Robin Van Lonkhuijsen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Rob Wainwright, the director of Europol, at a press conference in The Hague on Monday.
Soccer is known throughout much of the world as the beautiful game. But the sport’s ugliest side — the scourge of match-fixing — will not soon go away.
With the 2014 World Cup in Brazil drawing closer, a European police intelligence agency said Monday that its 19-month investigation, code-named Operation Veto, revealed widespread occurrences of match-fixing in recent years, with 680 games globally deemed suspicious. The list of match types is staggering: some 150 international matches, mostly in Africa, Asia and Latin America; roughly 380 games in Europe, covering World Cup and European championship qualifiers as well as two Champions League games; and games that run the gamut from lower-division semiprofessional matches to contests in top domestic leagues.
But officials at the news conference at The Hague repeatedly sidestepped questions from reporters on how many of the actual 680 matches cited had been previously reported, and, in some instances, previously prosecuted, and how many of them represented new information.
Nor would the officials identify any of the teams and individuals newly linked to match-fixing, citing the need to guard the confidentiality of police procedures.
Still, one new tantalizing detail did emerge: the revelation that one of the suspicious matches uncovered was a game in the Champions League — the most prestigious annual soccer tournament in the world — and that it was played in England in the last three or four years.
Even as the news conference continued, fans immediately took to social media to speculate on the match in question and, indeed, on which English team might have been involved. Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Tottenham are the only English teams that have participated in the Champions League during the time frame cited by officials. All six are iconic teams in England’s Premier League, which is by far the world’s most popular soccer league and has an unparalleled global following.
And while the absence of details left it unclear as to whether investigators believed an English team was culpable in fixing a Champions League game, or whether it was an opposing team from another country that had come to England for the match, the fact that match-fixing was now being linked to the country that represents the biggest international stage in soccer left many in the sport apprehensive.
“It would be naïve and complacent of those in the U.K. to think such a criminal conspiracy does not involve the English game and all the football in Europe,” Rob Wainwright, the director of the police intelligence agency, known as Europol, told reporters.
Most of the investigation’s focus, however, was elsewhere. Europol described a wide-ranging network of fixing that struck at the sport’s core. Nearly $11 million in profits and nearly $3 million in bribes were discovered during the investigation, which uncovered “match-fixing activity on a scale we have not seen before,” Wainwright said.
“This is a sad day for European football,” he added.
Fixers typically seek to dictate a game’s result by corrupting the players or the on-field officials, and the Europol officials said Monday that roughly 425 people were under suspicion because of the investigation, with 50 people having been arrested. The scope of the investigation covered games from roughly 2008 to 2011.
An organized crime syndicate based in Asia is believed to be the driving force behind the fixing activity, which stretches across at least 15 countries, Europol officials said. Individual bribes were, in some instances, higher than $136,000, and fixers would place bets on the tainted matches through bookmakers in Asia.
Various matches in Africa, Asia and South and Central America were identified as suspicious, and Declan Hill, a Canadian journalist and the author of “The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime,” said his reporting on the subject — which was included in Europol’s investigation — had not previously indicated such widespread fixing among national teams.
Europol Investigation Shows Fixing Is Suspected in 680 Soccer Matches
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Europol Investigation Shows Fixing Is Suspected in 680 Soccer Matches
