Finnish Football League to probe new match-fixing claims

Player admits to taking bribe to ensure his team lost

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The Finnish Football League and the Football Association have received an unwelcome Christmas gift, in the form of claims by an anonymous player that he arranged for his team to lose in return for backhanders amounting to thousands of euros.
      The matter follows hard on the heels of suspicions of match-fixing and betting irregularities surrounding the Vantaa club Allianssi. This case, which has international links, is still being investigated by the authorities.
     
The latest development broke on Monday in the late-edition tabloid Ilta-Sanomat, which ran a lengthy piece on an anonymous "well-known League player" who admitted he had received money in return for arranging his team to lose. Each defeat was worth "thousands of euros", claimed the player.
      This same player, who had now seen the error of his ways, said that he knew of at least two other footballers in other clubs who were guilty of accepting bribes to the same end. According to the newspaper, there are more players than merely these three.
     
The matter allegedly concerns only individual players, and not the coaching or managerial staff of clubs. The money has come from high-stakes punters or their agents, and has been paid in cash.
      According to the anonymous player interviewed, the latest example comes from last season and involved a match from the end of the campaign with no real life-or-death significance for either team, in which his own side was the underdog.
      As expected, the team lost the match, but the player's contribution was to assist in ensuring the defeat by "having a bad day at the office".
      Even if the fixed odds offered on such a fixture would be relatively small, a major punter could still carve out a decent profit, assuming the result was guaranteed.
     
Players' wages in Finland are small, and the temptation is great if an attractive offer of a bung comes from outside the club. The average salary of a Veikkausliiga player is only slightly more than EUR 17,000 a year. Most players are part-timers.
      Ilta-Sanomat's six-page exclusive came as a shock to the Football Association and to the players' own association. The League and the Finnish FA immediately set about taking whatever action was possible at this stage.
      Letters were sent to all League clubs asking for further information if any was to be had, and an appeal was made to players to reveal any information they might have on the issue, according to the League's Chief Executive Jan Walden.
      The League has also sent a request to the state-owned lottery and pools operator Veikkaus asking for an inspection of late-season matches for signs of unusual betting patterns. This may not throw up anything of value, however, as there is no firm evidence as yet to suggest the bets were laid in Finland.
      The players' association has called on the anonymous source to come forward in order that other players would not have to wear the brand of taking kick-backs. According to Walden of the Finnish League, if there really are as many cases as has been alleged in Ilta-Sanomat , somebody somewhere must have heard a whisper about the goings-on.
     
Walden has been in touch with detectives from the National Bureau of Investigation (Finland's central criminal police), who are engaged in a probe of the events of the match between FC Haka and Allianssi last July. FC Haka beat the Vantaa club 8-0 under rather suspicious circumstances and amid rumours of heavy betting on the game on Far East gaming markets, both legal and illegal.
      A police spokesman pointed out that the current story thus far remains altogether too flimsy to make an inquiry worthwhile, and that the details would need to be firmed up first.
     
The increasingly international nature of gaming and the ease of placing bets via online portals on the Internet has its downsides, and Finland is now seeing some of them.
      Finnish fixtures, even in the lower divisions, can come up on the coupons of foreign betting agencies during the otherwise quiet summer season. Big gamblers need to have something to bet on throughout the year, even if the major European leagues take a summer break.
      The odds on such games are often curious in the extreme, even without illegal interference, as betting operators struggle with calculating matches between sides they know nothing about.
      When players like the Finnish part-timers of the Veikkaus League or the smaller clubs are faced with lucrative foreign offers to throw a match, they appear to be no more and no less prone to accept than anyone else, in spite of the country's oft-trumpeted position as "the least corrupt country" according to Transparency International's annual studies.
     
Quite coincidentally, the Ilta-Sanomat revelations appeared on the same day that fines were handed out in a Vantaa court to three players of Finnish-rules baseball for a match-fixing scandal that took place in 1998 and which seriously tarnished the image of this traditional Finnish summer sport.
      In that incident, players and management got together to fix the results of irrelevant matches and collected large sums in ill-gotten winnings from Veikkaus.
      A total of 33 individuals have received sentences in the case, along with demands for the return of the proceeds.


Links:
  Bookmakers Review, July 2005

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