The Daily Telegraph investigation, which uncovered alleged attempts by an illegal international betting syndicate to ‘fix’ football matches played in the English non-league, provoked predictable outrage among anybody with an affinity for our national game. Owing to the identity of the fixtures targeted, however, the story lacked a shock factor.
Players earning a relatively meagre wage, the argument goes, are especially susceptible to the temptation to markedly supplement their income for complying with what, initially, appears a straightforward, perhaps even harmless, demand.
That the matches in which successfully targeted individuals pick up their pre-determined booking, or conspire to concede a set number of goals, take place off the national radar, and under the auspices of a hitherto complacent Football Association, surely increases confidence among perpetrators of this spiteful crime that their actions will evade detection.
The Telegraph’s report resulted in the arrest by the National Crime Agency (NCA) of seven men. Of the four subsequently charged, two, Michael Boateng and Hakeem Adelakun were footballers for Whitehawk FC. The Conference South club has dismissed both men from its employment.
It is in the same Conference South division that whispers of match fixing emerged last season. Bookmakers, having been alerted to suspicious gambling patterns, stopped taking bets on assorted matches involving Billericay Town, AFC Hornchurch and Chelmsford City. Infamously, a match between Welling and Billericay, played in front of just 408 people in November 2012, attracted betting sums totalling hundreds of thousands of pounds – the majority of which was staked on Asian exchanges.
The storm surrounding the three Essex sides blew out almost as soon as it had gathered force. In March, weeks after being alerted to the situation, the FA asked the league’s clubs to ‘remind players and officials of their responsibilities under the rules’. Nine months on and there has been no further word from the game’s national body. The three clubs’ chairmen still await FA contact with regard to any investigation.
Meanwhile, two former Hornchurch players, Reiss Noel and Joe Woolley, last month pleaded guilty in Melbourne Magistrates’ Court to ‘conduct that corrupts a betting outcome’. The duo, along with another ex-Hornchurch team-mate, Nick McKoy, was originally arrested and charged with match-fixing offences committed while playing for Southern Stars in the Victorian Premier League.
The former head of the organisation’s compliance unit, Graham Bean, recently accused the FA of a ‘dereliction of duty’. Troublingly, considering the words are spoken by a man with first-hand experience of its workings, Bean continued, ‘It is my belief that the FA tend to stick their heads in the sand at suggestions of match fixing and tend to give a perception that they don’t think it actually exists’.
Even in the wake of six fresh arrests being made in connection to football spot fixing this week, Alex Horne, General Secretary at the FA, described the consensus opinion at a cross-sport summit convened by Culture Secretary, Maria Miller, as being ‘this isn’t a big issue’.
This latest corruption case, stemming from the Sun on Sunday newspaper’s allegation that former Portsmouth footballer, Sam Sodje, told an undercover reporter he could arrange for individual players to be booked or sent off for money, indicates that Horne’s confidence is misplaced.
Since the original story featuring the Whitehawk two came to light, Marcus Gayle, who manages Staines Town in the Conference South, publicly stated that one of his players was a recent target for match-fixers – an approach hastily reported by the club.
Another non-league manager has this week informed me that he is one hundred per cent sure his team was involved in a match last season that was ‘crooked’. What’s more, the same manager believes that the referee on that day was one of the architects of the deception.
What began as an unsavoury tale, that on-lookers could at least reassure themselves was consigned to the game’s backwaters has, within a fortnight, evolved to encompass players currently operating in the football league and, potentially, a match official.
The bar had been raised when, following the Sun’s expose, Sam Sodje’s brother and Tranmere Rovers striker Akpo, another Tranmere player Ian Goodison and Cristian Montano of Oldham Athletic were revealed to be among the six men questioned by police in relation to football match-fixing allegations.
The subsequent disclosure that DJ Campbell had also been arrested as part of the same investigation has thrust the issue of fixing into the media on a scale not seen since Bruce Grobbelaar, Hans Segers and John Fashanu stood trial for conspiracy to corrupt – before eventually being acquitted in November 1997.
For here, we had a player accused of taking money to alter the course of a match who, one suspects, during a career that has included stops at Birmingham City, Leicester City, Blackpool and QPR will have accumulated a substantial personal wealth. Furthermore, this is a man that is right now taking home an enviable wage from Championship club, Blackburn Rovers.
