The Guardian – From a suspicious South Africa friendly international with a glut of penalties to a curious 4-1 defeat for Argentina at the hands of Nigeria the football world has become inured in recent years to what appear ever more outlandish attempts to fix matches.
In leagues from Italy to Turkey and from Finland to Germany scores of arrests have been made as hundreds of matches have fallen under suspicion. The scale of the threat to the soul of the game, not to mention the commercial implications, has slowly dawned on sports governing bodies around the world.
Last month the president of La Liga warned that at least eight matches per season were fixed in the top two divisions in Spain. In Turkey two of its most famous clubs – Fenerbahce and Besiktas – are serving European bans due to match-fixing. And yet there was still a frisson of shock at the first arrests on these shores, which linked the illegal and unregulated betting markets in Asia to matches being played on bumpy pitches on freezing Saturday afternoons in the upper echelons of the non-league pyramid considered the lifeblood of the English game.
Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, spoke on Thursday of fears that the six arrests could be the “tip of an iceberg”. But it is not as though the alarm bells have not been clanging. Earlier this year, in a self-aggrandising press conference, Europol announced it was probing 380 suspicious matches, including a Champions League tie at Anfield, as part of a Europe-wide crackdown. Fifa and Uefa have separately warned that match-fixing is the biggest threat facing the game and the former has begun issuing lifetime bans to those involved.
The fixer caught on camera by the Telegraph’s investigation reeled off a list of countries in which he said he could influence results: “I do Australia, Scotland, Ireland, Europe, World Cup, World Cup qualifier.” Closer to home UK bookmakers earlier this year stopped taking bets on a number of non-league teams amid fears about suspicious betting patterns. And the FA, which like other governing bodies uses a monitoring service to track betting activity in the legal market, issued a warning in March to clubs saying it had become “aware of suspicious betting activity on a number of matches played in the Football Conference South”.
