Post by QPR Report on Feb 6, 2009 7:23:54 GMT
'They can fix games in any league, I've seen it – and it's coming here'
Illegal gambling on football is nothing new but the scale of the problem facing the sport today is, writes Nick Harris
Friday, 6 February 2009
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German referee Robert Hoyzer was sentenced to over two years in 2005 for taking payments from a Croatian-led betting ring to manipulate four matches
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Gambling scandals are almost as old as football, blighting the game in ways as diverse as the Swan-Kay-Lane match-fixing case of 1965, the Grobbelaar-Segers-Fashanu trials of 1997 and numerous minor fines for players who made "recreational" bets that flouted the FA's blanket ban on betting, which has been diluted in recent years.
Then there were the floodlight failures at Charlton, West Ham and Wimbledon, and accusations against club officials at Swindon and Gillingham about improper wagers.
The Betfair age has produced at least one long and fruitless investigation into whether a football manager or any of his close associates cashed in by betting on him moving club. Only technicalities over what is and is not legally provable as insider trading stopped disciplinary action in one case.
Related articles
FA fears it is powerless to fight rising threat of match-fixing
Then there was the revelation last year by The Independent, substantiated by the head of the country's foremost clinic for treating sportsmen with addictions, that an "epidemic" of gambling has led to incidents of corrupt on-field behaviour by addicted players in order to repay debts to bookmakers.
In Germany, the Hoyzer scandal led to a referee being imprisoned for fixing games, which showed that South African cricket – through the Hansie Cronje affair – was far from the only clean sporting environment to be, in fact, riddled with corruption. It can happen anywhere, and with the surge in online betting and the proliferation of markets operating outwith effective regulation, it does.
The Football Association knows this, and acknowledges the threat, but as the FA stated publicly in a response in August 2007 to a Gambling Commission consultation on integrity in sports betting, "it is extremely frustrating that we are incurring additional, and increasing, costs in making sure we are able to deal with sports betting by participants".
So the FA still invests relatively little in this area and "believes as a matter of principle that if significant amounts of income are generated by the betting industry on the back of betting on football, some of that income ought to be allocated towards the cost of policing integrity in football."
Extra investment in this area cannot come soon enough, according to one expert in the dangers presented by the widening phenomenon of Asia-based match fixers in particular.
"For some time they've been travelling around the world, fixing at every major tournament," said Declan Hill, speaking yesterday as he promoted a conference – called Play the Game, to be staged at Coventry University in June – at which he will make a keynote address on football corruption. "They tell you they can fix matches in any league, in any tournament, and while they can't guarantee to get to every player and every club, they do find a way in. I've seen it, and it's coming to Britain."
Hill, a former Oxford University academic, is a Canadian documentary maker and writer who has won awards – including from Amnesty International – for his investigations into human rights abuses, the Mafia and other organised crime. His book, The Fix, was published last year and details his four-year study into the world of match-fixing, focusing particularly on Asian fixers.
His work has naturally been lambasted by organisations such as Fifa, football's world governing body, which he accuses of complacency, as well as football associations and bodies implicated in allegations of corruption. But the book is based, among other things, on interviews with more than 200 players, referees, officials, policeman, prosecutors and the fixers themselves. And Hill makes specific allegations about fixing at tournaments including the 1991 Under-17 World Cup, the 1995 Under-20 World Cup, the 1997 Under-20 World Cup, the 2004 Olympic Games, the 2006 World Cup, international friendlies in 2007, the women's World Cup in China the same year and the 2008 African Cup of Nations.
"If England matched America, there would be a specialist full-time policing unit at the FA staffed by former cops and investigators to guard the game's integrity. I cannot believe that an association like the FA, which administrates and runs a multibillion pound industry, does not have a dedicated security department.
"My fear for football is it will suffer from complacency in the way cycling has done over drugs."
Case study 1: Norwich City v Derby County, Championship 4/10/2008
Match details Derby's Rob Hulse scores, 26 min, 1-0. Derby's goalkeeper Roy Carroll, sent off, 51 min for foul on Leroy Lita; Norwich score penalty, 1-1. Nathan Ellington scores Derby winner, 85 min.
Alleged betting Reports of "massive movement" in Asian betting markets, placed with Philippines-based gambling firms.
Investigation The FA announced it would investigate, and on 4 December said that it had closed its inquiry, having found "as a result of detailed enquiries, there is no evidence to suggest any irregularities around the progress or result".