If an individual of such relatively prosperous standing could conceivably be snared by the fixers – the charge is unproven – then just how much of this poison is dripping through our game.
The NCA’ s expeditious response to both the Sun and Telegraph investigations is a welcome step forward, yet the fact remains that it has required the work of two newspapers to uncover these alleged wrongdoings. It is hard to shake the feeling that the revelations of recent weeks are merely the tip of an iceberg.
It required the testimony of former team-mates and fellow serial miscreants for Lance Armstrong’s transformation from gravely ill cancer patient to seven time Tour de France winner to be exposed as the dope-fuelled fairy-tale that it was.
That particular matter may have concerned the use of performance enhancing drugs rather than the fixing problem that faces football, but the comparison is just. As the sweeping extent of Armstrong’s once-held power over his sport continues to become clear, chief cycling administrators from the American’s dominant era are mired in accusations of coercion in his deeds.
For cheats to prosper, in whatever form, their misdemeanours must be facilitated. That might be by way of conscious assistance, or the passivity or sheer neglect of the people charged with guarding against that eventuality.
Moreover, it stretches credibility to imagine that every footballer who goes onto a pitch intending to deceive anybody with an emotional or financial investment in their match is acting entirely alone.
The European football superpower of Italy has been beset by its own match-fixing strife. The relegation to Serie B of Lazio and AC Milan was among myriad punishments handed out in the ‘Totonero’ scandal of 1980.
In 2006, the crime was shown to remain very much alive – rather than being consigned to a past when the game wasn’t awash with the money of today. The verdicts on the ‘Calciopili’ affair found guilty of participation in a sprawling match-fixing network, players, managers, club owners, referees, linesmen, officials of the Italian Referees’ Association (AIA), and the former president and vice-president of the Italian Football Federation. The initial sentences on the transgressors were imparted days after Italy had lifted the World Cup.
Back in England we looked on aghast, but grateful that our football was above corruption. As supporters we have arguably been no less complacent than the FA who believed its game untouchable.
But, just seven months before clubs of such renown as Juventus and AC Milan were found to have interfered with the selection of match officials, German referee, Robert Hoyzer, was sentenced to two years and five months imprisonment. Hoyzer confessed to having fixed, or attempted to fix, nine matches. The Croatian leader of the betting ring on whose behalf the referee was operating received a 2 year, 11 month jail term.
These are not isolated examples. In February this year, the EU Intelligence sharing agency, Europol, announced that 425 people from 15 different countries, including; players, match officials, club staff, and ‘serious criminals’, are suspected of involvement in seeking to fix 380 professional football matches across Europe.
Can it be that the unwelcome developments during the past fortnight in English football have at their roots only a few misguided footballers and their nefarious manipulators?
It is a wistful hope. The sense of foreboding doesn’t end there. Deliberately accruing a yellow or red card, the crime of which the aforementioned five football league players stand accused, is commonly interpreted as merely an indication that ‘the fix is on’.
A similar tactic was employed by Mazhar Majeed, an Asian betting ring’s fixer, in order to provide a ‘taster’ of the information he could supply with respect to the Pakistan cricket team. Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir, unaware that their actions were under the scrutiny of the News of the World, both delivered no balls in a Lord’s test match against England. The pair, along with their captain, Salman Butt, was eventually jailed after being found guilty of ‘conspiracy to cheat at gambling and conspiracy to accept corrupt payments’.
Pakistan cricket remains tainted. When, in a recent one day international match against South Africa, the team required 19 runs from fifty-five balls with six wickets still in hand, only to slump to a one run defeat, the natural reaction was not to consider that a thrilling sporting event had taken place. That might be unfair, but it is inevitable given Pakistan cricket’s sullied reputation.
If the public believe that they are no longer watching an honest and competitive contest, then sport is dead. Now it is incumbent on the English football authorities to discover how far the disease has spread. It is entirely possible, of course, that what we are now seeing is the outing of a few rogue ‘bad eggs’ but, correspondingly, we are already bearing the consequences of sitting idle and dismissing match-fixing as somebody else’s problem.
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