Iris sports betting and corruption
Declan Hill is a Canadian investigative journalist who penned The Fix, published in , which chronicles the four years he spent attempting to infiltrate the organised crime gangs involved in football match-fixing. His investigation saw him travel across four continents on his mission to expose illegal gambling cartels. Hill spoke to The42 to discuss the match-fixing scandal that has rocked the tennis world but he was also adamant that Irish sport needs to take the threat of match-fixing seriously, across all of its codes.
The year-old, who has given presentations to the International Olympic Committee and UK Parliament on sports corruption, wants to see serious talks on match-fixing take place in this country. The tennis match-fixing report was a serious and alarming wake-up call for Irish sports. This is a problem that all sports are going to face. But they also highlight the dangers of match-fixing and the severity of the punishment for such offences.
The site warns players about match-fixing and corruption and the punishments for those offences. From that point, the onus is on the association to launch an investigation. Most bookmakers are also members of ESSA, a European not-for-profit organisation that attempts to promote integrity by tackling match-fixing and fraudulent behaviour.
Report to Mme. Chantal Jouanno, French Minister of Sport, delivered on 17 March 8 prevention and deterrence of corruption, the detection of fraud and the facilitation of politico-judicial enquiries in order to provide the most effective penalties for criminal activity likely to be rampant at grassroots level.
To meet these requirements, an international research team was set up at the instigation of IRIS to federate the skills of different research units: - the French Institute of International and Strategic Relations IRIS , ranked in the world s leading 25 think tanks on security and defence issues 5, which has for many years been working on the geoeconomic and geopolitical aspects of sport.
David Forrest specialises in analysing the economy of sports betting - the China Center for Lottery Studies, a research centre based in Beijing with acknowledged expertise in the analysis of sports betting in Asia - and lastly Praxes Avocats, with Jean-Michel Icard and Jean-Pierre Meyer, specialists in the analysis of criminal organisations In addition to this international platform of theoretical and practical expertise, we have been privileged to be able to call on the skills of regional experts in other fields, who have enabled us to refine and deepen our hypotheses.
Their contributions are acknowledged at the end of this work. Lastly, we would very much like to thank all those members of the sports movement, betting operators, regulatory authorities, police, justice and intelligence departments with whom we have met during this year-long study, and who have explained to us their positions, concerns and difficulties.
The list of key figures interviewed also appears as an appendix to this report. Yet in the final of baseball s greatest competition, the team chose to scuttle itself. Led by Gandil, who had succeeded in enrolling several of his teammates, Chicago allowed the Cincinnati Reds to win the championship. A key factor in the fixing of the game was the players extremely tense relationship with their Chairman, who had refused to improve their salary conditions.
Star player Joe Jackson always claimed to have rejected the proposal, despite the accusations of Gandil who claimed that as the star of the team, Jackson s involvement was decisive for the match to be properly fixed. Gandil was to receive the money before the first match 1 October but Sullivan - who was unable to advance the money - brought Arnold Rothstein, a professional gambler who was able to advance the funds, into the loop.
The following day, he patted one of the opposing players on the back to signal that the deal was on, and the rigging would go ahead. The Reds won the first match. Although they had not yet received the money promised for throwing the first match apart from Cicotte , the White Sox decided to lose the second match.
They then won the third round. The conspirators then decided to abandon the match fixing and fought fiercely against the Reds in the sixth and seventh rounds. Arnold Rothstein, the professional gambler, then took things into his own hands and despatched one of his men to threaten one of the players with physical violence against him and his wife if the White Sox won.
They duly lost, and the Reds finally carried off the series the next day. When several newspapers began to spread rumours of rigging, star player Jackson alerted his Chairman and wrote to him suggesting that the final might have been rigged. Under the growing 9 10 weight of the rumours, the owners of the two clubs appointed a steward and gave him full powers to carry out an investigation.
Cicotte and Jackson admitted having been bribed to rig the matches, but Gandil denied everything to the end. The eight players and several members of the betting public with the exception of Rothstein were tried in but all were acquitted for lack of evidence the testimonies of Cicotte and Jackson to the Commission of Inquiry having mysteriously disappeared from the file.