What actually happened The FA says that it received "full cooperation" from the clubs, neither of which had concerns about the match, but it is understood that no players were interviewed, nor were any phone records or bank accounts checked. The FA said it had "received assistance from the Gambling Commission and individual UK bookmakers".
However, there was never any suggestion of irregularities in UK markets. The Independent has been told by FA sources that the association never attempted to contact the Asian firms concerned and that the Gambling Commission made enquiries via email with the firms, who had no obligation to reply.
Case study 2: Accrington Stanley v Bury, League Two 3/05/2008
Match details Bury's Andy Bishop scored both goals, a 22nd-minute penalty, and another goal just before half-time.
Alleged betting Several bookmakers, including William Hill and Coral, closed their books after seeing "an unusual amount of money" placed, including multiple cash bets in shops with CCTV.
Investigation The FA said it would investigate, having been aware of the patterns on the Friday before the game on the Saturday.
What actually happened Nine months on, nobody can or will say. An FA spokesman said he could give no details of avenues of inquiry, only: "The investigation is ongoing and we can't make any comment."
www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/they-can-fix-games-in-any-league-ive-seen-it-ndash-and-its-coming-here-1547558.html
Independent - By Nick Harris Friday, 6 February 2009
FA fears it is powerless to fight rising threat of match-fixing
Governing body struggling to protect football as corruption concerns grow
Senior Football Association officials in charge of maintaining the integrity of the game are privately worried that they are powerless to act against an increasing threat of match-fixing and other betting-related malpractice.
"There's no proof of endemic corruption, but cases have cropped up, and continue to do so, and they are becoming more complex and harder to investigate," one well-placed source has told The Independent. "We have issues with the policing of the integrity of the game and can't, under current circumstances, provide any guarantees that we can protect it."
The FA has a secrecy policy surrounding investigations so it is impossible to know how many cases of alleged corruption are under scrutiny, let alone details of what the FA actually does in investigations. "In practice, it is often very little," says another source.
Thus the FA will not detail how it investigated allegations surrounding irregular betting patterns in Asian markets on the Championship match between Norwich and Derby last autumn. It opened and closed what was claimed to be a thorough investigation within two months.
Nor will it say what progress has been made in discovering who placed unusually large sums of cash – in CCTV-equipped betting shops – on Bury beating Accrington in League Two last May. Betting was suspended and Bury won. The investigation remains open nine months on.
Nor will the FA give details of investigations, if any, into allegations of match-fixing in the non-league game late last year, or ongoing probes into reports, including in this newspaper, of players accepting bribes to get red-carded.
"No comment" is the stock phrase, although the FA privately argues it is hamstrung on what it can do. Scant resources are one issue. It is understood that only one FA employee at any one time from a staff of around 20 in the regulation department works full-time on betting integrity issues.
"This is a problem not just for football but for the whole sports industry," an FA source says. "Policing costs money, and the gambling industry needs to contribute more. The FA as a governing body is also helpless to prevent the availability of what might be considered 'high-risk' betting markets."
Last year the FA was forced to be more transparent than usual in one case following questions in Parliament from the Norwich North MP, Ian Gibson, and the Norfolk North MP, Norman Lamb, about alleged irregularities in betting on the Norwich-Derby game. Their intervention prompted the FA to confirm it was looking at a specific game.
Gibson, who has met with the FA to discuss the subject and will also meet soon with the Gambling Commission, was last night awaiting a response to another parliamentary question, this time addressed to Andy Burnham, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, relating to how many times he or his predecessors have liaised with the FA on these issues in the last five years. Gibson has also written to the FA to seek details about the processes of investigations, and ask whether the FA feels it is adequately staffed and funded to deal with any threat from gambling-related corruption.
While the English game has been largely untarnished by serious cases of substantiated corruption, leagues as comparable as Germany and Italy have been hit in recent years, as too have more obviously susceptible targets in eastern Europe and Asia.
"My appetite has been whetted by contact with the FA and the answers they have provided to my initial inquiries," Gibson told The Independent. "I know, for example, that the FA is severely restricted in what it is able to do about betting on English football, especially in Asian markets. While they don't deny that [irregular betting] could occur, and it probably does happen, they seem to need more stimulation to investigate the source of the bets and find out who benefits from the results. At the moment we have a far from satisfactory situation."
