Posts Tagged ‘blatter’

It Ain’t Complicated!

Friday, February 8th, 2013

Anyone who tells you that match-fixing is complicated to solve is either ignorant or lying.

 

Following the Europol press conference and the media hype around it  – let us analyse the current fixing situation in international football:

 

It is very, very simple.

Let us take out ‘football’ for the moment and imagine that we are speaking about bank robberies.

 

There is a gang that is going around the world and robbing banks.  They have stolen money from at least 680 banks in over-20 different countries.

 

We know the name of the alleged leader of the gang.

 

We know the address of the alleged leader of the gang.

 

We know his birth date and his phone number.

 

Police forces in some of those countries have collected hundreds of pages of evidence against him.

 

The police forces have gone to the country where he lives with an international arrest warrant and asked the government of that country to arrest him.

 

His national government has refused to arrest him.

 

They have come up with a variety of responses, ‘not enough evidence’, ‘warrant not valid’, ‘we are helping [but not enough to make any arrests]’, etc…  But basically, they are refusing to act.

 

It is that simple.  

 

Dan Seet Eng Tan is that man.  Interpol, FIFA, UEFA dare not mention his name or even publicly ask Singapore to arrest him. 

 

The Singaporeans are giving them the finger.  [Translation for international readers, the Singaporean government is telling the international sporting community to ‘F*** off’’ – and the international sporting community is accepting it.]

 

This is the situation: do not let anyone tell you any different.  

 

The international response to this refusal is very clear.  Instead of putting pressure on the Singaporean government.   All the sports officials and the international police force says, ‘We should train the bank tellers!’

 

Quite why large international institutions are afraid of offending the Singaporeans is beyond me.  Singapore is a pretty tetchy country in the sporting world. It is a nice place, full of very good people whom I greatly like  – but still in sporting terms, if you told the Singaporeans that they were not welcome at the Olympics because they were harbouring internationally wanted criminals who were accused of destroying sport – few people would notice their absence.

 

 

**

 

Another note – Sepp Blatter has come out this week saying that most of the 680-cases of fixing announced at the Europol press conference ‘have been dealt with’.

 

Really?

 

When?

 

There must have been a huge scandal that I missed. Because I have never seen a FIFA-wide investigation into hundreds of international matches being fixed.   These matches are the one that FIFA organizes.    This is a fair proportion of the total number of matches that FIFA is directly responsible for.   

The real mystery is when Blatter banned the national football officials who were helping the fixers.   I must have missed that story as well. 

 

Because if he is saying that a gang of match-fixers arranged hundreds of international FIFA-organized matches, without the help of someone inside the sport that would be very difficult indeed. 

 

Still if Mr. Blatter said that all these fixed matches have been dealt with and all the people caught. We will have to believe him, because Mr. Blatter has such a good reputation. 

 

The thought that there might be all those international fixed matches and no one has examined them is too much.

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Doncaster Rovers vs. Real Madrid? How to Understand FIFA’s Anti-corruption reforms

Monday, May 21st, 2012

It is the time for the FIFA Congress in Budapest. The agenda is dominated by anti-corruption and match-fixing items. How can you as a fan or sports journalist figure out what is going on? Here is a short primer to the issues and questions you need to ask:

The Current Situation

There is a gang of Asian match-fixers who have fixed matches in every continent and at just about every level of football from youth team matches up to the World Cup itself. I exposed their activities in The Fix. There are now over-thirty police investigations into their work around the globe: Serie A, Germany, Zimbabwe, etc. However, only one member of the gang has actually been arrested. The rest continue their business without any problems. The gang is able to do that because it has high-level political and financial protection in Asia.

There is a further problem. Because of the globalization of the sports gambling world, now almost anyone can fix a football match. We have seen this happen across Eastern Europe as the recent FIF Pro survey of professional football players shows. The epidemic of match corruption is no longer the purvey of a small group of fixers, but really any dodgy club owner or influential player can organize their own fix as part of their business model or pension plan.

The organization that governs the sport – FIFA – has absolutely no professional credibility on the issue of corruption.   An extraordinarily high number of its top executives have been convicted of corruption or censored by its own ethics committee.

