Background: Juventus ‘won’ the league championship in 2005 and 2006. However, a police investigation showed that their general manager had fixed a number of the games during those seasons. The Italian Football Federation stripped them of their title and demoted the Bianconeri to the second division (Please take note Turkish Football Federation, this is how a properly organized league is supposed to run).

In the last six years, Juve fans have made a number of claims about this scandal. The first is wrong: they claimed that the Juve administration did not fix. We have seen, after a long trial, that the police allegations were proved and that there is no doubt that there was fixing. However, their second claim is correct. Juve fans have always maintained that there is lots of fixing going on in the Italian league – last week, they were proved conclusively right.

All of this is behind a statement made by the current Juventus President Andrea Agnelli who claimed, in effect, that because of all the fixing in Italian football, Juventus had really won the league in 2005 and 2006. Presumably, Mr. Agnelli feels that the Serie A is not just a football league but a fixing and football league where teams are awarded victories for their success on and off the field.

Sepp Blatter to his credit wrote a diplomatic letter to Mr. Agnelli that stated that Juventus has actually won only 28 league titles. It is a small step but it should be congratulated that FIFA has not crumbled to a rich and powerful club, at least not this time.

In Italy, this is Moggi-style corruption on steroids. When the former general manager of Juventus was convicted of corruption there were about a dozen, (admittedly very high-level) people named along with him. In the current case, 52 active players, 4 club officials and 3 coaches are under investigation. For all practical purposes this is almost the entire administration of 3 whole clubs. If you have the club owner, the coach and most of the players involved it is not fixing but theatrical arranging of matches. And remember this investigation is on top of the 17 players arrested earlier for fixing. On top of these arrests – 22 other clubs have been named for possible fixing in an alleged operation that goes back over-ten years.

One sad point. I read through many of the judicial documents around these Italian cases. I noted the dates of some of the alleged fixed matches occurred on the same day that I was doing some of those media interviews where I tried to explain that the corruption was going on as we spoke. It gives no satisfaction to note the irony of the timing.

**

As for the farce in Turkey. What can you possibly say? A beautiful sport ruined by a gang of thuggish clowns.

To review:  Since last July, Turkish police have arrested almost a hundred players, coaches, referees and club officials on suspicion of fixing dozens of games in their league. The most prominent of the people arrested was the head of Fenerbahçe club.  Fenerbahçe is one of Turkey’s most popular teams roughly equivalent to Manchester United or the New York Yankees.  Their senior executives are alleged by police to have engaged in widespread corrupt practices. 

Two things have occurred in Turkey, both of which I find deeply depressing.   One is that in advance of the match-fixing trials, members of Turkey’s establishment have bent over backwards to ensure that the punishments (if there are guilty verdicts) are as light as possible.     Last week, the Turkish Football Federation announced that clubs caught fixing would only have points deducted from them and not mandatory relegation to lower divisions.    Part of the claim is that the clubs should not be punished for the actions of the senior executives.   This is such spurious logic that it is difficult not to laugh.  

However, what does make me fall about laughing are the actions of a majority of the Turkish parliamentary deputies.   Last winter, this gang of clowns voted a serious sounding anti-match-fixing law that had severe penalties for fraud.  A few months later when presumably many of the teams and executives that they support were in jeopardy of being punished under this new bill, they quickly reversed themselves and overturned their new law.  You can just imagine the conversation that they must have had, ‘Oh you mean someone may actually be punished by a law that we passed?  Someone may go to jail in Turkey for corruption?  We never meant for that to happen! We just wanted it on the books to impress the European Union. We never intended for our friends to risk going to prison.’

Please, it is a resounding slap in the face to the Turkish police and judicial prosecution.   Either you trust your institutions to do their job or you do not.  You change laws and procedures if there are human rights abuses or institutional malfeasance not because your favorite football team might be in jeopardy.    There has to be one law for all which if people are guilty they suffer for it.  

The second depressing thing is that so many fans would write so many letters in such well-organized campaigns that are so erroneous.  Most of these fans do not write because they are concerned for the well-being of sports or the Turkish judicial system (there are a few Turkish authors and journalists who love such an outpouring of support for their rights).    Rather most of the people write because they want to either punish or support one particular team.   Here is the important lesson for all Turks to learn – if Fenerbahçe (or any other team) fixed matches in Turkey (or any other country) they should be punished.  If they did not, they should be acquitted.

