by Declan Hill
They use former players. They are known to officials and players. They don’t create suspicion. They just look as if they are interested in the fate of their former team. It is often that they [the fixers] use former players.
This type of runner is perfect for a fixer. Whereas an outsider will not get past security, a former player with a big reputation can easily get access to any team event or into their hotel. They can walk into a player’s room without any questions being asked. The players trust them. They can also speak to the fixers, as they are not being watched by team security. They are the connectors between the illegal gambling world and a potentially corrupt soccer team. However, those runners, as former players, obviously, cannot fix the games themselves. They need someone directly on the team.
Scott Ollerenshaw never fixed a game in his life, but he taught me the next stage of fixing. He was a star forward in the Malaysian League in the 1990s. Ollerenshaw played around the world, from his early days with the Sydney Olympic of New South Wales, to Walsall in the English third division, to an international match against the great Brazilian national team, starring Romário, in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans. However, nothing prepared Ollerenshaw for what he faced while playing in Asia.
There were rumours all the time, but basically half the team was on the fix and the other half of the team was out there trying as hard as they could.
Now that he is no longer playing, Ollerenshaw is a lovely, amiable man. But he was one tough player: a fiery redhead with a quick temper. After one game, some of his corrupt teammates tried to break his legs because he threatened to beat them up for fixing a game. But he knows now how they operated.
What happened with our mob was that there was a ringleader. And the bookie would contact him and say, “You’re playing such and such a team, we are desperate for you to lose the game. Here is $50,000, how you distribute is up to you.” So then he would know that there were five or six corrupt guys on the team and he would go up to five of them and say, “Okay, here is four or five thousand for you after the game. I will pay you cash if you help me lose the game.” He was basically like a project manager. He would get the money, make sure the job was done right, and then distribute the money.
This project manager must be an influential player. South African cricket captain Hansie Cronje fixed international matches; the infamous fixing of baseball’s 1919 World Series by the Chicago White Sox was led by their star players; and when Liverpool and Manchester United decided to fix a game in 1915, the scam was led by their top players. Many people are surprised when they hear that the very best athletes would be the project managers of a fix. It is because those players are stars that fixers really want to work with them. Star players have the influence and prestige on the team that means that few of the other players will say no to them. They are able to build a corrupt network and culture on the team far more easily than any other player.
However, a fixing project manager in a team sport, no matter how good, needs a network on the team. He needs at least three to five other players to help fix the match. With fewer players, they might succeed, but the result is not guaranteed. In soccer fixes, normally five to seven players are enlisted, but the absolute mini mum, say the fixers and players, are: the goalkeeper, a defender, and a striker.
Most of the time, however, corrupt players don’t want all their teammates in on the fix partly because they don’t want to share the money, and partly because it makes it more difficult for the spectators to see what is going on. One Singaporean player who had fixed games told me that people judge the performance of the team as a whole, rather than as a collection of individuals. Not having the whole team taking part in the fix actually aids the corrupt players. If there are six players throwing the game, but five desperately trying to win, the onlookers are less likely to figure out that a fix is taking place – or even which particular players are taking part in the fix.
But how, if this fixing network is in place, do the corrupt players actually play in the fix? The Malaysians and Singaporeans were to teach me that as well.
2
“WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?”
It was ridiculous mistakes that a professional footballer shouldn’t make. Things like missing tackles, clearing the ball by tapping it five yards straight to the striker five yards from the goal. Or playing a stupid offside. That was probably the best one. You go charging up the field to play an offside and the forward goes charging through.
The Malaysian police have all kinds of ways of making prisoners talk. They are not big on being nice to prisoners. The interrogation culture came of age in the middle of a bloody communist insurgency, when thousands of people were killed and tens of thousands imprisoned. The Malays learned from their British colonial governors and then they came to surpass their teachers. Amnesty Inter national reports that the Malaysian police have refined torture to an art form: “Detainees have been assaulted, forced to strip, deprived of sleep, food and water, told that their families would be harmed, and subjected to prolonged aggressive interrogation to force confessions or obtain information.” Rank is no protection. Anwar Ibrahim, the former deputy prime minister, who in the late 1990s was silly enough to speak out against the then-prime minister, was put in a police cell for months. He appeared in court with a black eye and bruises; he had been beaten up by a senior police officer. At his trial, another police officer, the former head of the Intelligence Services, testified about the common practice of “turning over” prisoners for political purposes.
I made friends with some of those policemen. They became interested in my work and they offered to help. It is always odd being friends with torturers. There is something about them: some indefinable thing that marks them out. In southeastern Turkey, during the 2003 war in Iraq, I met several men like that. One of them, a former high-ranking officer in the Turkish military intelligence, became as close to a friend as possible. He helped arrange a covert meeting with Syrian drug dealers to see if they could smuggle me into northern Iraq. Throughout the negotiations he was extremely kind and hospitable. Despite being a wealthy man, he shared the long overnight bus journeys that were the only means of travel my freelance journalist budget could cover. He invited me to family parties and social get-togethers. He was urbane, cosmopolitan, and friendly. But I remember seeing him at a reception at the Ankara Hilton; it was for the opening of a television program claiming that the Armenian genocide never happened. Holding his wineglass by the stem, he looked across at someone as if calculating how much pain the person could take. For all his urbanity, for all his culture, this was a man who had stood beside the chair or the hook or whatever god-forsaken instrument of torture, had nodded and increased the pain. Torturing another human being produces a bruise on the soul that rots from the inside out, and no matter how the torturers try to hide, you can always sniff them out.
