Seeing is believing, so they say. Not any longer.
Can what is seen on any sporting field be taken at face value?
Can the tide of alleged moneymaking on field be stemmed?
The questions merit early answers but find their roots way back
a century.
The history of match fixing in organised sports dates back
to as far back as the early 1900s as many matches across sevaral
sports ever since have been played to a completely or partially
pre-determined result, violating the rules of the game, and more
often than not the law.
Since gambling pre-dates recorded history, it comes as little
surprise that evidence of match fixing is found throughout the
recorded pages of history.
Some major match-fixing incidents which rocked the sporting
world were:
In 1919, gamblers bribed several members of the Major League
Baseball team Chicago White Sox to throw the World Series. This
became known as the Black Sox Scandal and was recounted in book
and movie form as 'Eight Men Out'.
On August 24, 1989, former baseball player Pete Rose voluntarily
accepted a permanent ban from Major League Baseball for allegedly
betting on Cincinnati Reds games while managing the team. Rose
would later confirm the truth of the allegations in his 2004
autobiography, 'My Prison Without Bars'.
In 1994, a comprehensive point shaving scheme organised by
campus bookmaker Benny Silman and involving players from the
Arizona State University men's basketball team was uncovered
with the assistance of Las Vegas bookmakers, who grew suspicious
over repeated large wagers being made against Arizona State.
In February 1999, a Malaysian-based betting syndicate was
caught attempting to install a remote-controlled device to sabotage
the floodlights at English Premier League team Charlton Athletic's
ground with the aid of a corrupt security officer. If the match
had been abandoned after half-time, then the result and bets
would have stood. Subsequent investigations showed that the gang
had been responsible for previously unsuspected ''floodlight
failures'' at West Ham's ground in November 1997, and again a month
later at Crystal Palace's ground during a home match of Palace's
groundsharing tenant Wimbledon.
In 2000, the Delhi police intercepted a conversation between
a blacklisted bookie and the South African cricket captain Hansie
Cronje in which they learnt that Cronje accepted money to throw
matches. The South African government refused to allow any of its
players to face the Indian investigation unit, which opened up
a can of worms. A court of inquiry was set up and Cronje admitted
to throwing matches. He was immediately banned from all cricket.
He also named Saleem Malik (Pakistan), Mohammed Azharuddin and
Ajay Jadeja (India). Jadeja was banned for four years. They too
were banned from all cricket. As a kingpin, Cronje exposed the
dark side of betting.
However, with his untimely death in 2002, most of his sources
also have escaped law enforcement agencies. Two South African
cricketers, Herschelle Gibbs and Nicky Boje, are also wanted by
the Delhi police for their role in the match fixing saga.
A few years earlier in 1998, Australian players Mark Waugh
and Shane Warne were fined for revealing information about the
'weather' to a bookmaker.
The Italian Football Federation said in October 2000 it had
found eight players guilty of match-fixing. Three were from Serie
A side Atalanta and the other five played for Serie B side
Pistoiese.
The players were Giacomo Banchelli, Cristiano Doni and Sebastiano
Siviglia (all Atalanta) and Alfredo Aglietti, Massimiliano Allegri,
Daniele Amerini, Gianluca Lillo and Girolamo Bizzarri (all
Pistoiese). The charges related to an Italian Cup first round tie
between the two sides in Bergamo on August 20, 2000 which ended 1-1.
Atalanta scored at the end of the first half and Pistoiese
equalised three minutes from full time. Atalanta qualified for
the second round. Snai, which organises betting on Italian football,
said later it had registered suspiciously heavy betting on the
result and many of the bets were for a 1-0 halftime score and
a fulltime score of 1-1.
In June 2004 in South Africa, 33 people, including 19 referees,
club officials, a match commissioner and an official of the South
African Football Association, were arrested on match-fixing charges.