Here is the real danger. I remember when my colleagues and I were investigating corruption in figure skating in 2000.   Our documentary was about the alleged alliances between French and Russian officials to promote their own skaters, something that came to prominence at the Salt Lake City Olympic Games.  During the course of the research, I interviewed a very bright journalist at the magazine Patinage.  He said in some ways corruption had become an accepted part of figure skating.  That some judges may be corrupt was accepted by the fans as a form of the soap opera of the sport.  They could enjoy booing the judges if the marks for their favorite skaters was not correct. They could enjoy dreaming up conspiracy theories (some of which proved to be true) about the sport.    This is the menace in Turkey, that football becomes a fantastic, social entertainment but it ceases to be a sport.

Below is an article I wrote in the Ottawa Citizen calling for an international anti-corruption agency for sports, that is independent. The time has come for such an institution. Lets get it in place.

Best wishes,

Declan

Sports corruption has gone global
BY DECLAN HILL, THE OTTAWA CITIZEN APRIL 24, 2012
 
His body was found at the foot of his apartment building. This time last year, Lee Kyung-Hwan had it all. He was a good-looking, young soccer player with a pro contract for a local team in Seoul, South Korea. Lee was even being considered for a spot on his national team. However, like thousands of athletes around the world he made a mistake. Dissatisfied with low pay, he and some of his teammates decided to take part in fixing matches with a gang of criminals. They were found out. Lee was convicted and then banned from the sport he loved. Last week, it is presumed that shame became too much and he jumped out of his 15th-floor apartment in Seoul. He leaves a widowed mother.
Lee is the fourth South Korean sportsman to commit suicide over the issue of fixing. In the last few months, there have been other deaths — either murders or suicides — linked to sports corruption in half-a-dozen countries. There are now more than 60 national police investigations around the world into the problem from the U.S. college system to soccer games in the European Champions League to pre-World Cup matches in South Africa.
The whole phenomenon is a product of globalization. The sports gambling industry has been affected by the Internet and international television, as much as the travel and music industry were transformed in the 1990s. It does not matter if you are a Joe Bagofdonuts organized crime bookie on the streets of Montreal or a senior executive in a billion-dollar bookmaking company in the U.K., or a professional gambler in Las Vegas, your industry is being transformed by globalization.
One of the unforeseen effects of this globalization is the spread of corruption in the sports world. For most of the sports gambling market is in Asia. Most of that market is illegal and run by the Asian equivalent of Al Capone. There are a few uncorrupted sports in Asia, but those are the honourable exceptions. From Taiwanese baseball to Japanese sumo wrestling to Pakistani cricket, illegal bookmakers have fixed leagues on that continent to an extraordinary degree. A senior Malaysian politician once estimated that over 60 per cent of the soccer games in his country were corrupted. Officials give similar numbers in China, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and many other countries in the region.
These levels of corruption have meant that many sports fans and gamblers have given up on their own leagues. Attendance, television ratings and sponsorship for local sports have all declined dramatically. So what does an Asian sports fan do? In the globalized world, they turn their attention and bets to other leagues. For example, I once met a triad-connected businessman in Kuala Lumpur who claimed that he bets thousands of dollars a month on the Icelandic soccer league. He assumed that the Icelandic league was so small that it must be honest.
The criminal fixers have also travelled and are corrupting sports leagues around the world. There are trials and investigations going on in Turkey, Singapore, Australia, Costa Rica, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Finland, Hungary and 50 other countries.
There have also been alleged corrupted games in Canada. I spoke to senior German police officers who busted a gang of European and Asian fixers corrupting soccer games in nine different countries, including Canada. They were amazed that no Canadian officials had approached them to investigate what had happened here.
What is even more amazing is that no international sports agency has taken the lead in fighting this dangerous new problem. Last month, FIFA, the world soccer agency, got rid of its chief integrity officer. The International Olympic Committee, for whom I testified, has embarked on a series of meetings with mostly European bureaucrats and officials that have produced lots of words, but no concrete action.
The sports world desperately needs an independent agency to fight against this new type of corruption. The agency will have to be linked, but separate from other sports organizations, because like owners of a meat-packing plant producing tainted meat, officials have a vested interest in suppressing news of possible corruption in their own sport.
Canada should lead the campaign to found this organization. We should do this for a number of reasons. One, it is the right thing to do, and Canadians have never shirked from doing the right thing.
Two, we are a middle power searching for a more powerful presence in the world. Leading the fight against sports corruption is a good way of punching above our weight. For a million dollars, we can help pioneer an organization that can have positive attention for Canada around the world.
Three, we have done it before. A group of Canadians, led by the great Olympian and Montreal lawyer Dick Pound created the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the international and independent group that fights against drugs in sport. When the sports world was faced with a new wave of undetectable drugs in the late 1990s, Pound and the Canadians rolled up their sleeves and created WADA to fight against this type of corruption. It is time for us to do it again. The world of sports needs us.
Declan Hill is a journalist and academic whose book on this subject — The Fix — is published in 17 languages. He has testified for the Council of Europe, the International Olympic Committee and the Dutch Football Association (KNVB). He will be speaking for the Canadian International Council at the Sheraton Hotel in Ottawa on Tuesday at 6 p.m.