For the last two years, we have watched FIFA attempt to deal with these issues. They have presented us with a type of comic opera. At various times, from stage left appeared a new character in a new uniform to add a purported taste of integrity to FIFA – Sylvia Schenk, Chris Eaton, Placido Domingo, Henry Kissinger, and now, Mark Pieth.  They strutted across the stage for a few brief months. They held some press conferences. They gathered lots of good sounding headlines for FIFA. Then once their usefulness was over (i.e. they tried to bring out about any real change) they exited stage right, where it all ended in tears when these poor souls realized that they had been used by an organization with a deeply entrenched culture of impunity.  

However, at the Budapest Congress once again FIFA and its leader Sepp Blatter, are speaking with great gravity about the problems of corruption and fixing. They are now bringing out a series of ‘reforms’ to purportedly fight these issues.

How to understand what is going on

The trick to figuring out whether the official FIFA announcements are actually good work or more public relations, is to analyze them as you would the new manager of Doncaster Rovers (or Würzburger FV or Lierse SK or fill-in-the-name-of-whichever-obscure-team-you-would-like). On his first day in charge the manager holds a press conference and says, ‘In two-years time the Rovers will be playing Real Madrid in the Champions League.’ Now as a sports fan/journalist you would automatically question that statement, saying something like, ‘Has the team been taken over by a Russian billionaire!? Where is the money coming from to buy the players that you need? How are you going to change the culture of from a lower league team to being top of your sport in two-years?’

In its purported fight against corruption, FIFA and its cast of comic opera characters effectively do the same thing. They strut about making public pronouncements, but they never actually do anything. However, unlike the fictitious Doncaster Rovers manager, they seemingly get to do it again and again with no real questions being asked.

As the “reforms” come out of the Budapest Congress, ask these questions of FIFA:

i) What resources, money and institutional backing have you given these reforms?

ii) What concrete timetable do you have to implement them?

iii) What independent agency will hold you accountable if you do not put these reforms in place?

iv) Why have no other Asian fixers been arrested?

v) Why has no top football official lost his job for tolerating the presence of fixers in the sport for so long?

vi) Why have you not put pressure (as you did to the Brazilians to allow alcohol in the stadium) on the Thai, Malay, Indonesian and Singaporean governments to bust up the fixers and, more importantly, arrest their politically connected patrons?

vii) If you got rid of Sylvia Schenk and Chris Eaton, how do we know that the situation will be any different now? What concrete changes have you shown?

viii) Finally, when will you release the names of the FIFA executives convicted of accepting bribes by a Swiss court in the ISL case?

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A Farce, A Suicide and What This All Means

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

We have witnessed a farce, a piece of theatre, a comic soap opera, without intelligence, without morality from an organization without credibility.

Now according to FIFA and its President Sepp Blatter, we are supposed to believe that there is no crisis at FIFA. This despite 10 of the 24 FIFA Executive Committee, who made the world’s biggest sporting business decision giving the World Cup tournament to Qatar and Russia, being linked to corruption. This despite their presidential election crumbling into a coronation on allegations of corruption and envelopes stuffed with cash for votes. Hmmm, if this is not a crisis, it makes you wonder what FIFA would consider a crisis.

It is difficult to keep a straight face to all this nonsense. I suggest we do not. What is coming out of FIFA now is beyond scorn, it is beyond righteous anger, it is simply beyond any credibility. All press conferences. All FIFA outside communication should be laughed at. Comedy is the one thing that pompous bureaucrats care about – fans, if they care about the game, should also write to FIFA’s corporate sponsors and tell them they will drink Pepsi, use Mastercard/Puma and drive non-Korean cars, until those companies stop supporting the farce.

Here is the problem. While all this goes on, the international sporting world is facing a much larger challenge. It is a challenge that no one has spoken about in a serious way. It is the problem of match-fixing because of the globalization of the gambling market. This morning, amidst the charade of the FIFA conference, the story emerged of a young Korean player who committed suicide because of match-fixing.

I was interviewed last year by Korean journalists when their lower leagues were shown to be infested with fixers. They were, as usual, puzzled by it happening in the lower division, but they were certain that no one else was involved. No native-born Korean, they declared, would ever be so unethical as to sell a match for profit. I tried to tell them that I hear this nonsense all the time, from Germans, from Finns, from Belgians, from all different nationalities around the world. The simple and sad truth is that if you underpay and exploit players anywhere in the world, they will generally all do the same things, regardless of their nationality or ethnicity.

