Almost 18 months ago, officers in Bochum, in the Ruhr region, summoned journalists to their headquarters. They believed they were on the way to arresting gangs who had corrupted matches from Germany, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary, Slovenia, Switzerland and Turkey.
The sense of excitement and anticipation in the officers was palpable.
Well, hats off to them. A court in Bochum last week began handing down jail sentences of three to four years to gamblers and betting-shop operators convicted of bribing players to throw games or manipulate play.
But are we winning this fight? Or is the tampering with good, honest soccer a modern-day version of the Lernaean Hydra — the serpent from Greek mythology that reproduced two heads for every one that was chopped off.
It’s not just soccer. In this wicked world of ours, sporting events from Japanese sumo to Pakistan cricket to British horse racing are going through a similar crisis. Sometimes, it seems, the more you pay players, the more they fall prey to the sinister figures who bribe them.
With the spread of Internet betting, it needn’t be the result that is fixed. A corner kick, a no-ball, a horse not ridden to the full can all be bet upon at the click of a computer mouse.
The good news from Bochum came a few weeks after the former Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi had his prison sentence cut by Rome’s Court of Appeal from 18 months to one year. Moggi, 73, had been found guilty of using a soccer player management agency to manipulate the Italian transfer market.
Moggi and his son were said to have intimidated players through threats of violence to sign for particular clubs. The elder Moggi was also banned from soccer for five years for his alleged role in the Italian referee and match-fixing scandal, exposed in 2006.
The Moggis will not serve a day in prison, because in Italy sentences under two years are suspended.
The peculiarities of law might confound us. So, too, might the rule of sports. Why, if the Italian soccer authorities deem Moggi to have corrupted the game, should he only receive a five-year excommunication? Why not a lifetime ban? In welcoming three-to-four-year jail terms for fixers in Germany, it appears I have contrary values to what happens in the court and the game. The difference is that under most criminal codes, a person who breaks the law is given the chance to serve his or her time, and earn redemption.
Sports, though, cannot afford such fairness. They aren’t above the law, but they are different. Sports are for the young, sporting players are the icons of future generations, and the authorities should not encourage repeat offenses among those who contaminate the very purpose of sports.
Once rules are bent or broken, to the extent that nobody can trust the outcome, then all essence is lost.
Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, says as much. So does Sepp Blatter, president of soccer’s world governing body, FIFA. And so does Michel Platini, one of great players and now the chief administrator of European soccer.
Rogge held a summit with government ministers and the international police body, Interpol, this year, saying, “We heard from Interpol that illegal betting is on the rise. We absolutely have to fight that, and with urgency.”
He spoke of educating the athletes, as if there can be anything equivocal about selling their games to match-fixers.
Blatter talks, interminably, of squeezing out corrupters, wherever they exist. And critics of FIFA suggest it puts its own house in order first.
Platini has just been re-elected for another four-year term in charge of Europe’s 53 member nations of UEFA. And Platini’s rhetoric about illegal betting being “the greatest danger, the one that can kill football” is well intended.
However, the sport and the clubs do not help distance themselves from the scourge of betting. Every major league has top-ranked teams — Real Madrid for example — parading around with advertising on their shirts for online gambling.
It would appear that illegal betting is when someone else, outside the clubs themselves, is making all the money. This ambivalence is corrosive to a game that, from China to Germany, is so infested with suspicion that the crooks are always one step ahead of the detectives.
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