After Fenerbahce’s president and other top officials were charged, a majority of Turkish politicians deliberately reversed a law that they had just passed calling for stiff jail sentences for match-fixing. The president of Turkey refused to pass their bill. They overturned his veto. Then the Turkish Football Federation (TFF), some of whom were linked to Fenerbahce, resigned. Then a proposal was mooted by the new TFF that if the club officials were guilty, they should stay in jail, but the clubs should not be punished for the actions of their executives and should not be relegated to lower divisions.

All this, by the way, is not the other recent scandal where Sedat Peker, the mafia godfather, was found to be choosing and appointing referees for major matches in the league. Nor is it the Alaattin Cakici scandal where the former Grey Wolves thug was helped to flee the country by Besiktas football officials. Nor is it the Akcaabat Sebatspor match-fixing attempt that ended with a machine-gun attack in the parking lot and the club owner bleeding on the ground. Nor is it the dozens of Turkish matches that were alleged to have been fixed by the German Organized Crime Task Force in Bochum.

The rebuttal to this official story (put forward by people like my Twitter friend and colleague Ata ‘Iron Turk’ Dizdar and lots of Fenerbahce supporters) is that the whole thing is a giant judicial set-up. There may have been fixed matches and corruption but their particular team did not take part in them. The control of Fenerbahce football club is one of deep social and political power in Turkish society. What we are witnessing is an attempt to overturn key elements in Turkey by their rivals under the guise of an official police investigation.

Either way no international sports tournament should be played in Turkey. If the police and prosecutors are correct, there is a deep network of corruption that risks infecting anything it touches. If the Fenerbahce supporters are correct, there is a covert police state that is capable of an industrial scale manufacturing of evidence. Until Turkey sorts itself out and brings its sports governance into the modern era, it simply is not capable as a society of hosting a major sporting tournament.

I do not say this lightly. I know there are many Turkish sports fans who will be upset, but they should turn their anger on their own officials who have betrayed them. This is a moment in Turkey’s history like the car crash in Susurluk where Turks have an opportunity to see how their country is actually organized. They need to start to make sure it runs properly and lives up to Turkey’s long and storied history.

A number of people have been kind enough to express interest at my recent boxing match for a Charity fundraiser here in Canada.

Below is an article I wrote about the experience for the local newspaper. Plus a link to the actual fight. If this moves anyone to make a contribution to the charity, it would be very much appreciated.

Best wishes to all,

Declan

Click here for the pre-fight video and donation page

View the full fight video here

Boxing and the Canadian soul
Declan Hill, Ottawa Citizen
Published: Saturday, April 07, 2012

Last weekend’s fight in Ottawa between politicians Justin Trudeau and Patrick Brazeau was staged to raise money for cancer research. But it also set off a debate about the nature of Canadian identity and our historic reputation as fighters. Journalist-turned-academic DECLAN HILL, who fought on the undercard, explores the dark secret of our national psyche.

When you fight in a boxing match, the whole world goes grey. I realized that about 15 seconds into my fight last Saturday, a white-collar bout staged just before the Justin Trudeau-Patrick Brazeau charity showdown in Ottawa.

Hundreds of people were watching, but the only thing that my mind seemed to comprehend was that I was in a cramped, closed ring with another person who wanted to hurt me. My senses could not take in anything tangential, anything unimportant to my physical survival.

