Canadian author claims bribery and corruption rife in international football

AC Allianssi case from 2005 also given prominence

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The Canadian investigative journalist Declan Hill makes a number of serious charges about the corrupt state of football in his new book The Fix - Soccer and Organized Crime, which goes on sale this week.
      Owing to the fresh revelations contained in its pages, the contents of The Fix have been a jealously guarded publisher’s secret.
      According to Hill, illegal Asian gambling syndicates paid players active in matches at the two last FIFA World Cup finals in 2006 and 2002, and also during the Athens Olympics of 2004, in order that they would throw games to secure the desired result.
     
Referees and players have also been paid in European Champions League matches and in international qualifying matches to ensure a favourable outcome for the gamblers, says Hill.
      For years, referees have had expensive gifts left for them in hotel rooms or they have been offered sexual services before important games.
      When the German referee Robert Hoyzer, officiating in the lower divisions of the Bundesliga, was given a 30-month prison sentence for taking bribes for match-fixing from a Croatian organized crime ring, the case was just one among many. According to Hill, the successful prosecution of one case such as this offered the football federations a nice scapegoat and a good excuse not to go probing further into the endemic problems.
     
Hill has travelled widely on an anti-corruption crusade, interviewing people who are in the business of fixing matches. A good deal of the book’s content deals with the illegal Asian gaming markets.
      The volume also touches on a celebrated Finnish case from a few years ago, reported on here, in which a Chinese businessman living in Belgium bought the Vantaa team AC Allianssi with a view to fixing results for profit.
      The new owner brought in Belgian players and coaches who were apparently already under acloud of suspicion, and Allianssi lost a notorious match against FC Haka of Valkeakoski 8-0 in highly dubious circumstances, triggering a police enquiry and causing several “burned” bookmakers to take Finnish matches off their coupons.
     
A Chinese gambler interviewed by Hill claims to have paid Ghanaian players to lose their match against Japan at the Athens Olympics four years ago.
      Ghana had such a strong team at the games that they should never have lost the encounter, but Japan duly won by the only goal of the game.
      At the World Cup Finals in Germany in 2006, Italy were supposed to beat Ghana by two clear goals in their first preliminary round game, in order that illegal betting cartels would clean up, and then eight members of the Ghanaian squad would each receive USD 30,000 for their cooperation. According to Hill, one of the organisers of the bribery was a member of the Ghanaian coaching staff.
      Italy won 2-0, although Ghana had the lion’s share of possession during the match.
     
Countless sports administrators, referees, players, and punters have disappeared or been killed in Asia and Russia.
      At least for now, the list of the “missing - whereabouts unknown” includes the former owner of Finnish club AC Allianssi, Zheyun Ye.
      Hill claims that the criminal gangs running illicit gambling in Asia are capable of bending police and politicians to their will through bribes.
      Many of those who have exposed the corrupt practices have been killed, sacked from their jobs, or sentenced to prison terms as a result of defamation charges brought by the gang leaders over their allegations.
     
A further claim in the book is that ice hockey is not immune: Hill charges among other things that matches in the North American NHL have been fixed using money from Russian organised crime.
      Aside from football, where the money-men came from abroad, Finland has had its own very local match-fixing scandals, most noticeably in pesäpallo (Finnish-rules baseball) some years ago, when "irrelevant" end-of-season games were manipulated for profit.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Football manager Olivier Suray admits Finnish match fixing (17.3.2006)
  Finnish Football League to probe new match-fixing claims (13.12.2005)

Links:
  Robert Hoyzer (Wikipedia)
  Zheyun Ye (Wikipedia)
  Declan Hill The Fix - Soccer and Organized Crime

Helsingin Sanomat