In the summer of 2004, Betfair provided evidence of race fixing
to City of London Police that led to the arrest of jockey Kieren
Fallon and 15 others on race fixing charges. On 7 December 2007
the judge in the case ordered the jury to find Fallon not guilty
on all charges.
In January 2005, the German Football Association (DFB) and
German prosecutors launched separate probes into charges that
referee Robert Hoyzer bet on and fixed several matches that he
worked, including a German Cup tie.
Hoyzer later admitted to the allegations; it has been reported
that he was involved with Croat gambling syndicates. He also
implicated other referees and players in the match fixing scheme.
The first arrests in the Hoyzer investigation were made on January
28 in Berlin, and Hoyzer himself was arrested on February 12 after
new evidence apparently emerged to suggest that he had been involved
in fixing more matches than he had admitted to. Hoyzer has been
banned for life from football by the DFB.
On March 10, a second referee, Dominik Marks, was arrested
after being implicated in the scheme by Hoyzer. Still later
(March 24), it was reported that Hoyzer had told investigators
that the gambling ring he was involved with had access
to UEFA's referee assignments for international matches and
Champions League and UEFA Cup fixtures several days before UEFA
publicly announced them. Ultimately, Hoyzer was sentenced to serve
two years and five months in prison.
In July 2005, Italian Serie B champions Genoa was arbitrarily
placed last in the division, and therefore condemned to relegation
to Serie C1, after it was revealed that they bribed their opponents
in the final match of the season, Venezia to throw the match. Genoa
won the match 3-2 and had apparently secured promotion to Serie A.
Brazilian football match-fixing scandal: In September 2005, a
Brazilian magazine revealed that two football referees, Edílson
Pereira de Carvalho (a member of FIFA's referee staff) and Paulo
José Danelon, had accepted bribes to fix matches. Soon afterwards,
sport authorities ordered the replaying of 11 matches in the
country's top competition, the Campeonato Brasileiro, that had been
worked by Edílson. Both referees have been banned for life from
football and face possible criminal charges. Brazilian supporters
have taken to shout ''Edílson'' at a referee who they consider to
have made a bad call against their team, in a reference to the
scandal.
In May 2006, perhaps the largest match fixing scandal in the
history of Italian Serie A football was uncovered by Italian Police,
implicating league champions Juventus, and powerhouses AC Milan,
Fiorentina, and Lazio.
Teams were suspected of rigging games by selecting favorable
referees, and even superstar Italian World Cup team goalkeeper
Gianluigi Buffon was charged with betting on football games.
Initially, Juventus were stripped of their titles in 2004-05 and
2005-06, all four clubs were barred from European club competition
in 2006-07, and all except Milan were forcibly relegated to Serie
B.
After all four clubs appealed, only Juventus remained relegated
while Milan were allowed to enter the third qualifying round of
the Champions League (they went on to win the tournament.) The
stripping of Juventus' titles stood.
2008 The Fix: Book by Declan Hill alleges that in the 2006
World Cup, the group game between Ghana and Italy, the round-of-16
game between Ghana and Brazil, and the Italy-Ukraine quarter-final
were all fixed by Asian gambling syndicates to whom the final
scores were known in advance. The German Football Federation
(DFB) and German Football League (DFL) looked into claims made
in a Der Spiegel interview with Hill that two Bundesliga matches
were fixed by William Bee Wah Lim a fugitive with a 2004 conviction
for match-fixing.
In November last year, German police arrested 17 people on
suspicion of fixing at least 200 soccer matches in nine countries.
Among the suspected games were those from the top leagues of
Austria, Bosnia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovenia, and Turkey, and
games from the second highest leagues of Belgium, Germany, and
Switzerland. Three contests from the Champions League were also
under investigation, and 12 from the Europa League.
The fourth Test of Pakistan's summer 2010 cricket tour of
England was alleged to have contained several incidents of
spot fixing, involving members of the Pakistan team deliberately
bowling no-balls at pre-agreed points during the match in order
to facilitate the potential defrauding of bookmakers.
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