My opponent, Jeff Davis, a muscular businessman who runs the Heart & Crown bar in the ByWard Market, appeared white against the grey wall. I hit him with an up-down-up, Cuban combination and moved quickly to my left. I knew that Jeff loves to fight and that his entire strategy was to inflict as much pain as possible on me.
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When I took up boxing a few years ago, I was surprised by the level of good manners in the sport. I’ve played competitive soccer almost all my life, and, compared to boxing, the Beautiful Game is a nest of cheating, lying and whiny bad sportsmanship.
In soccer, for example, it is common for players to swear at the referee. Many fans regard it is as a sign of how hard a player is trying.

Many fans also think that pretending to be hurt to get your opponent penalized is a good thing, so much so that players falling over to draw a foul is now almost an art form.

Boxing, to my astonishment, has none of these problems. The modern variation of the sport was organized by a 19th-century British aristocrat, and it still carries the vestiges of the code of the gentlemen. The referee and judges wear bow ties. The fighters shake hands with their opponent’s coaches and cornermen and, at the end of a long, violent fight, they frequently hug.

I was also surprised to learn that most boxers are extraordinarily modest outside of the ring. I had expected them to be jerks like Mike Tyson or Floyd Mayweather, but what I discovered is that the norm for real boxers is a strong sense of humility. What they have to do inside a ring is so intense, the line between victory and defeat so thin, that there is little energy to waste on outside nonsense.

Of course, there is a hard, undeniable core of brutality at boxing’s heart. The strong emphasis on good manners at all times – well, except for the weigh-in at which boxers are supposed to go through pantomime insults to drum up interest – is a cover for this sheer visceral animalism.
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In the second round of our threeround bout, Jeff hit me with three slow, hard left hooks. Each punch hurt. I staggered.

Through the grey wall of my senses, I could hear a section of the crowd roar with approval. The sound frightened me as much as Jeff’s blows. To hear people rejoicing because you are being hurt is a surreal, unpleasant experience. I could feel it in the ring as a palpable presence.

In less time than it takes to read these lines, my body moved automatically out of the range of his punches and I stopped, winded, and waited for his next attack.
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In the weeks before the fight, I trained with both Trudeau and Brazeau. They handled themselves well. In the gym, there were no false airs from either and the other fighters working out at the gym were roughly divided as to who would win.

But, on the night of the fight, I knew Trudeau would win almost as soon as I walked into the dressing room. Standing beside Trudeau was a very gentle fellow who I realized, as we shook hands, was Ali Nestor, the great Montreal fighter.

In true boxing form, Nestor, the most dangerous person in the room, was also the most understated and shy. Trudeau told me that Nestor was his coach. I laughed and said, “Oh, that’s your secret!”

Until that moment, Trudeau had displayed a public attitude of casual surprise: “What, there’s a fight on … oh yes, I should probably train for it.”

At the official weigh-in a few days before the fight, Trudeau drank a beer and seemed relaxed and unconcerned. (Jeff and I had not touched alcohol for weeks). In reality, he had been training very hard with one of Canada’s best fighters.
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At the end of the third round, my concentration slipped. There were about 30 seconds to go, I knew I was in the lead in points.
Despite my sensory deprivation, or possibly because of it, I had been boxing well throughout the fight, steadily scoring points with left jabs and combinations. I relaxed.

As my mind wandered, the colour returned to the room. In that split second of time, again less time than it takes to finish this sentence, Jeff had crossed the distance between us and was thundering punches into me. The grey curtain dropped back instantly. I moved. As I moved I could hear the crowd roaring.
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I admire Trudeau for working so hard to become good at boxing. I respect Trudeau for confronting that “shiny pony” image that gives off to many Canadians. For in confronting it, Trudeau understood the dark secret at the heart of Canada’s psyche: we adore fighting.

Forget that self-image Canadians have of themselves as decent United Nations peacekeepers, slightly boring, but dependable. In our communal soul, there is a dark corner that is forever Don Cherry. Susanna Moodie wrote about it as one of her first impressions on coming to Canada in the 1830s. Our very nation was formed in the trenches of the First World War and the heroism at Vimy Ridge. There our reputation as brutal fighters was the stuff of horrific legends.

As for our national games, hockey and lacrosse, there are simply no other sports that allow, even encourage, participants to stop, fight and then carry on playing. It is unheard of in anywhere else in the world. In Canadian-made sports, it is simply shrugged off as part of the action.

Perhaps, then, Canadian society is a mirror of boxing: lots of good manners and decency on the surface, but scrape away the layers and you will find a brutal, animalistic streak at the centre of its soul.

Of course, this is not true for all Canadians and certainly not all of the time. But it is powerful force in the Canadian soul that you ignore at your peril.

