10Feb

The Greatest Case of Commercial Blindness in the History of Sports Integrity

There are all kinds of examples of inappropriate blindness. There was Captain Smith of the SS Titanic not seeing the iceberg. There was Admiral Nelson putting the telescope to his eye patch not to see the signal to retreat. There was Johnny Papalia the mafia thug who beat up the head of Toronto’s illegal gambling racket in front of two-hundred people in a crowded restaurant and when the police arrived none of the patrons said they saw anything. Then there...

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13Dec

Canada’s Shame

The success of Toronto FC aside, Canadian soccer remains an abject embarrassment — not because of quality of play, but because European police and sports officials say a lower-level Canadian league remains a hot spot of corruption and match-fixing. “You are supposed to be honest people,” Kee, a Chinese-Malaysian bookie who runs an illegal gambling site in Kuala Lumpur, said last year. “How can you be honest when so many fixed soccer games are going on in your country?” These accusations...

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09Sep

The Ghosts Fixed the Match

They began August 4, 2014 at 8.30 a.m. It was supposed to be a normal, pre-season, football game between the lower-league Portuguese team Freamunde and the Spanish team Ponferradina. Francesco Baranca the secretary-general of Federbet, a company that monitors the sports gambling market for potential fixes, said in an interview with Play the Game, “[t]he morning of the match the market went crazy […] The odds were very heavy that the match would finish 2-1 for the Spanish team Ponferradina and...

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24Jun

The ‘Sports’ Farce in Washington

To my American colleagues who went to the seminar on ‘sports integrity’ at the National Press Club on June 24th, You saw a presentation by a man with little credibility in sports integrity and two other men who have failed. You attended a presentation sponsored by the Qatari sports establishment.    This is a group that is suspected by sports fans around the world of corruption in securing the rights to the World Cup tournament of 2022. This is a group that...

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