Slovenia – Declan Hill – Investigative Journalist & Academic

05DecDecember 5, 2017

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...

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...

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...