The boxing crowd was like that last Saturday night. In other sports, you stick with your team win or lose. Fight fans are not like that. They love their winners. When Brazeau entered the hall before the fight, nearly everyone there loved him. When he left after being defeated there were few people who shook his hand.
At some level, I think Trudeau knew that and realized he could never have a successful career as a politician unless he took on that visceral Canadian sense of thuggishness and won it over along with the crowd.
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After the fight was over, Jeff came immediately over to me and shook my hand. I had won, but we had trained together, liked each other and promised that, whatever the result, we would drink whiskies to toast each other’s relatives who had died from cancer.

We did. And it was for me the best part of the evening.

Follow Declan Hill on Twitter @declan_hill

In the next few weeks, my research team and I will be launching far more blog entries than we have previously posted. There will be both articles and videos/photos. The blog will continue to focus on sports corruption and match-fixing, however, it will also include articles on a range of subjects from the Afghan War, social media in journalism and the Cuban/Canadian boxing worlds. There is no better way to start this new phase then a note about my former college advisor, mentor and friend – Dr. Andrew Markus.

I have many strong memories of Andrew. I would never have got my doctorate without his care and gentle advice. Despite our near constant banter, I tried at all times to listen carefully to him when he spoke to me. College life was a wonderful series of social and sporting opportunities. But after a couple of years, I remember Andrew taking me aside and saying, ‘Declan, I hope you don’t mind, but I think you have a choice. You can either have a lot of friends or you can get your doctorate. Now, I am not trying to say which one is better, but I think you should think about this situation carefully.’ Two weeks later, I left Oxford to write in an isolated apartment for nine months where I finished both my doctorate and the book. I remember before a college ball Andrew was determined that I should be able to tie my own bow tie (‘the mark of a gentleman’) so after lunch we commandeered the ladies washroom in the old College Observatory and spent forty-five minutes carefully tying and re-tying the bow. Much of the delay was caused by our laughing too hard to be able to concentrate. I remember the walks through the gentle Chiltern Hills around Oxford in the early spring when the ground is covered in bluebells. I remember his quiet support, concern and fury when I was stuck in an academic imbroglio. I remember reading concerned notes from him when I was in Iraq. It was late at night and we could hear the mortars striking the American base in Kirkuk in the distance, but his voice and care were so strong it was as if he were in the room with me.

I respect Andrew for many reasons. He was a surrogate father to me at an important time in my life, and he was also one of the last of that generation of English men who really were gentlemen (unlike those ‘Top Gear’ like buffoons that now so populate English public life). In his manner he was an old-school blend of Rex Harrison and Jack Hawkins. He was like his close friend Sir Richard Doll, the founder of our College, the soldier of Dunkirk, the prominent epidemiologist and anti-nuclear protestor. They both had great manners and courtesy. They were both part of the original group who had founded Green College. They both wanted the college to have high academic standards but also be a welcoming, friendly, non-hierarchical place. So my recollections of Andrew’s care are not unique. There are hundreds of students who share similar memories of his kindness in a university that can be very intimidating.

Along with the College and his students Andrew had a wide range of interests. He was Chairman of the Oxford branch of the Friends of the Welsh National Opera. Travel and photography were two other great passions. I cherish the photos that he would take be it from Roman archaeological sites or the great buried cities of medieval Ethiopia or an African safari. But his chief pride and joy were the stories of his family and the latest yarns from his grandchildren.

I received the news on Easter Sunday that Andrew had died the night before from advanced cancer. For those of you who knew about my latest boxing adventures it was, in part, motivated by trying to share the pain of a good friend. I write, in part, because as a medico, Andrew was never a big fan of boxing. I simply did not know how else to share something so painful and intense with him. I wish I had told him that, but knowing Andrew he would have laughed at me and told me ‘to come off it’.

Last month, I flew over to see Andrew and Patricia at their beautiful house in Thame. He was in good spirits and good shape. We spoke over lunch and we hoped that we would be able to go on another walk through the bluebells that cover the Chiltern Hills in the early spring. Sadly, it was not to be. There will not be another walk in the hills with Andrew, and I will miss it greatly.

Declan Hill, April 2012

I have not posted much in the last few weeks, as I have been preparing for a boxing match.  It was a local fundraiser for charity and I was drawn to fight a tough, young local bar owner Jeff Davis, so I needed to focus pretty hard on the training. 