In any case, the scandal was sufficiently important for the public to rename this the Black Sox Affair, an indication of the lack of the purity supposedly symbolised by the immaculate white of the White Sox. Despite the acquittal of the eight players, the Baseball Federation nevertheless decided to ban them from all activities linked with baseball, with this powerful declaration that even today retains its full impact: No player who throws a ball game, no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ball game, no player that sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.
The following day, the South African Federation denied any match fixing, but suspended Cronje after he admitted to a fellow player that he had not been entirely honest. Gibbs scored 74 runs and Williams retired hurt. Neither of them received any money. He also admitted having sold strategic information and having agreed to forfeit an innings in a match against England in that could no longer influence the final outcome of the Test Series 6.
In August , Gibbs and Williams received six-month suspensions for having failed to alert the authorities, and in October , Cronje was suspended for life from any activity linked to professional cricket. He died in a plane accident two years later, giving rise to all sorts of theories about the possible involvement of illegal betting circles in his death.
Several cases of fraud had already shaken the cricket world by the end of the s. In it was discovered that the Australian Federation had secretly suspended two players in for passing information to Sri Lankan gamblers. A number of players had also revealed instances of match fixing, but the enquiries had come to nothing. An earlier trial in April had already ended in the sentencing of four other criminals from the same network: Nurretin Gunay, Tuna Akbulut, Stefan Relic and Kristian Sprecakovic.
The trial, which is still ongoing, is currently the largest instance of corruption in the history of European sport. It is the outcome of a vast inquiry which began - by accident - at the end of At the time, the police were investigating a prostitution and narcotics ring run by a transnational criminal organisation based in Bochum Germany.
But the investigators discovered that the criminals were also running a vast network instigating corruption in sport and rigging bets to launder the fruits of their activities. On 19 November , after a year of telephone tapping, 50 people were arrested and charged with corrupting over football matches in 10 European countries. International and European Cup games were included in the investigation.
The corruption was organised methodically by people who identified which matches were to be fixed, others advanced the money needed to arrange such match-fixing, corruptors who contacted the sports people involved directly or through intermediaries , and people who placed the bets and recovered the winnings etc. Major Mafia moneymen were also accused of financing criminal betting syndicates from Asia. The most vulnerable footballers were targeted for corruption relatively old players, players at the end of their contract, those with debts etc.
The modus operandi changed continually across the rigged matches. Sometimes the referee was bought, sometimes one or more specific players, sometimes an entire team was corrupted, even both teams! A Belgian club was also purchased directly by one of the members of the gang, which enabled him to place accomplices in the team and fix matches with ease.
Friendly games were also organised by the corruptors purely with a view to enabling betting on these events. The criminals established a system of stars that enabled them to classify matches whose manipulation was definite five stars for matches where both teams had been bought down to less certain matches one star for a single player bought out of the The sums to be placed on betting sites were determined according to this classification.
In the space of just over one year, a total of 12 million was injected to corrupt players, referees, trainers and federation officials. Tens of millions of euro were bet, including In total, it is estimated that this gang profited to the tune of 7. It should be noted that the Croatian Ante Sapina, the mastermind of this network, had already been accused in a previous affair the Hoyzer affair , which tainted German football in At the time, Ante Sapina and his two brothers, Milan and Philip, had been accused of corrupting two German referees, Dominik Marks and Robert Hoyzer.
In total, the latter received 70, from Ante Sapina who walked away with a profit of about 2 million from 23 German Second and Third Division matches, one Cup match and a Turkish Championship match between April and December Ante Sapina was sentenced to almost three years in prison but only remained behind bars for a few months. In the Bochum affair, Ante Sapina said he placed bets of about 1 million per month on 30 matches, and sought to corrupt on average one match per week.
He also revealed that he used the former Osnabruck player Thomas Cichon to make contact with the players he corrupted. The first of these referees was struck off for life by UEFA in February , and the second received the same penalty from the Court of Arbitration for Sport on 18 January Sapina s revelations also tarnished UEFA because he was discovered to have an inside influence on that organisation.
His accomplice, Jozef Marko, served on the Referee Selection Panel and was thus able to nominate certain unscrupulous referees for matches in which Sapina had an interest. The Bochum trial, the third part of which is due to begin shortly, has passed relatively unnoticed in Europe the French daily sports paper L Equipe, for example, has given the investigation almost no coverage. Geographic distribution of rigged matches revealed during the first two parts of the investigation relating to the Bochum trial 14 I.
