Sport is made for betting

Good article from CNN about match-fixing and how stubborn football authorities are finally starting to realise just how big and how widespread the problem is. Football's match-fixing problem (CNN) -- It was the highest profile, and most embarrassing, sanction imaginable. The decision by the Turkish Football Federation (TFF) to withdraw champions Fenerbahce from this season's Champions League on Wednesday, due to allegations of endemic match fixing and bribery, shocked the football world far outside arguably Europe's most passionate footballing nation. For Turkish football fans, it's the equivalent of Manchester United being stripped of the English Premier League title; or of the New York Yankees losing the World Series over corruption charges. Last year's runners up, Trabzonspor, will take Fenerbahce's place, but the shock waves remain...

Greece, Italy and Turkey are making strides in rooting out match-fixing in their football leagues - there's a long way to go though. Don't believe for a moment that these are isolated cases... Riots follow ban for 2 clubs in Greek league Italian authorities rush to end match-fixing scandal Turkish league endorses play-offs amid match-fixing allegations

Amid all the headlines for Greek and Turkish football, I hadn't seen this one before... Czech team Olomouc sanctioned for match-fixing The Czech football association said Thursday it had sanctioned Czech top-flight side Sigma Olomouc with a loss of nine points and a €164,000 for a 2009 match-fixing scandal. The association's disciplinary committee fined Olomouc for an attempt to bribe Bohemians Prague players with 300,000 koruna ahead of their league game in May 2009 to secure a place in the Europa League. Sigma's keeper Petr Drobisz, accused of having delivered the money, was handed an 18-month ban and a fine worth 200,000 koruna. Soft penalty in my opinion - where's the punishment for those in charge of the club who were behind it? Shooting the messenger (or courier in this case) is pathetic.

Lots going on, but very short of time lately, here's a quick look at what has been going on... Sportingbet are keen to be acquired by Ladbrokes, but the 'Magic Sign' are nervous about SB's activity in Turkey , one of the strongest regions of their business. If Sportingbet are serious about the sale going through, looks like they will have to sell that part of the company. The Betfair share price keeps on tumbling , not even the internal buyback scheme can stop the price sliding, sliding away... The Gold Coast Turf Club is targetting night racing as a way to move themselves up the ladder of Australian racing. Sounds like a positive move, the weather's great up there but when they run their feature Magic Millions Day in January when it is approaching 40C, that's ridiculous. The racecourse does need a serious upgrade to its facilities if they want to become a bigger club, getting into the Friday night rotation of meetings would probably serve them better tha...

... and bring in a lie detector. Well, it's a start at least, but the problem goes much deeper than that. If players are disenchanted with their clubs or the wrong type of people are involved with the club, then their heads can easily be turned. The new rules need to encourage whistle-blowers, to keep the wrong people out of the locker rooms, provide players with a long-term future in the sport rather than making them survive on a low base wage and to see the K-League share information with the betting firms. Simply removing the option to bet locally, only makes it easier for match-fixers. Every bet then goes via illegal channels, mostly outside South Korea, and without any chance of tracing it. Regulation and establishing an audit trail is the best way forward..... K-League ups base salary after match-fixing stain The top local professional football league said Monday it will improve the welfare of its players and hand out severe punishments for corruption in response to a ...

This is utterly ridiculous. In a land where opponents of the self-appointed President simply disappear off the streets, and the police regularly get a slice off proceedings from armed robberies, the head muppet of FIFA has joined with Robert Mugabe in declaring match-fixing to be evil and that all people found to be involved in football corruption will be banned for life. FIFA Join Hands With Interpol On Match Fixing Investigations: Blatter Harare, July 05, 2011 - FIFA president, Sepp Blatter has hinted on a possible life ban on all those implicated in match-fixing scandals in Zimbabwe if found guilty. “We will ban all those involved in shady deals in this country if they are found guilty. This is a country that has talent which no administrator would want to see going to waste. You have work to develop that talent and not to kill it through things such as match-fixing,” Blatter told administrators during a press conference organized for him by Zifa. The press conference was ...

You would be wrong. There are all sorts of reasons why players would agree to throw a match, or part of a match. If you go back to the famous 1919 Chicago Blacksox baseball scandal , the players involved agreed to throw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds because they felt they were grossly underpaid by the team owner. The opportunity was there, and in came the underworld connection who liked a bet. The name Wilson Raj Perumal is infamous in match-fixing circles and if you google search him, you'll find people blaming his ego for getting caught. He borrowed money from people to start fixing matches, didn't pay them all back despite having a lavish lifestyle and posting photos on Facebook of him travelling the world... people he owed money to naturally started getting a bit pissed off. In this article , you'll read a story of how one low-level cup match in Malaysia was thrown for as little as RM200 (£42) each to six players, from an accomplice of Raj Perumal. Th...