I did it partly out of a spirit of adventure, and partly because cancer has claimed my father and many other close friends and relatives.  The fight was part of the Trudeau-Brazeau Canadian political shin-dig.   And by great good fortune and very hard training, I managed to eek out a narrow win.

For those of you who feel moved, I wonder if you would consider making a small donation to the cause.  

The link page to the pre-fight video is here

With lots of good wishes and thanks,
Declan

PS.  For the curious I will post a link to the fight footage as soon as it becomes available. 

First, it is clear that there was a significant cultural struggle between FIFA hierarchy and Mr. Eaton. In a BBC interview Eaton claims that he thinks FIFA is ‘naïve’ about the extent of match-fixing and that he was ‘uncomfortable’ with the widespread allegations of corruption connected to the organization. According to my sources, the truth is that almost all of Eaton’s projects (again, they were excellent ideas on paper) have been moved off to various FIFA committees, where they presumably will be quietly disarmed or shelved. In the words of one senior executive, “Eaton was left effectively alone, without resources.”

On the public side, however, Mr. Eaton has, in most interviews, been extremely loyal to the organization. FIFA has also issued a flattering statement about his work that said the usual clichés of ‘the-man-has-gone-but-his-work-will-continue’ nonsense. And yesterday, the head of the Qatari anti-corruption agency came out to say soothing things about both FIFA and the entire recruitment process. So overall what is going on to produce this disconnect? I believe that currently Mr. Eaton is being gruntled. Gruntling is the process where an organization takes an important ex-employee who may be disgruntled and who could embarrass the organization by complaining to the media and ensures that they are well-provided for. This is not outright corruption or bribery. Nor is it necessarily the stuff of confidentiality agreements and pensions, rather it can be more informal. It is the process where letters of references are positive, hallway conversations always encouraging, public expressions of esteem are traded back and forth. For Mr. Eaton to come out and clearly state what happened would be a public relations disaster for FIFA, their people know it so they are on a campaign to make sure that he does not say anything too bad about them.

However, there is a far more serious message in this situation than bad PR for FIFA. This controversy is a disaster for the fight against corruption and match-fixing. FIFA’s initiative against match-fixing is dead. There will be no effective or serious replacement for Mr. Eaton. Why would there be? The only people who will consider taking over Eaton’s job are the desperate and the deluded. Why would any credible candidate apply for a job when the last person’s ideas, plans and projects are widely considered to have been sidelined and he appears to have been, professionally, cut off at the knees? It is a career death-wish to accept such a position.

What about the new job that Eaton is moving to, the Qatari anti-corruption agency?

(Sound of Hill laughing. Slapping of thigh. Suspenders snapping. Ribs breaking, etc).

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! The sheer joy of covering stories on sports corruption and FIFA are the wonderful sub-plots that come out of the organization. You really could not make this stuff up. Last year, we had Sepp Blatter announcing that Placido Domingo, the opera singer, was going to be a lead helper in the fight against corruption. Now we have the news that there is a relatively obscure Qatari organization that will begin to lead the fight against sports corruption. What next? The Vladimir Putin Centre for Electoral Reform? So the Qataris want to stop corruption in sport do they? Right ho. How about investigating the possibility that the 2022 World Cup was bought by – wait for it – the Qataris? Those, after all, were the words of FIFA’s senior executive Jérôme Valcke who in a leaked e-mailed claimed that the Qataris had ‘bought the World Cup’. To be fair to Mr. Valcke, he later issued a statement saying that he had not meant the Qataris had bought the World Cup by bribing anyone, rather they had simply bought the World Cup by – well, by some previously unknown, but entirely legal process that FIFA had not been entirely clear about. This is an issue which concerns football fans around the world, and there are many fair-minded people who think that there was something wrong about the World Cup selection process – so how about a genuinely independent investigation into that affair? Otherwise, there will be many commentators who will doubt the credibility of the organization from the get-go.

This is the atmosphere that Mr. Eaton is now joining. Do I hold much hope for any real action from his new employers? No. Do I think that they will be able to do anything when FIFA has not fully backed any effective reforms or actions? No. Will they be able to make strong recommendations of the kind that sports officials nod wisely to in conference halls and then ignore in real life? Yes. Do I hope that I am wrong and that in six months Mr. Eaton and the Qataris will come riding back in a blaze of glory? Yes. Do I think that will happen? No.