Then came news of more suspected fixing in the Italian leagues. A former captain of Lazio has been arrested under suspicion of arranging matches. Where were the alleged fixers placing their bets? On the Asian gambling markets – and no ‘early-warning system’ had picked up on it. (Sometimes, it can be depressing to be right all the time about a particular subject. I have been saying for years that early warning systems of the gambling markets will not work. I am right about this subject because no gambling company or sporting association pays me to pretend that everything is alright, when it clearly is not).

So the situation is that we have fixing stories following the same general pattern in two different countries, in two different leagues, thousands of miles apart. They are typical of many different football leagues and sports around the world. This is the real challenge facing international sport, it will destroy the current sporting world if nothing is done about it. And no one in Zurich or anyone connected with FIFA is dealing with it in a serious way. This is the tragedy within the farce at FIFA.

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What Took You So Long?

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

It is difficult to find a place more hidden from the rest of the world than a boxing gym in Havana. There may be some Tibetan monastery nestled in the Himalayas where you get less news from the outside world, but few of those monks (I presume) throw punches at you. This has the effect of concentrating your mind very quickly on the very near and very immediate. So I returned from Cuba to find news of bin Laden, Canadian elections and all manner of corruption and match-fixing around FIFA.

To review – In the middle of their own presidential election race – FIFA has announced that at least 300 matches were fixed (we knew that), that there are fixed matches in a range of European leagues, including the Champions League (we knew that), and that international friendly matches may have been fixed (we knew that). The next day (May 10) Lord Triesman, the former head of the English Football Association, testified before parliament that four members of FIFA’s own executive committee solicited bribes during the decision process to host the World Cup.

I don’t want to be one of those commentators who lives in the ‘everything that football officials do is bad’ camp; so to begin, here is the good that has emerged from the latest events.

FIFA is finally taking match-fixing seriously. At their press event they brought in investigators with real credibility like Friedhelm Althans – one of the lead people in the Bochum Organized Crime Task Force. This German inquiry is the one undeniably serious and effective police investigation that the sport has seen into match-fixing. It is good that they are getting the attention they deserve from the world media. On top of that, FIFA has established, with Interpol, an anti-corruption centre in Singapore. They have given it lots of money and resources. Potentially, it could be an excellent start to attacking corruption in football.

These things seem very positive.

The rest, sadly, is not.

In FIFA’s announcement about their new anti-corruption centre, there is no actual money being put aside for investigations or enforcement. Nor is there a mandate to investigate corruption inside FIFA. Without these things the centre will largely be a sham. To be clear, FIFA does not investigate match-fixing or corruption. Nor does Interpol investigate crimes. All of the money that FIFA has given to the centre is for education.

Ask yourself – what do players need education for? Do you really need to explain to them which goal they are supposed to score in? What does a referee need education for? Is it really that difficult to figure out they are supposed to do their job without taking bribes?

I am not being facetious. If there are no investigation or enforcement arms at this anti-corruption centre, then to teach athletes and referees about the dangers of match-fixing is simply providing a bunch of ‘how-to-be-corrupt’ courses. No one will be afraid to take the money. Why should they be? There are no resources devoted to catching people who are fixing games. So the anti-corruption centre promises to be one of those well-constructed snooze-fest places where people go to hear their bosses give seminars full of corporate nonsense and then leave to get on with the lives.

At this stage, the people who really need the education and training are league and team officials (you can start with teaching them not to bet on their own games and leagues). A few of them, according to the fixers, actually work with the fixers; and some of them solicit bribes. This is the problem at the heart of international sports that officials are desperate not to examine. They try to focus the attention on ‘illegal gambling’. They set up centres that do not investigate but do educate the people with no power in the sporting world. However, it is the nexus between corrupt sports officials and gambling that is the real problem. Until we have an international sports agency that can collect information and investigate within sports – the problems of fixing will continue.

Finally, and here is the headline, please Mr. Blatter, stop concentrating on fixed matches in the Finnish league or the possibility of small friendly matches being corrupted. The problems of international football go right the way to the top. We spoke about this three years ago in February 2008, at your offices in Zurich. I told you about the gangs of match-fixers who go to all the big international soccer tournaments, including the World Cup. I told you that they have been going for years. I told you they have approached dozens of teams, and hundreds of referees and players. And I told you that I believe, at times, they have succeeded. They can be stopped very easily, but giving millions of dollars to an education centre is not going to help.