An FA spokesman said last night the FA was unable to comment on any ongoing investigations, or even say how many there were.
www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/fa-fears-it-is-powerless-to-fight-rising-threat-of-matchfixing-1547560.html
Illegal gambling on football is nothing new but the scale of the problem facing the sport today is, writes Nick Harris
Friday, 6 February 2009
Share Digg It del.icio.us Facebook Reddit Print Article Email Article Text Size
NormalLargeExtra Large
GETTY IMAGES
German referee Robert Hoyzer was sentenced to over two years in 2005 for taking payments from a Croatian-led betting ring to manipulate four matches
enlarge
Gambling scandals are almost as old as football, blighting the game in ways as diverse as the Swan-Kay-Lane match-fixing case of 1965, the Grobbelaar-Segers-Fashanu trials of 1997 and numerous minor fines for players who made "recreational" bets that flouted the FA's blanket ban on betting, which has been diluted in recent years.
Then there were the floodlight failures at Charlton, West Ham and Wimbledon, and accusations against club officials at Swindon and Gillingham about improper wagers.
The Betfair age has produced at least one long and fruitless investigation into whether a football manager or any of his close associates cashed in by betting on him moving club. Only technicalities over what is and is not legally provable as insider trading stopped disciplinary action in one case.
Related articles
FA fears it is powerless to fight rising threat of match-fixing
Then there was the revelation last year by The Independent, substantiated by the head of the country's foremost clinic for treating sportsmen with addictions, that an "epidemic" of gambling has led to incidents of corrupt on-field behaviour by addicted players in order to repay debts to bookmakers.
In Germany, the Hoyzer scandal led to a referee being imprisoned for fixing games, which showed that South African cricket – through the Hansie Cronje affair – was far from the only clean sporting environment to be, in fact, riddled with corruption. It can happen anywhere, and with the surge in online betting and the proliferation of markets operating outwith effective regulation, it does.
The Football Association knows this, and acknowledges the threat, but as the FA stated publicly in a response in August 2007 to a Gambling Commission consultation on integrity in sports betting, "it is extremely frustrating that we are incurring additional, and increasing, costs in making sure we are able to deal with sports betting by participants".
So the FA still invests relatively little in this area and "believes as a matter of principle that if significant amounts of income are generated by the betting industry on the back of betting on football, some of that income ought to be allocated towards the cost of policing integrity in football."
Extra investment in this area cannot come soon enough, according to one expert in the dangers presented by the widening phenomenon of Asia-based match fixers in particular.
"For some time they've been travelling around the world, fixing at every major tournament," said Declan Hill, speaking yesterday as he promoted a conference – called Play the Game, to be staged at Coventry University in June – at which he will make a keynote address on football corruption. "They tell you they can fix matches in any league, in any tournament, and while they can't guarantee to get to every player and every club, they do find a way in. I've seen it, and it's coming to Britain."
Hill, a former Oxford University academic, is a Canadian documentary maker and writer who has won awards – including from Amnesty International – for his investigations into human rights abuses, the Mafia and other organised crime. His book, The Fix, was published last year and details his four-year study into the world of match-fixing, focusing particularly on Asian fixers.
His work has naturally been lambasted by organisations such as Fifa, football's world governing body, which he accuses of complacency, as well as football associations and bodies implicated in allegations of corruption. But the book is based, among other things, on interviews with more than 200 players, referees, officials, policeman, prosecutors and the fixers themselves. And Hill makes specific allegations about fixing at tournaments including the 1991 Under-17 World Cup, the 1995 Under-20 World Cup, the 1997 Under-20 World Cup, the 2004 Olympic Games, the 2006 World Cup, international friendlies in 2007, the women's World Cup in China the same year and the 2008 African Cup of Nations.
"If England matched America, there would be a specialist full-time policing unit at the FA staffed by former cops and investigators to guard the game's integrity. I cannot believe that an association like the FA, which administrates and runs a multibillion pound industry, does not have a dedicated security department.
"My fear for football is it will suffer from complacency in the way cycling has done over drugs."
Case study 1: Norwich City v Derby County, Championship 4/10/2008
Match details Derby's Rob Hulse scores, 26 min, 1-0. Derby's goalkeeper Roy Carroll, sent off, 51 min for foul on Leroy Lita; Norwich score penalty, 1-1. Nathan Ellington scores Derby winner, 85 min.
Alleged betting Reports of "massive movement" in Asian betting markets, placed with Philippines-based gambling firms.
Investigation The FA announced it would investigate, and on 4 December said that it had closed its inquiry, having found "as a result of detailed enquiries, there is no evidence to suggest any irregularities around the progress or result".
