Declan Hill's Blog

Last month, I was in Munich at a conference with the great Joe Pistone, aka: Donnie Brasco, the undercover informant who helped break the New York mob.  But the media did not particularly want to talk about his work or my book, rather they were interested in the possibility that Bayern Munich may have fixed the UEFA Cup semi-final match against Zenit St. Petersburg, which is what Baltasar Garzon the Spanish prosecutor claimed may have occurred according to transcripts of Russian mobsters.

After Munich, I went to Denmark to launch the book in Copenhagen.  What did journalists there want to talk about?  The possibility that the European Championship qualifying match between Malta and Denmark had been fixed.    A Danish newspaper had received a tip that there had been something odd going on and so many of the questions were about that match.

I returned to London and many people were obsessed with the possibility of problems around the Norwich versus Derby match.  Then I get a copy of a two-page review of the book in the French newspaper – Libération.  The writer says, in essence, “Dr. Hill has written a good book, but, poor fellow, he is so naïve.  He thinks that the Final of the Champions League in 2005 between AC Milan versus Liverpool was an example of the greatness of football and the human spirit.  We received a phone call from a source on the Asian gambling market who told us that match was fixed.”

The point is not that any of these matches were actually fixed – I know nothing more than what was in the newspaper about them, and frankly, think the Liberation guys were being naïve themselves – it is that the culture of European football is reaching a tipping point.  There is a shift in the culture of football going on.  Any of these stories would have seemed unbelievable two years ago.  But once the public and the media starts to have these conversations it does not matter how many of them are actually true.  It is the beginning of the end.  It eats away at the credibility of the game.  It may not happen tomorrow or this season, but the decline of football will come.

Think about cycling five or ten years ago, it was unthinkable that the sport would have any problems.  However, two weeks ago the organizers of the Tour of Stuttgart, a multi-million Euro bike race, canceled the competition.  They claimed that after a long series of failed drug tests, the sport had such a bad image problem it was not worth holding the race.

If football is not to go the same way cycling is going, the Football Associations must be seen to be doing something rigorous to stop match-fixing.  This brings me to the FIFA conference on match corruption and gambling to be held in Zurich on Monday November 10th.  I have not been invited.  This is ridiculous.  At the moment, no one in football knows more about match-fixing than I do (except for the fixers).  So who do they have speaking?  Well, the organizers announced that Franz Beckenbauer would be there.  This is about as useful as having me give a presentation on defensive formations for the German national team.  It is just silly.  Football needs the Associations to wake up to the real dangers posed by match-fixing and not engage in shallow exercises in marketing.

Tags: match fixing

This entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 11:18 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.