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About Time! (Or is it?)

Monday, January 3rd, 2011

RE: Blatter announces an anti-corruption group:

On January 2nd, the Swiss newspaper SonntagsZeitung printed an interview with Sepp Blatter, President of FIFA where he claimed that he is considering establishing an anti-corruption committee for FIFA. Great idea – on paper. However, as presented in the article, this is an idea which smacks of a publicity exercise rather than a genuine move to clean up the sport. I hope I am wrong, but here are a few questions and quotes for sports fans and journalists to consider:

1) Who are the investigators for this committee?

It is fine for Blatter to say that there will be “[people on the committee] not only from sport but from politics, finance, business and culture”. However, I do not see any professions with any credibility as investigators on that list. A good anti-corruption committee needs former police officers, gambling experts, prosecutors, lawyers and anti-corruption experts not a bunch of high-flyers with no investigative experience.

2) What is their budget?

Even the best investigators can do little if they have no money. Who will fund this group and by how much? I do not see an idea for a budget or a mandate – will they be able to travel to conduct proper interviews, or will they be scrounging for spare change for the bus?

3) How will it operate?

Will the committee actively investigate possible corruption among executives and match-fixers or wait until allegations are brought to it by the media?

4) Will their operations be separate from the rest of FIFA?

If not, it is a conflict of interest. You cannot investigate your boss. It will not work. If the structure is not set up to be completely independent of FIFA, how will it have any credibility?

5) Will the committee investigate the issues around the ISL bribery case?

According to a Swiss court, the case involved ISL paying bribes to a number of FIFA executives for the television rights of the World Cup tournaments in the 1990s. The BBC named three of those executives, but claimed there are also a number of other executives who may be involved. Will FIFA’s new anti-corruption committee investigate this case? If not, how will it have any credibility?

6) Finally, what will happen to any possible FIFA executives who are caught?

Just review what happened to Jack Warner – a senior FIFA executive member – after he was found guilty of essentially ticket touting by FIFA’s ethics committee. Will the anti-corruption committee be as toothless? If so, how will it have any credibility?

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Chutzpah, Complicity and a Conflict of Interest

Thursday, October 28th, 2010

Crikey! There is so much stuff coming in about sports corruption this week it is difficult to sort it all out.

To start with a case of what must be a contender for the Chutzpah of the Year Award – the management of Juventus. A quick definition of Chutzpah – the Hebrew word for pure cheek – is the man who murders his mother and father and then thrown himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan. Juventus had their Italian 2004-5, 2005-2006 league titles stripped because their club officials were found guilty of prolonged and persistent bribing and intimidation of referees. Their former general manager who directed much of this corruption is now on trial in Naples. During that trial it was alleged that Internazionale Milano (the team that was given the titles in place of Juventus) also may have corrupted referees. So Juventus is now asking that its titles be given back! The simple answer is no – if Inter Milan is genuinely discovered to have bribed and intimidated referees as Juventus did, then the Italian Football Federation should go down the league until they can find the highest-placed honest team (by some reckoning that might be in the middle of Serie B!) and give the league title to them.

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To a more serious subject. The corruption allegations swirling around FIFA and the decision to award the World Cup shows why sport desperately needs an independent anti-corruption agency. Sepp Blatter is the president of FIFA. He does not get elected by football fans, he does not gets elected by European sports journalists, not even by a vote of Canadian journalists/academics. Rather, Blatter gets elected by FIFA national executives; these are the same people he is currently supposed to be investigating. This scenario is called a ‘conflict of interest’. In most industries and companies much time is spent devising ways so that people are not placed in this position. If you have problems figuring out the issues around the FIFA case, then just imagine you are put in charge of leading an investigation against your direct boss and then reporting to him the findings of your investigation. Then two weeks later you want to ask him for a Christmas bonus. Good luck with that request, if you have led a proper investigation.

Sport needs an independent authority who can properly investigate cases like FIFA and the World Cup. The decision of where to award the World Cup is massive. It is the world’s biggest sporting tournament. It involves billions of dollars. It involves the entire national sporting infrastructure of the bidding countries. The Sunday Times investigation against FIFA’s bid process has revealed a culture of widespread potential corruption. It needs a properly resourced, well-run organization that can deal with this case in a serious way.

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