Suspicious games, match-fixing and corruption from around the world.

“Yeah, there’s tons of big events which are being fixed.
Especially now, lately the trend is very huge events in e-sports as well. Because there is no punition. You can just fix and not get punished.“

Interview with match-fixer, July 2024.

The list is long and varied.

It is compiled by Francesco Baranca – the brilliant, controversial and brilliantly controversial sports gambling monitor – and the team here at the University of New Haven. It is a list of suspicious games around the world in the last month. A selection of matches played from May 31 to July 2 where the odds movements were so bizarre that they triggered some kind of alarm.

The sports include table tennis, tennis (of course), basketball, soccer, volleyball, and speaking of – of courses – cricket.

The countries range around the world: Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Mongolia, Bhutan, Vietnam, Tunisia, Canada, Russia, Ukraine, India, UK, Turkey, Malaysia, Uganda, China, Romania, Finland, Germany, Estonia, Paraguay, Algeria, Iran, Czech Republic, Venezuela, Thailand, Ghana, Nigeria, Lithuania, Peru, Philippines, Kazakhstan, the inevitable international club friendly matches played in neutral countries and the United States.

Here are the surprises.

First, Israel was not mentioned. My suspicion is that my colleagues regard it as so obvious that there will be massive fixing in Israeli sports that it is not worth bothering to search for it. For a sports corruption researcher spotting fixed matches in Israeli soccer is the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel. (Its also their off-season. :)

Second, on Canada Day – July 1 – there was, yet again, a suspicious match in Canadian soccer. My first decade of fighting against match-fixing in professional sports was spent doing lonely investigations and research into the phenomenon. The first part of the next decade was spent around various conferences and international events where I would speak about the dangers of corruption and fixing in sports. At the end of these occasions, there would be almost inevitably, some chap who would stand at the back of the room, toss their silk handkerchief in the air and say in a fluent, sophisticated accent, “How dare Mr. Hill, a Canadian, lecture us on this sports corruption matter. He says all this when the league in his country, the Canadian Soccer League is so corrupt that bookies will not offer bets on it.”

Fair play.

Not only was I jealous of these men’s cosmopolitan, handkerchiefs-in-the-air manners and smooth accents, I also have to admit that they had a point. The Canadian Soccer League (CSL) was an international joke. It was so outrageously corrupt that at one point a gambling market expert told me that a possible 50% of the games had been arranged. I am not sure if that were true, but I am sure that the corruption was so bad that in one game in the Niagara Peninsula, one team became determined to screw over the fixers. So they marched down the field with the ball and tried to score in their own goal. The team that was, allegedly, fixing became so worried that they seized the ball and ran down the field to score in their own goal. The last twenty minutes of the match was the bizarre scene of both teams desperately trying to score in their own goals!

I had hoped with the end of the CSL and the foundation of the Canadian Premier League that those days were over. Sadly, it seems as it they may have returned.

Three, women’s sports are being fixed and corrupted. There is a strange, old-world chivalry in the betting world. Often, it is considered that women would not fix sports matches. Men, yes, of course but women are in some way regarded as above doing such things. Yet women have been approached to participate in fixing since at least the 2007 Women’s World Cup in China.
Why wouldn’t they fix? All the same conditions exist in women’s sport. There is a one trillion-dollar-plus gambling market that bets on women’s games. The athletes are badly paid. They are often exploited by management, sometimes accompanied by the silent plague of sports – appalling sexual abuse of the athletes by their coaches or officials.

The other eyebrow raising areas of corruption is the number of under-20-years-old competitions that are under suspicion. It is an axiom of dodgy sports officials that corruption is the purview of young, untrained athletes who exposed to the exhilarating life of a professional sports person – fast cars, faster women and easy money – fall into the ways of criminals.

Ha, ha, ha!

Look, there are a tiny one-percent of professional athletes who have access to this kind of life style but most athletes are extraordinary hard-working, self-sacrificing young people who have to think twice before going to a party. Even the top, super-star athletes have physical demands on their bodies that preclude any kind of indulgence. One example from many, the brilliant Polish goalkeeper Wojciech Szczesny, now playing for Juventus was fired, in part, from the Arsenal of the English Premier League because his then manager caught him smoking a cigarette.

When you consider this idea of young players being more prone to corruption it is a wonderful way of excusing any league official or administrator. It is the complete opposite of the truth. Part of my doctoral research showed that like other financial crimes – fraud and money-laundering – it is the purview of the older person. The older a player, the more likely they were to fix.

However, now we see, particularly in Brazil and Argentina, a host of youth games being fixed. This is bad news for the home of those perpetual wizards of soccer/football. If the corruption is starting early, there is no way of stopping it.

Finally, yes, there was a suspicious match in the United States. There are many. It is the coming of the corruption tsunami that has enveloped the rest of the sports world. Stay tuned, stay very tuned, there is a massive scandal in American sports coming down the pipeline.