How Gambling Corruptors Fix Football Matches

Abstract

How do gambling corruptors fix football matches? How do a group of disparate players and gamblers come together, organize themselves and then perform a con in front of a large audience including their own team-mates and officials? This paper examines the difficulties and challenges faced by corruptors in both organizing this type of fraud and approaching the players. It is based on both quantitative and qualitative methods of research: over 220 interviews with players, referees, sports/law enforcement officials, as well as gambling industry representatives and corruptors; the creation of several databases including the Fixed Match Database which has over 130 legally certified examples of fixed matches, and a control group of 120 matches that can be presumed to be played honestly: and finally the collection of police or other transcripts of corruptors taped while attempting to corrupt matches. The findings are that the corruptors have five distinct stages in fixing matches – access, set-up, calling the fix, performance and payment - and that their methods of approaching players are similar to the business strategies of some erotic dancers.

Notes

1. The construction of the databases owes much to the advice of Johann Lambsdorff of the University of Passau and Marc Carinici of Betcapper.com. The theoretical model comes from the chapter by Michael Biggs in Making Sense of Suicide Missions (Gambetta, 2006).

2. Approximately, £1 million.

3. Yasin Tuncer (2005). My thanks to Chris Wade and Emre Ozlan for their translations and insights into Turkish Football.

4. See also Burt (2001), and his discussion of Brokerage network where markets are seen as “a network of separate groups” and Baker and Faulkner's (1993, p. 843) description of “action sets” in illegal networks in price-fixing in the heavy electrical industry of the USA.

5. See Cloward and Ohlin (1998), Benedict (1998) and Skolnick (2005) for a discussion of the internal group norms on sports teams which make informing outsiders about any transgressions inside the team prohibited.

6. Kefauver had already come to prominence with the first US legislative inquiry into the existence of the La Cosa Nostra (or LCN) mafia in the 1950s.

7. Franzese is the son of notorious mob hitman John ‘Sonny’ Franzese. Michael became a Capo for the Colombo crime family while still in his twenties. His quick rise to mafia prominence was partly due to his family connections, but mostly due to an extraordinary gas tax scam he pioneered with the Russian mobster, Michael Markowitz that earned “his family” approximately one billion dollars a year (Hearing before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Governmental Affairs United States Senate: One hundred and fourth Congress, Second Session – May 15, 1996, 36–42).

8. Another popular form of corrupt invitation for corruptors to use is the “You can get x amount of money for just ninety minutes of work. Think about it” (C1).

9. The names have all been altered.

10. The currency is Malaysian ringhit (RM): $US1≈4 RM. The monthly salary of the players was approximately RM4,000.

11. This was stressed a number of times by the translator, although it is, obviously, not apparent in the English version.

12. This is the customary way of greeting Malaysian Royalty—of whom there are a great many as the country is a conglomeration of several indigenous Kingdoms. Many of these people own or run football teams.

13. In the Hoyzer case, after Hoyzer accepted the money, his corrupter said, “Now you're my man” (Da Costa, 2005, p. 18). A reader should also note the difference between the business agent roles described here and the kinship roles that Hill describes for initiates into the Yakuza (Hill, 2003).

14. As well as similarities with fixing in nineteenth-century cricket, the challenges and constraints facing contemporary football match corruptors are almost identical to the ones faced by Arnold Rothstein, the Jewish mobster who corrupted baseball's 1919 World Series. For an entertaining overview of this situation, the film Eight Men Out (Sayles, 1988) shows the fix being set up complete with the five stages of corruption, the signalling between the players and the corruptors, and the problems of fixing the betting market.

15. For a good description of the challenges that face even successful gambling syndicates (not corruptors) see Konick's Smart Money: a description of a “mule” for a successful sports betting in syndicate in Las Vegas. Konick writes that the casinos made it so difficult for anyone with a consistent winning record to place a bet that the syndicates would resort to disguises or hiring outsiders, like him, to place their bets (Konick, 2006, pp. 18–110).

16. Game theorists would describe this strategy as a “long-term” mode, as opposed to a “one-shot” game: see Dasgupta (2000) for further discussion of this theme.

17. With the advent of betting exchanges, as much as half of the total stakes is now placed live, while the game is going on.

18. The opposite is to “go all out” meaning go for a win.

19. Conversely, some interview subjects alleged that the payments of the players were augmented by putting their rewards as bets on the gambling market. This had a two-fold advantage, it increased the payout for the players, and it more readily guaranteed their co-operation with the fix.

20. It would be the equivalent of Scotland losing to England.