18Sep

The Sporting Scandals of the Season

It is in the dog days of summer that the dirty deeds get done. A good habit for European and North American investigative journalists is to check government press releases at the beginning of the July 1st/4th weekend and the Friday before the Christmas Holidays. For it is then, when most people are rushing out the door for their holidays, that bad news emerges from guilty corporations, complicit government departments and cunning media spokes people. In sports corruption, the equivalent are...

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05Dec

Suspicious Games in the Champions League & the Great Olympic Scandal

Interesting week in international sports. Lets start with the Champions League where once again we have a ‘choke-point’ where games are regularly fixed. Here is the scenario.  You are a UEFA investigator. The rest of the world thinks that you have unlimited resources and money coming out of your elbows. You know that if you’re lucky, the system will give you a bent paper clip and an elastic band for resources to stop corruption in Europe’s premier competition – the Champions...

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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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17May

2 Farces, Turkish Nightmare & Infantino’s Blatter-Lite FIFA

It was not a good week for sport. The Turkish nightmare continues. There are strange doings, as usual, in Singapore and Qatar. However, the big story is that Gianni Infantino's FIFA has now become a Blatter-Lite FIFA: the same organisation, only with better table manners for the media.   The key issue is the resignation of Domenico Scala as the Head of the Audit and Compliance Committee. He quit FIFA as Infantino pushed through a measure that would have allowed the FIFA Executive Committee...

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30Apr

It’s Not a Fix: Leicester City’s Dream Season

Returning from three-weeks away to an inbox of e-mails from around the world asking, 'is the whole thing is a fix?'.  Is Leicester City's triumphant surge simply a case of bunged envelopes, compliant defenders and compromised games?  The notes have poured in from across the world. Readers from New Zealand to South Africa to England to the US, and many countries in between,  have asked this question. The answer is no. If there were any fixing in the Premier League (which...

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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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07Jun

Two Crises, One Continent

It was a bizarre accident that started the investigation. On a road in northern Italy a driver fell asleep. No big deal. Except the driver was a soccer player from the local team who could not stay awake, no matter how hard he tried. When the police tested him, they discovered he was not suffering from narcolepsy; but a gambler had drugged him and some of his team-mates to ensure that they played so badly they lost the game,...

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