room. They saw an enormous pile of cash lying on the bed. Uncle Frankie offered it to them, if they would give him the result that he wanted. They immediately declined and left the room. They won the game 4-0 but to this day, a couple of the Swedish players wonder if Uncle Frankie had repeated his offer more successfully to some of the Bulgarian players.
Will the match-fixers be back at this World Cup tournament?
Why not? They have been at almost every other major FIFA tournament since then.
In the first part of this series we examined the tournament secrets that help motivate corruption: the tournaments are designed to have dead rubber matches - games where it really matters to one team if they win or not; a lot of the players, coaches, managers and officials are gambling addicts: and a lot of the players are under-paid. To make it even worse, at this World Cup the players’ salaries will be taxed by US authorities.
In the second part of the series, we got inside the match-fixing world and I showed you that the match-fixers are both smart and very well-connected.
In this third part, lets examine why no one inside the FIFA world is doing anything effective to stop the fixers.
SECRET 6: The Con of the Sports Integrity Industry
“You know match-fixing is a problem, but I have been thinking, our bigger problem is marketing. If the fans knew how extensive corruption is in our sport they would switch off.”
Very Senior European football official, Interview with Hill (Just before he threatened me with his mob buddies - but that’s a story for another day).
Here is another secret: the much vaunted system of integrity used by FIFA to protect against match-fixing during a World Cup is useless. Not only is it useless, almost everyone knows that it is useless but publicly pretends otherwise.
This is what FIFA does. They form a relationship with a sports betting monitoring company. For years, they essentially outsourced their integrity units to Sportradar (see articles here by stock short sellers on the alleged links between this company and organized crime). The claim is that these companies can monitor the gambling market during the World Cup and see if there was anything suspicious going on during games.
Ummmm… they cannot do it.
I mean they say they can do it but they really cannot do it effectively.
You cannot tell what is going on in the sports gambling market at the World Cup - it is too large.
The average game in the World Cup takes in over one-billion-dollars in bets. It is by far the biggest sports gambling tournament in the world. During the 2014 World Cup, I stayed up through the night at the Hong Kong Jockey Club as a match took place at the World Cup in Brazil. I will respect commercial secrets but I can tell you the amount gambled on just that one site in just Hong Kong - population 7.4 million - was in the tens-of-millions of dollars on just the live action of the game. There are tens-of-thousands of other Asian gambling sites, some of them far larger than the Jockey Club.
In other words, the kind of monitoring that FIFA boasts about can work if you are overseeing a small league - where a shift of a few million dollars can be seen almost immediately.
It can even work on a small bet in a big game. This is what happened to the NBA player Jontay Porter and his gang of inexperienced gambling fixers. They bet hundreds-of-thousands of dollars on a series of relatively small ‘micro’ bets linked to Porter’s performance.
But at the World Cup? Naawww, you are just not going to see that much of a movement. After all, the match-fixer bets are with the team that the market expects to win anyway.
There is another problem in those very rare occasions that the market can spot a suspicious odds movements.
Betting Movements are Not Evidence
During the 2014 World Cup, I was touring the sites and sights of the illegal Asian match-fixing and gambling world for the New York Times. In one of the third games of the opening round (the usual fixers’ target) - Croatia played Cameroon. Someone, somewhere in about the tenth minute of the game moved the opening line by half-a-goal. That is a huge bet. Possibly more than $30 million dollars all on Cameroon to lose above the Asian Handicap.
The actual game was bizarre. Players on the Cameroonian team fought with each other. Their former star player - Samuel Eto’o - had arrived at the tournament with Rolex watches as gifts that he claimed would inspire the players to their honest best. Wilson Raj Perumal, the Asian match-fixer, claimed to a German journalist that the game was fixed (he later rescinded his claim).
Here is the problem - its not evidence.
There has only been one case where the Council of Arbitration of Sport (CAS - the Supreme Court for international sports) has accepted betting data as legal evidence. So Sportradar announced in their formal press briefing that “there was no evidence” that there was any match-fixing at the tournament. Its true, no matter what the market would have done - there would have been no legal evidence of match-fixing.
Why Doesn’t FIFA Do Something?
Because FIFA is a living, walking-talking model of a conflict of interest. This is an unspoken protection deal at the very heart of its structure.
The President of FIFA - Gianni Infantino is elected by presidents of National Football Associations (NFAs) from each member country in the organization. Many of those NFA Presidents are deeply corrupt. The Presidents vote for a FIFA leader who will keep the cash rolling in. The FIFA leader ensures that the Presidents of the National Football Associations can do pretty anything they want in their own country. “Pretty anything they want” in the last few years has extended very far in the footballing world. In Argentina, the country that won the last World Cup, the head of the National Football Association and many of his top officials have been indicted in a massive money laundering and commercial fraud case. Same thing in the Republic of Congo. There the former leader of football has been convicted of widespread financial crimes. A little further North in the Central African Republic, their senior football leader is now in prison for widespread war crimes. Or, according to the New York Times, the former head of Conmebol (the Latin American chapter of FIFA) who is accused of taking millions of dollars in secret payments from a ‘victims fund’ established by the US Department of Justice.
In none of those cases, did FIFA move quickly to investigate the alleged wrong doing.
It will be the same for a potential match-fixing scandal at the World Cup. This is not an organization that wants to embarrass any of its officials.
There is another force that is supposed to be stopping potential match-fixing at these tournaments - American police and law enforcement. They, too, will not do anything.
SECRET 7: No one is stopping them: Politics and the Police
There is an FBI Unit dedicated to stopping cases of sports integrity and match-fixing. It is supposed to be working hard to monitor the upcoming World Cup and investigating match-fixers.
It will not succeed.