Analysis of the players and methods of corruption in sport This report aims to increase knowledge of corruption in sport by trying to identify the players, methods and conditions that favour this type of criminal dynamic. It will also propose a typology of corruption in sport, a working framework to help understand the phenomenon and its unique characteristics from every angle.
The work Comment truquer un match de foot? How to rig a football match Declan Hill, Florent Massot, provides an initial inventory of these criminal dynamics, modus operandi and people involved in corruption in sport, but without giving an overall summary or general understanding of the issue. Corruption is a behaviour that exists independently of sport, and the rigging of sports matches has always existed, the modus operandi varying according to the spatio-temporal context and the development of technologies.
As is the case with other problems violence, racism , sport reflects the values and trends of the society in which it takes place. Sport does not in itself create corruption, racism or violence. But sport - like politics for example - can be a victim of any or all of these. In this first section, we propose to analyse corruption in sport as a whole, in other words to study all the attacks or attempted attacks on the integrity of sport, including those whose motivation is not enrichment on the betting market.
It does in fact appear that all cases of match-fixing can help in understanding the operation of, and conditions for, corruption in sport. The models of corruption in sport have been classified in three distinct categories in order to facilitate their analysis and understanding by the reader. The first focus area will be individual fraud in sport, which describes the specific rigging of a sporting event. The second focus area will relate to corruption motivated by a club or federation, and the third will concentrate on corruption involving criminal organisations outside the world of sport.
This choice will not necessarily prevent overlapping, because there is no predefined model of corruption. Each case has its own logic, depending on the identity of the corruptors and corruptees, their motivation, their resources and their environment. Scandals have multiplied in recent years and encompass all disciplines, all levels of sport and a wide number of countries. These highprofile cases provide the information needed to gain a better understanding of the strategies and mechanisms at work, and the interests of the corruptors.
This information has been supplemented by a substantial number of interviews by the research team, which have helped to refine the analysis of the criminal s behaviour. Fraud in sport at grassroots level: the first level of corruption All cases of corruption in sport involve the falsification of a result or aspect of the game at a given moment. The athlete or referee is therefore the first cog in the wheel of corruption.
It is their action or conversely, their inertia that is likely to falsify the course of an event and be the substance of the fraud. Integrity is the very essence of modern sport. The beauty of competition lies in the uncertainty of the result, the absolute chance that enables the smallest team to overcome the largest, the lowest-ranked athlete to beat the favourite.
On any sports field, competition brings together athletes who, despite their different intrinsic qualities, share the same goal of victory. The chance inherent in any sporting event explains the popularity of sport, and the emotions aroused when athletes win or lose.
Rigging an event deceives the onlookers, and gives them an illusion of uncertainty when the result of the encounter is already decided. And although some competitions are attentively followed by a large number of viewers, there are multiple possibilities for athletes nowadays to deceive their audience.
How is it possible to rig a football game? How is it possible nowadays to rig a football game without attracting the attention of the multitude of viewers who carefully observe all aspects of the game? It is obviously not possible to apply scientific rules to describe the behaviour of cheating players. Recent history and admitted instances of match fixing show that everyone involved in a game may be concerned: some cases involve both teams in their entirety, sometimes a single team or merely one or more players, or the match officials, or sometimes a member of the sports management, who may drug 15 16 players to weaken them.
It has even been known for stadium technicians to extinguish the lights in order to freeze the scores and win on the betting market! The corruption of the goalkeeper and at least one central defender may be sufficient to ensure a defeat, even though several other players defenders and mid-field may play a part in rigging the match. How do these players manage to concede goals without attracting the attention of those watching the game? The main solutions for cheats do not lie in specific events in the game such as being sent off, or giving away penalties or goals against their own team.
These practices if they ever existed are too obvious and can arouse mistrust and controversy. On the other hand, deliberate defensive errors that lead to goals are less flagrant and more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt.
These can be marking, offside or other types of positioning errors that may appear less suspicious because they occur more often in a match. So during an attacking move by the opposing team, a defender may openly move offside.