UEFA's anti-corruption team has been busy, handing over vast amounts of evidence to the Greek and Turkish prosecutors over local match-fixing. Police announce arrests in Greek match-fixing probe Turkish football in crisis after match-fixing investigation Until big names and big clubs are brought down in these cases, it will continue on. Perhaps that won't even stop it - it hasn't stopped dodgy late-season results in Italy, but the Juventus scandal wasn't over betting, just presidential egos and putting pressure on referees... And there's plenty more on the story from Declan Hill 70,000 Copies of the ‘The Fix’ and the Prosecutor Who is Cleaning the Stables

It's getting rather messy in South Korea, the imaginatively named K-League has been infested with match-fixing and now the government is getting involved. K-League faces shutdown threat over match-fixing scandal SEOUL, Jun 30 (Reuters) - South Korea's government has threatened to "shut down" the country's professional soccer league after losing patience with an embarrassing match-fixing scandal, which is in danger of spiralling out of control. Clubs whose players are found guilty of being involved in match-fixing have been warned they face expulsion from Korea's domestic competition, local media reported on Thursday. "If K-League players are caught trying to throw matches from this July, their teams will be forced out of the league," Park Sun-kyoo, Vice Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism told South Korea's Yonhap news agency. "We will also consider shutting down the K-League in the worst-case scenario." I was quoted i...

After a few attempted rorts in rugby league and a few plunges based on leaked team information, the major Australian sports, backed by a few clueless politicians and media desperate for a story, have proposed clampdowns on exotic bet types. Now we all hate match-fixing in sport, don't get me wrong there, but invariably these shenanigans are restricted to betting via illegal bookies, where there is no audit trail for investigators to pick up. Legal betting outlets don't drop the ball very often. At the first sign of suspicious betting, alarm bells go off and word spreads like wildfire. The accounts in question are marked forever and the total exposure involved is usually only a few grand - less than they'll get out of the PR value of the ensuing story! Andrew Twaits says tighter controls on online poker is necessary *snipped* Sportingbet Australia chief executive, Michael Sullivan, called yesterday on professional sports under the Coalition of Major Professional and...

A source tipped me off about this several months ago. A major Asian betting monopoly would take certain Korean football matches off the board without making a big deal about them, knowing that they were likely to be fixed. Now the stories are breaking into the world press.... K-League's Pohang Steelers fire midfielder Kim amid widening match-fixing scandal SEOUL, South Korea — The Pohang Steelers have fired midfielder Kim Jung-kyum for allegedly betting on one of his own games in a match-fixing scandal that is widening in South Korea. The Yonhap news agency reported Thursday that the K-League club terminated Kim's contract because he allegedly bet on the outcome of one of the Steeler's matches two months ago. Five players from different clubs have been arrested and charged with taking money from gambling brokers and allegedly making deliberate mistakes that led to their teams losing, according to domestic media. Jeong Jong-kwan, a former K-League player, was foun...

Nothing new here, but glad to see the Italians are actually doing something about it! Ex-Italy striker arrested for match-fixing ROME (AFP) - Former Italy striker Giuseppe Signori was among 16 people arrested for match-fixing in a co-ordinated sting by Italian police on Wednesday. Amongst those targeted were ex Serie A players and current players from both Serie B and Serie C as well as club directors from the lower leagues, all suspected of being part of an organisation that rigged games to fix bets. Perhaps the tide will turn in Italy and this stuff might start disappearing, but I reckon we are still a long way from that. It's a cultural thing, just like the endemic levels of corruption within FIFA. It is an old boys' club where everything is about greasing palms. Football is a dirty game run by dirty people. Its simplicity leads to its popularity and its popularity reels in the dodgy characters plaguing the game. The more we realise it is just one sport, rather th...

Daniel Koellerer, widely regarded as the biggest @£%& in professional tennis, has received his just desserts today with a life ban from professional tennis and a fine of $100k. The Tennis Integrity Unit works under a shroud of secrecy so there are no official details of which matches were bent (although you could probably from a substantial list from Koellerer's schedule). From the press release : Mr Koellerer was found guilty of three charges under Article D of the 2010 Uniform Tennis Anti-Corruption Program, namely: • Contriving or attempting to contrive the outcome of an Event; • Soliciting or facilitating a Player not to use his or her best efforts in an Event; and; • Soliciting, offering or providing money, benefit or Consideration to any other covered person with the intention of negatively influencing a Player’s best efforts in any Event So the Tennis Integrity Unit has found a spine, that's great news for the game. Although, let's be honest, Dan...

