This continues to be the best news in football for years. Full congratulations to the German police and UEFA.
However, one question has to be answered: what are the national football associations actually going to do about corruption?
You can see them now, in their press conferences and statements to the press, jostling around trying to escape doing anything about match-corruption. ‘We did not know anything about all this match-fixing going on in our leagues! We are completely surprised! (Really? I did. I even wrote a book about it. Why didn’t you read it?) Nothing we can do,’ they say, ‘We do not want to upset an on-going investigation. This is beyond our expertise. We are football administrators, not policemen.’ Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It is all crap.
They can do something about match-fixing; they should do something about match-fixing and they must do something about match-fixing.
Here are a few suggestions:
1) More integrity units.
Every Football Association in the world should have an integrity unit staffed with honest ex-policemen, gambling experts and football insiders. It is not possible for the unit in UEFA alone to do all the work. Football Associations run national industries worth, in some cases, billions of dollars. It beggars belief that they do not have their own security units. Can you imagine a similar sized Fortune 500 Company not having an internal security unit? No, of course not.
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A proper system of reporting corrupt approaches.
Imagine – you are professional football player in some European league. A criminal approaches you to fix a game. What do you do now? Who do you report it to? Especially, as the corruptors are really, really good at this type of approach. They know what to say. And usually, they will say something that isolates a player from the rest of the team, ‘You do know that your coach is on our payroll.’ Or ‘We control your team owner. He gets his cash from us.’ In the best case, these kind of statements are untrue but they put doubt in a player’s mind. In many cases, they are actually true and remind the player that if tells anyone he may face some very serious consequences.
What to do? Establish an independent security unit with a hotline telephone number that every player and coach knows they must call if approached to fix. This is what the Danish Football Association has done.
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Pro-active reporting.
This is the rule in professional tennis. If a player is approached by a corruptor they must report the incident. The fixers have to know that every time they approach players they are at risk of being turned in.
There are dozens more ways of prevent more fixing. Watch in the next few weeks to see if the football associations are actually doing anything concrete. Until you see any reforms take place, you will know that all the words of the national associations are exactly that – words – and once this current scandal is over corruption will creep back into the game.