Declan Hill has written journal articles, book sections and an academic book Insider’s Guide to Match-Fixing in Football to explain the new phenomenon of globalization and match-fixing in professional sports.

Hill’s other academic interests are corruption studies, organized crime and ‘informal governance’ – or the analysis of power structures in societies that are outside formal governments.

In general, Hill follows the Oxford sociology tradition of ‘rational choice analysis’. He thinks that in most situations the majority of people choose to act in a certain way because they believe it will be for their own benefit. So if you pay customs officials badly, they will be more likely to be corrupt than if you pay them well. This is in contrast to a subjective or cultural analysis that says corruption is due to a lack of ethics.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17430437.2020.1804114

Hill is driven by evidence-based work: research methods should fit the topic that is being examined, rather than shaping the topic to use a favorite research method. Therefore, Hill uses both qualitative (interviews, text analysis) and quantitative methods (statistics) in his research.

SEVEN STEPS TO UNDERSTANDING MATCH-FIXING

“If it seems complicated, you are not an expert.”
Academic proverb

“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”
Dr. Seuss

Match-fixing is not complicated. Here are the seven steps to understanding the phenomenon.

 

1.   Match-fixing has been around since sport was first organized.

2.   However, we in this generation are facing something new. There is a linkage between match-fixing and globalization. The same phenomenon that is transforming industries like journalism, travel and music – is transforming sports corruption.

3.   There is a global multiple-hundreds-of-billions of dollars market in sports gambling that is now accessible to anybody who wants to make a bet on almost any sports event in the world. Sports events from NFL American Football to 2nd division Dutch women’s soccer games to Austrian ski jumping can be bet on almost anywhere in the world.

4.   This means that sports events that were safe from the possibility of fixing ten years ago are now in danger.

5.   Many of the fixing scandals in football (soccer) are the responsibility of a small group of interconnected fixers living in Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia and Thailand. They all know each other. They compete and collude with each other every week.

6.   The authorities in those countries know most of these fixers, rather than arrest or put them on public trial, they try to ignore them. Or when they do ‘fixing investigations’ they arrest the relatively low-level players or referees. They do so because there are some very influential and rich people who sometimes bankroll the fixers. Those people would be deeply embarrassed (at the very least) if the full picture of their activities were revealed.

7.   The Asian fixers have established a network of corrupted sports officials around the world. Most of those officials have not been named. If the fixers were put on public trial we could find out the full extent of the network, arrest the corrupt officials and protect global sports for the next ten years.

 

Below are videos that answer some of the basic questions on current-day match-fixing. Thanks to Andrew Thompson, Tad Homer-Dixon and the kind staff of the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) Centre in Kitchener/Waterloo, please visit for the complete interview:

https://www.cigionline.org/videos/corruption-and-international-sport-inside-issues-511