Of course, there will be match fixing at the FIFA World Cup – Why wouldn’t there be? Sports gambling/betting, corruption, under-paid players, its all legal!

So what you want, we can deliver to you. After this match, I have a game in the Under-20 World Cup… So Under-20 World Cup first two games they will play, so after the third game, they will do for us because XXXX is our team (names a prominent sub-Saharan national team)… So after first two games they will surely be relegated, so the table they will be below. It means if they lose, it doesn’t matter…They need to take the money and will fix it for us.
Covertly filmed interview with an Asian match-fixer

Here is the first, important and dirty secret: Match-fixing at the World Cup is easy.
The fixers have been coming to the big sport tournaments since at least 1991 – when they approached players at the Under-17 World Cup in Melbourne, Australia. My sources for this are hundreds of players, coaches, referees, national football federation officials, law enforcement and senior FIFA executives (including the former President Sepp Blatter).
The official line is that the fixers are the unluckiest tourists in the world – yes, they come to all these different tournaments but they never succeed. Privately, almost everyone in the inside-FIFA power world knows that the fixers sometimes succeed. They speculate on which games were fixed.
Here are the secrets from inside this world that allow this kind of corruption to continue.

Power point slide from one of my presentations at the University of New Haven, Sports Integrity Certificate, outlining the number of top soccer tournaments that been affected by match-fixing.

SECRET 1: LOSING TO WIN

American sports leagues are full of corruption. Yet virtually no one speaks about it as match-fixing. Rather almost all the journalists talk about “tanking”. As an outsider, it boggles the mind that anyone would take the NBA, MLB, or NHL seriously. The underperformance of some of the teams in those leagues is so outrageous that much of the games are simply theater.

The key motivation for this type of fixing is the way that the leagues are set up. After a certain “threshold” point (the All-Star Weekend for Baseball) it is apparent that some teams have absolutely no chance of of making the play-offs. It actually benefits those team to lose as many games as possible as they will be rewarded with low draft picks for the next years’ new players.

There is all kinds of talk about changing the system – but the essential truth is that if you lose a lot of games, you will get a better draft pick than if you try hard.

It is the same in European football – il sistema – is alive and well in most southern European leagues. After a certain point in the season, mid-table teams trade points for money or the transfer of players and… (Editor’s note: Declan get back to the story about match-fixing at the World Cup!)

It is the same for the upcoming FIFA World Cup. There are now 700 teams taking part – (actually it is only 48, but it feels like 700). There will be 104 games. The above quote from the match-fixer shows you what will happen. The teams whose administrations are corrupt, and are underpaying their players – will sell their final games in the opening round. In the match-fixers words,“So after first two games they will surely be relegated, so the table they will be below. It means if they lose, it doesn’t matter.”

If the words of an Asian match-fixer don’t convince you then how about one of Europe’s most-successful businessmen and match-fixers: Bernard Tapie? He was a French cabinet minister, the CEO of Adidas, and owner of Olympique de Marseille. Tapie fixed, with the help of his pals in the Corsican Mafia, the final game of the 1993 French league season. His motive? Marseille could both win the league and have an easy match before the Final of the European Cup (forerunner of the Champions League). When Tapie met the players’ he was bribing, he said, “You are going to lose anyway, why don’t you lose with 30,000 Francs in your pocket?”

SECRET 2: Some of the players don’t get paid

To make this situation worst, the players on some teams at the FIFA World Cup do not get paid.

They should get paid. FIFA allocates every participating national federation millions of dollars to pay for their teams’ travel logistics, hotels, salaries for coaches, players, masseurs, cooks, physiotherapists, etc.

The national federations are supposed to negotiate in good faith with their players for a fair allocation of the money. After all, the fans watch the games to see the players, not some out-of-shape football executive.

Most federations find fair agreements with their players but some of them, particularly from sub-Saharan Africa, the executives of their National Football Association just pocket the cash, buy late model European cars, and give the players cliches about “national development” or “Your work is making our youth program far stronger” or “Our whole country thanks you…”

Meanwhile, the ‘big men’ of the Football Association have flown in their mistresses or wives to stay at five-star hotels, while the players, the actual people who get the team to the prestigious tournament are excluded.

One of the African players I interviewed summed it well, saying, “Whenever someone talks about patriotism and the good of the game – I know I am going to not get paid.”

At the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, most teams brought about 40-50 people: players, coaches, and their support staff. People whose jobs it was to help the players be the very best they could be, The Nigerian team? They brought over-one-hundred-and-fifty people. Most of them “Big Men” with their various females companions. The Nigerian Football Association quickly realized they had a problem: there was not enough room for everybody at the five-star hotel chosen to be the training center for the Nigeria team. The solution? Shift the players to a cheap motel at the side of a highway while the “Big Men” and their ladies stayed in the fancy hotel.
To be clear, I am not accusing the Super Eagles of fixing but I am saying that the team crashed out in the opening round. You can understand why.

Striking Players

Because of this kind of larceny, player strikes are common at the FIFA World Cup tournaments. In 2014, the entire Ghana team declared themselves ready to sit out a game until they got paid. The President of Ghana had to charter a plane and fly it to Brazil with the players’ cash before the players would play.

Two points.

First, the great Sulley Muntari, one of the star midfielders of Ghana, immediately took some of his cash and went for a walk in a local favela – a very poor and often very dangerous Brazilian city neighbourhood. He handed out $100 dollar bills to the inhabitants. His point? It’s not about the money, it is the principle: we deserve to get paid fairly.

Second, the President of the Ghana Football Association was covertly taped by investigative journalists accepting bribes and covert cash payments (unrelated to match-fixing) just before the start of the 2018 World Cup.

SECRET 3: LOTS OF THE PLAYERS ARE GAMBLING ADDICTS

A small number of the FIFA World Cup players who have had gambling issues – none of the above have ever been linked to match-fixing

Compounding the issue fo exploitation is an age-old problem: widespread gambling addiction among the players.

Sandro Tonali, Ivan Toney are big players. They are/were on the national teams of two of the best-known football countries – England and Italy – in the world. They were both gambling addicts. Tonali was so badly addicted that he ended up being criminally convicted of betting with an illegal gamblers and settling his bills with Rolex watches.

His practices are reminiscent of the ‘golden generation’ of English Football. Their 2006 World Cup team featured Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and a host of other great players who never quite dominated for their country as they did for their clubs. Gary Neville, one of their best defenders wrote in his autobiography that many of the team were so badly addicted that they were gambling and losing heavily at card games during the World Cup in Germany. “As well as the problems with the team, I was never thrilled about the gambling culture off the pitch. The amount of time spent on horse racing or cards was ridiculous…Gambling is a cancer in a changing room.”

Now, with the advent of widespread mobile phone gambling the problem is even worst.
In November I was invited to speak on Capitol Hill in Washington about the “Silent, Sporting Plague” of gambling addiction. It is a disease that few dare-mention but it is hitting American athletes very, very hard. It is the same among players at the World Cup.
It does not mean that every player is a gambling addict. Nor does it mean that any of the players I mentioned above ever fixed a match. But it does mean that many of the players at this World Cup know their way around the betting market.
There were even players at the FIFA 2022 World Cup who were connected to the Sapina match-fixing Boys. Quite what they were doing playing at the world’s biggest sporting tournament is anyone’s guess. However, as you will see in Part 2 & 3, of this series (The Seven Secrets of Why There Will be Match-Fixing at the World Cup), there is a whole system designed, established and maintained to investigate but not publicize any suspicious events at a FIFA World Cup – the corruption will go on.

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