These errors are sometimes viewed as unforgivable and may indicate match-fixing, but how can one prove that the fault is intentional? One footballer interviewed during this study admitted he knew when members of his team had decided not to give their all in a match simply by spotting these errors or blunders that, according to him, a professional player just does not make Traditionally, corruption in football is manifested in the alteration of the final result of a game.
However, new technologies inherent in the sports betting sector have helped to develop more subtle methods, particularly what is known as spot fixing. Some sports betting operators accept bets, for example, on the number of yellow or red cards, the first or last player to receive a yellow or red card, the first throw-in, the last offence, the number of minutes of additional time, the player taking a certain corner, the name of the first substitute to come onto the pitch etc.
Understandably, these types of bet multiply the risk of corruption because it is very easy to tamper with individual aspects of a game without however influencing its course in any other way. For example, a former Premier League player, Matt Le Tissier, recounts in his autobiography how players could manipulate the beginning of a match by determining in advance which team would take the first throw-in. During a Southampton- Wimbledon match in April , Le Tissier was supposed to kick the ball out of play at the beginning, so that the opposing team would receive the first throw-in.
But a player who was unaware of the plan prevented the ball from going out, thus inadvertently foiling the attempt This type of fraud is extremely difficult to prove. Furthermore, as it has no effect on the final score, it can be easier to get the players themselves to agree to this type of manipulation.
Corrupting the officials is not the surest way of rigging a match. Nevertheless, a number of factors do mean that the referee has an important role. On the one hand, he and he alone makes the decisions, because video refereeing does not exist in modern football and collegial decisions with linesmen are certainly possible at the request of the referee, but not mandatory.
On the other hand, physical contacts are numerous and often their irregularity is not objectively definable, which confers genuine authority 9 The floodlight scandal : These examples will be treated in more detail below. The following examples illustrate the behaviour of corrupt referees. The first of these arose in a friendly match between Nigeria and Argentina on 1 June , during which the referee awarded two imaginary penalties, one after eight minutes of extra time an irrational volume of bets had been recorded in favour of a number of goals above four; an inquiry is currently under way The second example concerns Bosnian referee Novo Panic, who awarded an equally controversial penalty on 9 September in the Liechtenstein-Finland World Cup qualifier.
This game was one of the rigged games analysed in connection with the Bochum trial see insert In addition to players and referees, members of the sports staff can also be involved in corruption. The coach is in a decisive position because he can alter the composition of the team, in other words, put players in unaccustomed positions and make detrimental changes. The medical staff also have access to the players and can - for example - drug them so that they are not at peak physical fitness Lastly, and most unexpectedly, games can be fixed by secondary e.
This was the case in when several championship matches in the English Premier League were interrupted by electricity cuts. The stadium technicians had switched off the lights in order to freeze the score of the match on Asian betting sites, if the match is interrupted for technical reasons, the score at the moment of the interruption is considered to be the final score. There is therefore a significant number of routes whereby corruption can infiltrate football referee, management, players, medical staff, external technicians etc.
But these practices are not specific to football alone, and all sporting disciplines are now affected by such methods. The adaptation of corruption in sport to different disciplines Tennis has a number of specific features that concentrate risks. As an individual sport, attempts at corruption may be judged to be easier.
Effectively, defeat involves only one athlete, and not a team. Tennis players therefore have strong control over their game. To lose they only need to hit a few balls out, serve more softly or run slightly more slowly. Over the past 10 years, numerous rumours and recognised cases of corruption have peppered the life of the professional circuit.
The first instance of corruption to receive wide media coverage was back in October , during the Lyon tournament. Betting company Betfair had recorded bets of , on the victory of Fernando Vicente, who was quoted at 5-to-1 against Evgeni Kafelnikov, one of the best players in the world. Vicente s victory triggered an inquiry. But it failed due to lack of evidence. Suspicions were also aroused by the withdrawal of Russian Nikolai Davydenko World No 4 at the time from his match against Argentinian outsider Martin Vassalo-Arguello in August at a tournament in Sopot Poland , for which Betfair had once again recorded particularly irrational betting: bets of 7 million were in fact placed on the Argentinian to win, which was six times more than normal for a match of this type.
Although nothing came of the Davydenko affair, many tennis players then admitted having been contacted by corruptors, thereby revealing the vulnerability of tennis to the risk of corruption
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