The FBI will not succeed, partly, because in their fight to protect soccer they have been mostly trained by people in the international sports integrity industry. The same industry that is riven with commercial and political conflicts of interest. You can see senior FBI officials at various FIFA press conferences and media events. They look po-faced and serious while declaiming about how “they will turn over every stone”, “push back against all corruption”, and etc etc (That’s enough anti-corruption cliches! Editor)
They will also not succeed because if they did it would be career suicide for any intelligent FBI investigator.
American politics are on a knife-edge. President Donald Trump is involved in a deeply unpopular war with Iran. His standing in political polls is sliding faster than a wet tray on a ski hill. The mid-term elections are coming up in November, a few months after the tournament. At this moment, the Democrats are predicted to retake both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Meaning Trump could face two years of impeachment trials from his political opponents. He needs a successful World Cup tournament. Trump needs lots of sports fans dancing before the cameras. He needs lots of slavish articles about how wonderful the United States actually is, how friendly the people, how over-stated the criticism against Trump.
What Trump does not need is a major sporting scandal featuring corruption at the World Cup - a major hope for his political comeback.
Given these circumstances, why would any intelligent FBI agent report a potential match-fixing case and pee on the political parade of the incumbent President? I am not sure what the level of federal crime is in northern Alaska, where winter temperatures fall to -30, but I am pretty sure that any FBI agents who revealed a major sporting scandal during this year’s World Cup would be bound for a one-way trip there.
Look, this is an organization who cannot investigate the White House, when someone, somewhere in that building made a successful bid on the prediction markets on the price of oil just minutes before President Trump announced yet another false tale of peace talks with Iran. The unknown person made a vast sum of money on inside information. America being America today, no federal investigation was launched.
I hope I am wrong. I hope that I have to eat my words. Its a sad fall for American federal agents. Ten years ago, they were at the heart of the international law enforcement case against corrupt FIFA officials. Some of the FIFA officials were dragged out of the six-star hotel in Zurich and put on flights to American prisons. Those days and agents are long-gone. Recently, the Trump Department of Justice (who are nominally in charge of the FBI) announced that they were closing down the investigation and releasing the remaining former FIFA officials.
There is a further reason why there will be no inquiry into possible corruption at the FIFA World Cup. The very intimate relations between President Donald Trump and Gianni Infantino.
The Infantino-Trump Bromance
Its difficult to overstate the nauseating level of obsequiousness produced by Gianni Infantino for Trump. Last year, at a US business conference Infantino said, “I think we should all support what he’s doing, because I think he’s doing pretty good, right?”
A few weeks later, Infantino “awarded” Trump the FIFA Peace Prize. It was claimed to be the inaugural prize - there have been no one recipients. Nor is it clear, why Trump, who has launched several bombing campaigns against Iran with no declaration of hostilities actually did to merit a “peace prize”.
Infantino was in attendance at the Gaza Board of Peace launch, no Palestinians from Gaza were there. He claimed that there would be a new seventy-five-million dollar project for the people of Gaza. None of that money has appeared yet.
I could go on but you get the idea. A match-fixing scandal will make Infantino’s ‘product’ - the World Cup - look bad. If Infantino looks bad, then Trump will look bad. Thus no US federal agent who values his career will wish to raise any suspicions of match-fixing.
I do genuinely hope I am wrong. There are many good people in the FBI and US law enforcement. But as things stand now, the United States will be an open field for match-fixing at this year’s World Cup. Sadly, the situation in Mexico and Canada is even worse.
Bonus SECRET: Canada and Mexico are open for match-fixing
It is difficult to report match-fixers when you are dead.
I said, “Look, if you, any of you get a problem, then you need to immediately report it to the Head of Referee’s Committee. This (American) referee put his hand up.
“That’d be difficult to do when we’re dead.”
“What do you mean?
“It’s a real privilege to be here for the World Cup, but every time I’ve been down here, I’ve been told that I must do this, or I must do that. I can’t tell you who told me that, but let’s just say that they were very close to the match… I’ve come down here three times. I’ve been warned three times and told that, ‘If I didn’t comply with the instructions that I was given, then I will be dead.’ So in this instance (if a match-fixer approached him), I’m just saying to you, who would I report it to?”
Interview with senior FIFA Official on training referees and match officials in Mexico
The American government will not let into the country various Iranian coaches and officials. They have detained a top striker from the Iraq team. They have refused entry to a FIFA referee from Somalia.
But the assistant coach of the Mexican national team was designated a major operator for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. His name was removed after four years on the US government’s Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation list.
It is the kind of head-scratching bizarrity that could only happen in Mexico where the drug cartels and various levels of government are deeply intermingled.
The situation, strangely enough, is worse in Canada. Canadian soccer has a long, ignoble history of match-fixing. In 1986, the first time the men’s national team got to the World Cup, they celebrated by taking a tour of Singapore. Five members of the team took bribes to lose a match against North Korea. Their coach - the great Bob Bearpark, reportedly died devastated by this dishonour. The program took decades to recover.
The Canadian Soccer League of the 2000s and 2010s was a bastion of match-fixing. Even illegal bookmakers, not renowned for their honest attitude to sports, would refuse to take bets on the games. At international anti-match-fixing conferences, the Canadian Soccer League was denounced as a corrupt joke.
Here is the kicker. After all these scandals. After being awarded the host of the world’s biggest sporting tournaments. After four. years of legalized sports gambling - it is still legal to fix matches in Canada.
Forget all the other countries and issues. If you are a match-fixer, just station yourself in Canada. In my home and native country, there will be no knock on the door, no boot coming through the door or arrest. Because what you will be doing as a match-fixer is all completely legal.
There is a whole system designed, established and maintained to investigate but not publicize any suspicious events at a FIFA World Cup - thus the corruption will go on.
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well said