Slate – Sharjah was a short drive up the road from Dubai, but it felt like a world away, a face of the United Arab Emirates that most Westerners never saw. Sharjah didn’t look like a place where someone could get rich overnight. This made it a fitting location for the criminals who had infiltrated the game of soccer. Their specialty was illusion, and they were about to pull off their latest ruse, one that would bring a lucrative return after just 90 minutes.
The match set for that day—March 26, 2011—was a friendly between the national teams of Kuwait and Jordan, the sort of game that took place hundreds of times each year around the world. National team coaches often looked upon these contests as little more than vigorous practice. Interested criminal groups from Southeast Asia to Eastern Europe, however, considered them the cornerstones of an extensive commercial enterprise.
This game was just a tiny skirmish in a gathering war. On one side were organized criminal syndicates, which were making hundreds of millions of dollars—if not billions—by manipulating game results. On the other were soccer administrators, who were beginning to accept that match-fixing was a fundamental threat to the most popular game in the world.
FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, had received information that a collection of known criminals had arranged to manipulate the outcome of the Sharjah match. This was no great surprise—FIFA officials were all too familiar with inflated final scores, questionable penalty calls, and strange betting patterns. What was novel about this Sharjah match was the fact that FIFA, directed by a new security chief, was operating a clandestine investigation. The time had come to take action.