The truly sad part of this whole story is that while Mr. Eaton is leaving, the situation for corruption has gotten far worse in football. The recent FIFPro (an international umbrella organization of football players union) survey of three-thousand current players indicates shockingly high-levels of corruption in many leagues. In almost one third of the countries that comprise FIFA there are police investigations into match-fixing. This is one of the troubling issues in this story. Match-fixing is beginning, in certain leagues, to become part of the system – part of the business plan of many clubs. If the organization that is supposed to be in charge of football world-wide does not move to protect it in a credible manner then who will?

There is one final issue that has been overlooked by almost all the media in following this story (except the excellent Haresh Deol) – Mr. Eaton’s allegation that there are certain senior Asian sports officials who are helping the match-fixers. The scandals in Turkey, China and Eaton’s own leaving tend to overshadow this matter, but it is the most serious issue of all. In my book ‘The Fix’ I write about how I got inside the gang that has been shown to be fixing matches all over the world. What they always told me was that they had protection from influential people in the Asian sports world. If you think about it, of course, they must have high-level protection – how else could they have continued for so long? It is not entirely clear who is protecting them, but the gang has, I believe, helped to corrupt matches at almost all levels of the game across the world. They will continue to do so, unless they are stopped. And so long as they continue to receive protection it will be very, very difficult to stop them.

Last week, Sepp Blatter the head of FIFA announced that they were taking the issue of match-fixing very seriously. So they should. There are over fifty national police investigations into match-fixing in a bewildering range of countries, from international friendlies in South Africa and Zimbabwe to second division matches in Finland to the CONCACAF Champions League in El Salvador. The gangs are widespread and the threat of corruption in international football is growing.

However, today, I can confirm that Chris Eaton will be leaving FIFA in the next two months and many of his initiatives are being quietly shelved or sent to FIFA committees where they will move forward with glacial speed.

What will FIFA say about Eaton’s sudden departure? They will possibly say the usual platitudes, something like, ‘Mr. Eaton is leaving to pursue other activities.’

What will Chris Eaton say? He too will possibly say the usual platitudes, something like; ‘I want to spend more time with my family.’ Or ‘New opportunity, fresh pastures, exciting challenges, etc’.

What they will not say is that Chris Eaton had finished his task of rooting out match-fixing in international football. Heck! They cannot even say he began his task of rooting out match-fixing in international football. All the measures that were announced in the last few months – the proposed amnesty for players, the independent hotline for whistle-blowers – they have all been quietly shelved or will be moved to FIFA committees where they will wither away. Eaton is on his way out and FIFA’s credibility on this issue is in tatters.

Here is what I believe actually happened. My sources inside both Interpol and FIFA say that there is a battle going on inside FIFA. It is a room-by-room, desk-by-desk, hallway-by-hallway war. The fight is between the officials who want to bring the world football organization into the 21st century with proper professional standards, and the old-guard. The latter are officials who claim that the status quo has done very well so far and that there is no need to change it. There is also concern that with so many skeletons in the proverbial closet having an open season to discuss corruption might prove to be too much for FIFA (‘when can you get people to stop confessing?’)

Part of the public relations strategy of the old-guard is to bring in outsiders who will make loud pronouncements about the need for change, but when they actually ask for resources or serious reforms, find themselves isolated and alone.

Eaton was one of those people. He charged around the world trying to pretend that FIFA was conducting investigations, yet when he proposed a series of very sensible and practical solutions to preventing much of the corruption in international football – his proposals died.

It was the same pattern for Sylvia Schenk, the tough-talking, former athlete who is Transparency International’s point person for corruption in sport. A few months ago, she too had a brief flirtation with working with FIFA, and again, when she challenged the fundamental culture of FIFA, she left.

All in all this is a very worrying day for international football. With fifty national police investigations into match-fixing and so much confusion and controversy at FIFA, fans in every country can justifiably doubt the very credibility of much of the sport they are watching.

**

I add, as a footnote, my own experience with FIFA. I heard about this story last week from Interpol contacts. I confirmed it with FIFA sources. There were no other journalists close to the story. Then I followed proper, professional journalist protocol. I contacted the FIFA press department and asked them for a statement on this important issue. Three hours later a colleague at another news organization announced the story.

Do I believe that this timing was a coincidence? No.

Will I trust FIFA again? No.

Therefore, I suggest to all my colleagues: if in the future you have a story with FIFA, give them no more than an hour to formulate a response. It does not matter how serious or complex the issue, currently the work culture at FIFA is too toxic and poisonous to be trusted.