Good piece from today's Daily Telegraph, detailing the grubby career of a Singaporean who wasn't interested in fair football matches.... Wilson Raj Perumal: the convicted match-fixer who ran international empire yards from Wembley To those who met him in Wembley, Rajamohan Chelliah seemed like any other respectable foreign businessman with a healthy interest in football. Described as “humble”, “polite” and “smartly dressed”, the 45 year-old did nothing to alert the suspicion of his landlord, his neighbours or many of his friends during his seven-month stay in London. But the quiet Singaporean was in fact Wilson Raj Perumal, a convicted match-fixer on the run from the police, who was busily masterminding an international empire from his one-bedroom flat in the shadow of Wembley Stadium. One thing is fairly clear from the article, but conveniently not mentioned - the easiest matches to manipulate are the small-fry ones where players aren't earning much and are pre...

It's not a good sign for the innocence of the world if even sumo wrestling is facing match-fixing problems.... Sumo wrestling rocked by match-fixing scandal The head of Japan's sumo association has apologised to fans after it was revealed wrestlers may have been fixing matches. In some of the text messages uncovered by police, wrestlers would tell their opponents what to expect inside the ring while others would instruct their rivals to throw a match. One wrestler texted another: "You fall when I move to tackle." It is just the latest scandal to tarnish this ancient sport, with dozens of wrestlers last year admitting to placing illegal bets on baseball with the Japanese mafia. A culture where gambling is illegal, the participants like a bet on other sports with the black market bookies and then they get blackmailed into throwing matches so they aren't exposed for breaking the law... (Cheers to Richard Farmer for the link)

Settle down, it's nothing from Melbourne but the bent-as-a-three-bob-note ATP match from St Petersburg in October between Filippo Volandri and Teymuraz Gabashvili. The Evening Standard reports that the Tennis Integrity Unit is investigating the circumstances around this match. I posted twice on this match originally, here and then a day later here . Volandri will almost certainly retire this year anyway, so I suspect any penalty will be meaningless anyway.

Worrying signs north of the border as Scottish football has had some very unusual matches of late, backed up by suspicious betting patterns. The common denominator in both matches: Hearts. Motherwell midfielder Steve Jennings is in the spotlight this week after his red card in Tuesday night's match against Hearts was predicted by a lot of punters, particularly new ones, wanting to have bets well above the average for this usually trivial market. Several bookmakers have reported clusters of bets being placed on 'A Red Card to be awarded' at 10/1 on this match, far and above the average for a televised SPL match, with a widespread of accts, lumpy bets and numerous new accounts, particularly from the Liverpool area, where Jennings has links from one of his previous clubs, Tranmere. SPL - Jennings in betting probe over red card Motherwell midfielder Steve Jennings has denied any wrongdoing after bookmakers began an investigation into betting patterns over the red card he ...

BBC 5 Live are running a programme on Sunday evening devoted to match-fixing in football. Not a lot of new ground by the sound of this article, but to those who don't follow it closely, it will be an eye-opener. Football Match fixing - how betting gives the game away Some 300 football games a season are fixed in Europe's top leagues, according to experts. The BBC's Tim Mansel gains exclusive access to Sportradar, which tracks betting on football matches all over the world, looking for evidence of suspicious behaviour. The former German football manager Sepp Herberger once famously said that people go to football matches because they do not know who will win. I have just watched a match in the almost certain knowledge not only of who would win, but with a fairly shrewd idea of what the score would be.

Here's what Tennisform had to say about the match yesterday. 24/10 2100 - Volandri hasn't played since retiring with a right forearm injury in the Palermo challenger earlier this month. Volandri's last match off the dirt was in this event 2 years ago, where he lost 6-4 6-4 to the Russian wild card Mikhail Elgin. It goes wthout saying that close attention should be paid to the market in his match against Gabashvili. 25/10 13:52 Gabashvili will have a 2-1 win over Volandri today if the set betting is to be believed. Nearly 60K has been matched on set betting on Betfair with plenty under 3.5 on the 2-1 option. The outright market has had plenty of interest too with the price on Gabashvili yo-yoing between 1.21 and 1.52. 18:52 Gabashvili advanced to the second round at the expense of Filippo Volandri, who didn't appear to have any intention of winning this match and acted out his part of the script well. Gabashvili was heavily supported throughout the one hour...

Not a good day for snooker ahead of the World Championship final, with world #1 John Higgins seemingly exposed by a News of the World investigative report. Let's see him get out of this one.... How world snooker champion John Higgins plots to betray his fans for cash MILLIONAIRE World Snooker champion John Higgins is captured here on camera shaking hands on a disgraceful deal to fix a string of high-profile matches after demanding a £300,000 kickback. The scandal will cast a dark shadow over the final of this year's championship which starts today and disgust the millions of fans tuning into the BBC to watch their sporting idols. John Higgins caught on camera agreeing to a massive bribe to fix World Series snooker matches After 34-year-old Higgins' shock defeat in the tournament at the hands of veteran Steve Davis, he flew to the Ukrainian capital of Kiev and in a meeting with undercover News of the World investigators on Friday shamelessly: * AGREED to deliberately LO...