Ethical and Legal Implications of Third-Party Incentives to Win Matches in European Football

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we examine the legal case involving the Court of Arbitration of Sport (CAS), the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), and the Turkish team Eskişehirspor to analyze the legitimacy of third-party incentives to win in European professional football. We first present arguments for the legalization of such incentives. Then, we analyze four ethical arguments, namely the equivalency argument, the conventionalist argument, the integrity argument, and the fairness argument. We conclude that none of the arguments provides enough ground for the legalization of third-party incentives in European professional football.

KEYWORDS:

• Third-party incentives
• integrity
• inducement
• football
• fairness

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For a review of the history of match fixing, see Hill 2003 and Huggins (2018).

2. In the 2013–14 season, when Osasuna was in the relegation zone, several of the club’s administrators extended monetary offers to two Real Betis players who would face two of Osasuna’s most direct rivals for avoiding relegation. One of the offers was to lose to their opponent; the other for beating Real Valladolid. The ruling condemned the players and managers involved for both types offers, establishing a precedent for applying the Penal Code to third-party incentives for winning (see Garcia 2020; Pérez Triviño 2020).

3. Interestingly, despite his belligerent attitude against bonuses for winning, he he has not made any move to modify the regulation such bonuses ever since he became president of the RFEF.

4. CAS subsequently supported such a consideration: ‘Match-fixing activities constitute one of the most serious breaches of sport principles and, in particular, those of loyalty, integrity, sportsmanship and fair play, and thus clearly jeopardizes the most essential objectives of UEFA. Consequently, to protect the essence of football competitions, it is necessary to be extremely inflexible with match-fixing’ (Court of Arbitration of Sport, CAS 2015).

5. Suppose the team receiving the monetary offer has already won the national league and is scheduled to play a European tournament final within the next three days. The incentive to win, provided the receiving party accepted it, would alter the expected course of action (i.e. the coach would rest the team’s best players for the upcoming European final).

6. This is not however to be confused with a coach’s strategy to threaten players with exclusion or demotion in the regular part of the season where they will worry if they can get back if the replacement plays well.

7. Of course, steering, nudging, or incentivizing behaviors draws us into issues of paternalism that are beyond the scope of this essay.

8. We note the naturalistic fallacy merely to point out the problematic in moving from factual premises to normative conclusions, but we do not commit ourselves to it as a logical position, merely an argumentative strategy. For philosophical critique of the move, see Midgley and Clark (1980) and Putnam (2002).

9. To be clear, this does not mean that extrinsic values must remain irrelevant in the participants’ motivation. Rather, mutualists take extrinsic values to be important but argue that they should not be the primary motivation for engaging in sport. External values have a place in sport but only when competition is understood as a mutual quest for excellence. Of course, payment of elite athletic performance is not in itself some barbarian intrusion (McNamee 1995).

10. See McNamee (1994).

11. In the statistics-mad world of American sport this hardly seems a contrivance (Steinberg, 2015).

12. In the context of the European Union, whether the entry into force of European Directive 2019/1937, on the protection of individuals who report violations of EU law, will provide a real boost in this direction is still open to question.