Just went up tonight on the New York Times site here.
And, even though I'm giving a Cliff's Notes version and some opinions, you really need to read and see this stuff for yourself. Declan Hill has done a tremendous job -- so good, I'm surprised he's still living.
It starts with an anecdotal situation about a team in the north of Finland, who has apparently been contacted for having their matches fixed by the same old Singaporean kingpins who run this sort of thing.
After a few days of disbelief, guess who they found in the north of Finland?
Yep, Mr. "Football 4 U" himself, Wilson Raj Perumal, who proclaims himself the largest match-fixer in the world -- and, as Part One of Declan's work in the Times noted, was so braggadocious about it that a World Cup referee couldn't trust Perumal to shut up enough to take $400,000 to fix a World Cup match!!!
Threatened with extradition back to Singapore (and their obvious penalties), Perumal talked about how there's no way soccer can be taken legitimately anymore.
You see, in the guise of making soccer/football the world's game, soccer has become the main sport in many very poor countries -- countries which cannot realistically pay their players very much, and, sometimes, nor even what they are promised to be paid!
This opens the door for the largely-unregulated Asian sports gambling scene to send people like Perumal in to ensure certain results.
For example, going back to part one. Mr. Chaibou from Niger...
In 2012, the UN reported that the per capita Gross Domestic Product of Niger was in the bottom ten nations of the world, at a per capita $395 US.
Is it any wonder a corrupt referee would gladly take $60,000-$100,000 from "Football 4 U", and would've gotten more if he'd gotten on the field for the final South African match, rather than being locked in the referee's room so a more respected official could take the field?
Just as a matter of comparison, if this were to happen in the United States to this factor, it would take somewhere between $7.77 million and almost $13 million to do the same here.
(This could be one answer to Brian Tuohy's recent questions regarding why US sports think they are immune.)
Perumal then told authorities about how he started in the process, and brought up a name familiar to fans of Declan Hill: Dan Tan.
The two routinely were rigging matches through Singapore and Malaysia, and were so proficient at it that not only was it estimated that 70% of all the games played in that league were fixed, but Tan, Perumal, and their associates actually physically killed the main soccer league in Singapore and Malaysia.
The top man back in the day in that syndicate was a man who routinely attempted to fix World Cup matches.
Then, out of nowhere, something any United States soccer fan needs to read before this World Cup starts:
An ominous warning came from the president of the football association of the United States' first opponent in the tournament this month, Ghana:
"“In every competition you find gamblers around,” said Kwesi Nyantakyi,
president of the Ghana Football Association. “Yes, every competition.
Every competition, they are there. It is done all the time in major
competitions. In all the major tournaments, World Cup, Cup of Nations.”"
In fact, a 2007 match was believed fixed when the Singaporeans were seen around the Ghanian goalkeeping coach. It turns out that he had been working with them for a decade!
Another common target is Eastern Europe, with far less money in their economies, leagues, and salaries than their Western European counterparts.
You really need to read about the system and the sophistication (and the number of people they would attempt to target) for a given match. Often, the amount they would wager on a fixed match would depend on how many people they were able to pay off!!!
Two Croatian brothers, now serving time in Germany for fixing soccer matches there, targetted a vast array of players, referees, coaches, anybody they could find, to help the cause of the match-fixing/betting syndicates.
How much money could be involved?
By comparison, in 2012, Las Vegas estimated their sports books took in about $3,450,000,000 of action.
An executive of a government book in Hong Kong said the Asian sports book market took in... $1,000,000,000,000.
ONE TRILLION DOLLARS.
What's $60,000 to a referee of a pre-World Cup friendly in THAT environment?
Or $400,000 to rig a World Cup tournament match?
Now try this on for size: How about the match-fixers actually having everybody in a four-team tournament on the take?
Four national sides played in empty stadiums, in games not televised, for a national tournament.
The entire thing was a sham... Every goal in the tournament (all seven), penalty kicks awarded by the crooked refs.
The Asian fixers made a mint!
And the United States has not been immune. Many of El Salvador's players took money for fixing two 2010 matches in the USA: One against MLS club DC United, and the other against the US national team (February 24, 2010, the USA won 2-1).
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I want to ask one question, as I implore anyone reading this blog to read both parts of Hill's excellent work:
How can anyone expect the 2014 World Cup, in a strife-ridden Brazil, not to be fixed by this trillion-dollar underground industry?
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