Sport is made for betting

Is anyone actually surprised that there are stories in the press today about FIFA Executive Committee members, the guys who vote on the venues for the World Cup, are taking bribes to secure their votes for World Cup bids? Two members, named as a member from Nigeria and the President of Oceania Football Federation, have been caught out by a newspaper investigation. Of course the money wasn't 'supposed' to be going directly to them, but to fund some domestic football project they'd take a nice fat bung out of along the way. Newspaper investigation reveals FIFA officials offered to sell World Cup votes Two FIFA officials have offered to sell their votes on which country will host the 2018 FIFA World Cup, according to a newspaper report. The Sunday Times newspaper alleged that Amos Adamu, a Nigerian member of the world football governing body's executive committee, asked for $US800,000 ($A807,007) to endorse one of the bid candidates. It filmed him meeting with ...

Fair play to the IOC for being proactive and wanting to avoid any match-fixing scandals from ever tainting an Olympic Games. But it's a bit rich to single out betting as the evil one when over the years there have been numerous suspicious judging decisions in athletics, boxing and other sports to satisfy political agendas. Not to mention the old junkets and favours which used to be exchanged in order to succeed with a bid to host the Games. IOC sets up system to watch for illegal betting At last year's Beijing Games, the IOC used a system set up by FIFA for soccer to watch for irregular betting on Olympic competitions. The monitoring found that a wide array of bets were offered for all Olympic sports, but that bets laid were generally small — between $7 to $70, the IOC says. It says there were no cases of irregular betting. Firstly the title of the article is wrong - you can't 'monitor' illegal betting, the whole point of black market betting is that it's untrac...