What actually happened The FA says that it received "full cooperation" from the clubs, neither of which had concerns about the match, but it is understood that no players were interviewed, nor were any phone records or bank accounts checked. The FA said it had "received assistance from the Gambling Commission and individual UK bookmakers".
However, there was never any suggestion of irregularities in UK markets. The Independent has been told by FA sources that the association never attempted to contact the Asian firms concerned and that the Gambling Commission made enquiries via email with the firms, who had no obligation to reply.
Case study 2: Accrington Stanley v Bury, League Two 3/05/2008
Match details Bury's Andy Bishop scored both goals, a 22nd-minute penalty, and another goal just before half-time.
Alleged betting Several bookmakers, including William Hill and Coral, closed their books after seeing "an unusual amount of money" placed, including multiple cash bets in shops with CCTV.
Investigation The FA said it would investigate, having been aware of the patterns on the Friday before the game on the Saturday.
What actually happened Nine months on, nobody can or will say. An FA spokesman said he could give no details of avenues of inquiry, only: "The investigation is ongoing and we can't make any comment."
www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/they-can-fix-games-in-any-league-ive-seen-it-ndash-and-its-coming-here-1547558.html
Independent - By Nick Harris Friday, 6 February 2009
FA fears it is powerless to fight rising threat of match-fixing
Governing body struggling to protect football as corruption concerns grow
Senior Football Association officials in charge of maintaining the integrity of the game are privately worried that they are powerless to act against an increasing threat of match-fixing and other betting-related malpractice.
"There's no proof of endemic corruption, but cases have cropped up, and continue to do so, and they are becoming more complex and harder to investigate," one well-placed source has told The Independent. "We have issues with the policing of the integrity of the game and can't, under current circumstances, provide any guarantees that we can protect it."
The FA has a secrecy policy surrounding investigations so it is impossible to know how many cases of alleged corruption are under scrutiny, let alone details of what the FA actually does in investigations. "In practice, it is often very little," says another source.
Thus the FA will not detail how it investigated allegations surrounding irregular betting patterns in Asian markets on the Championship match between Norwich and Derby last autumn. It opened and closed what was claimed to be a thorough investigation within two months.
Nor will it say what progress has been made in discovering who placed unusually large sums of cash – in CCTV-equipped betting shops – on Bury beating Accrington in League Two last May. Betting was suspended and Bury won. The investigation remains open nine months on.
Nor will the FA give details of investigations, if any, into allegations of match-fixing in the non-league game late last year, or ongoing probes into reports, including in this newspaper, of players accepting bribes to get red-carded.
"No comment" is the stock phrase, although the FA privately argues it is hamstrung on what it can do. Scant resources are one issue. It is understood that only one FA employee at any one time from a staff of around 20 in the regulation department works full-time on betting integrity issues.
"This is a problem not just for football but for the whole sports industry," an FA source says. "Policing costs money, and the gambling industry needs to contribute more. The FA as a governing body is also helpless to prevent the availability of what might be considered 'high-risk' betting markets."
Last year the FA was forced to be more transparent than usual in one case following questions in Parliament from the Norwich North MP, Ian Gibson, and the Norfolk North MP, Norman Lamb, about alleged irregularities in betting on the Norwich-Derby game. Their intervention prompted the FA to confirm it was looking at a specific game.
Gibson, who has met with the FA to discuss the subject and will also meet soon with the Gambling Commission, was last night awaiting a response to another parliamentary question, this time addressed to Andy Burnham, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, relating to how many times he or his predecessors have liaised with the FA on these issues in the last five years. Gibson has also written to the FA to seek details about the processes of investigations, and ask whether the FA feels it is adequately staffed and funded to deal with any threat from gambling-related corruption.
While the English game has been largely untarnished by serious cases of substantiated corruption, leagues as comparable as Germany and Italy have been hit in recent years, as too have more obviously susceptible targets in eastern Europe and Asia.
"My appetite has been whetted by contact with the FA and the answers they have provided to my initial inquiries," Gibson told The Independent. "I know, for example, that the FA is severely restricted in what it is able to do about betting on English football, especially in Asian markets. While they don't deny that [irregular betting] could occur, and it probably does happen, they seem to need more stimulation to investigate the source of the bets and find out who benefits from the results. At the moment we have a far from satisfactory situation."
An FA spokesman said last night the FA was unable to comment on any ongoing investigations, or even say how many there were.
www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/fa-fears-it-is-powerless-to-fight-rising-threat-of-matchfixing-1547560.html