Eurasia Net – Just about everyone knows that the FIFA World Cup football tournament gets underway June 12 in Brazil. But in a parallel football universe, a little-known tournament has already been completed, and the champion is a land that stretches across portions of France and Italy. The alternative tournament featured 12 teams representing internationally unrecognized nations, places like Abkhazia and South Ossetia, separatist territories that are formally part of the Republic of Georgia, as well as Nagorno-Karabakh, the focal point of an unsettled conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Teams representing Darfur, a strife-torn region of western Sudan, Kurdistan and…

For some soccer fans, the burning question of World Cup match fixing is almost as important as wondering which national team will be crowned champion. That question looms over the upcoming 2014 event is not can matches be fixed by gamblers, but will they be? FIFA assures us that every precaution has been taken to prevent World Cup match fixing from corrupting the games played in Brazil. The organization has begun an “Integrity Initiative” among players, featuring the catchy mantra “Recognize it, resist it and report it.” To aid in this program, FIFA instituted a hotline for players, team officials…

Aljazeera – The man in the dark green shirt and matching scarf, stood, statuesque, on Stevenage Road, in the upper-middle-class district of Fulham in west London. Some other fans, in Scottish kilts, stopped to take his picture. He wanted to be noticed, because he held a placard in front of his chest with words written in red ink across it: “We don’t fix matches, we WIN them.” Across the road, at Fulham’s Craven Cottage stadium, the placard bearer’s beloved Nigeria team was about to kick off against Scotland, in the first of Nigeria’s friendly preparation matches for the World Cup….

SCMP – Hong Kong police are launching a month-long operation against illegal soccer betting in the run-up to the World Cup. Working in conjunction with Interpol in nine other countries, local police are coordinating efforts to eliminate the multimillion-dollar problem. Police in the city also say they are being thwarted in attempts to stamp out illegal soccer betting as most syndicates operate online, on the mainland and offshore. Superintendent Dan Ng Wai-hon, from the Organised Crime and Triad Bureau, said yesterday that criminals had moved to the mainland and regions such as South America and Taiwan since local authorities got…

Police from Macau, Hong Kong and mainland China are stepping up enforcement action against illegal World Cup betting as police from both Special Administrative Regions and from Guangdong province have launched a month-long crackdown on illegal football gambling, Hong Kong Standard newspaper reports. The 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil kicks off on June 12 with the final set for July 13. In June 2010, Macau’s casino revenue declined 20 percent from the previous month, a drop that was attributed by some financial analysts to the World Cup keeping some gamblers away from gaming tables and slot machines. Gambling revenue for the…

World Cup 2014 – As predictable as a Gary Lineker tweet, an Alan Hansen denouncement of anyone who “writes off the Germans” and a limp quarter-final exit in a major football tournament by England, is the collective media clairvoyance predicting an imminent billion-pound betting bonanza at the World Cup in Brazil. Brazil 2014 kicks off on June 12 in Sao Paolo as 31 of the best teams in the world—and England—battle it out amid the heat, unfinished stadia and street crime to lift the coveted trophy. And sports-betting fans across the world will have their laptops, tablets and PCs at…