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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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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