The contacts in the Malaysian police were like the Turkish intelligence officer: friendly, generous, and helpful. But they all had that odd coldness at the heart of their laughter that comes from the power of being able to place other humans in pain. They also had a treasure trove of documents about match-fixing. In 1994 and 1995, when Johnson Fernandez, Lazarus Rokk, and other journalists had written too many stories about match-fixing in the Malaysian League to ignore, the police moved in. They called it Operation Bola. In a series of nationwide raids, they arrested more than 150 soccer players and coaches. Under legislation dating back to the colonial era, the police kept the players in prison for a number of days or weeks and then exiled over twenty of them to different parts of the country. Oddly, none of the players ever went on trial. So in the files of the Royal Malaysian Police, there was a horde of confessions by these players that had never been examined by anyone outside the police force. They invited me look at some of these documents.
On a hot spring day in Kuala Lumpur, with the temperature in the nineties and me sweltering in a woollen suit, I went to their headquarters. Say the words
Kuala Lumpur and it may conjure up images of palm trees, exotic buildings, and flowing rivers under tropical moonlight or a glorious sunset. Go there for one day and you discover that the city used to look like that, but now it has been invaded by that Californian pastiche architecture that has conquered the rest of the world: buildings that look as if they were made by opening a packet and adding water; pale, anemic shopping malls split open by multi-lane highways; and long passages of neon lights marked by gas stations that hurry you from nowhere to nowhere.
The Royal Malaysian Police Headquarters is another instant noodle of a building. It is built on the edge of the remains of Kuala Lumpur’s city park: imagine a desecrated Hyde or Central Park, with six-lane highways whizzing around it. My identification was checked three times before I could enter. And there, in an anonymous office room, a source pulled out the files of the arrested players and we read them. Together those pages gave a picture of an incredible network of crime. The players spoke of games fixed to an extraordinary level, of criminals threatening players and giving them covert payoffs, of alleged ties with some of Malaysia’s top politicians and businessmen. They also show some remarkable stories of courage and fortitude; of lonely coaches beset by corruption who desperately appealed and motivated their corrupt players to play honestly. It is a wonderful resource, with the materials for several novels.
One story will do.
Rafiq Saad (*) had been one of the best players in the Malaysian League. But that didn’t do him much good in 1994 when he was alone in a prison cell with a group of policemen who really wanted him to talk.
It must have been tough for him. The officer conducting the interrogation writes in the secret report that Saad started the first day as “unco-operative.” But it goes on to say, prosaically, that on the second day Saad became much more “co-operative.” He certainly did. Alone in a cell with those Malaysian police officers and their enthusiastic methods for ensuring co-operation, he sang like a canary.
Saad is not his real name, but we know everything about him. We know his salary. We know how, as a project manager, he organized players on his team to fix matches. We know which teams he played for. We know some of the games he helped fix and how much he got paid for doing so. And we know how he fixed those games. Because at some point in one of those long, arduous conversations, the interrogating officer began to get curious: How exactly did players fix matches? What methods did they use? How could they carry them out successfully?
Those are good questions because it is genuinely difficult to fix a soccer match. There are twenty-two players, the referee, two linesman, and various coaches to take into account. Each of them could swing the game one way or another. There is the crowd often ready to scream at a player if he makes an honest mistake, let alone deliberately sabotages his own team. There are ways of doing it really badly. For example, the entire Genoa and Venezia teams arranged a match between them in the spring of 2005 and they almost managed to screw it up. The arrangement was that Genoa would win and get promoted to Italy’s top division, Serie A, and Venezia would get a lot of money. But in the second half, the Venezia manager got a call from the Genoa coach, “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Your player scored a goal!?” he screamed.
“I know, I know,” replied the Venetian. “The players are crazy! They scored a goal by mistake!”
To the Genoa’s team great relief, Venezia did manage to let them score and the game ended, as arranged, in a victory for Genoa so they could advance to Serie A. Well, they would have done, if the whole arrangement had not been caught on tape by Italian magistrates investigating the team officials.
Different era, same league, same problem. In his autobiography, In the Mud with the Soccer God, the 1970s Italian forward Carlo Petrini described the problem he and his Bologna teammates had when they arranged a fix against Juventus in a Serie A match. The plan was that both teams would draw the match 0-0. Great. Except in the fifty-fifth minute, someone on the Juventus team actually shot at the Bologna goal! It had been snowing, so the Bologna goalkeeper could not hold the ball, and it slipped past him into the net. 1-0 Juventus. The Bologna team was furious. There was, according to Petrini, almost a fight between the two teams in the middle of the pitch. However, a Juventus midfielder calmed them when he called out, “Don’t worry, lads, we’ll score an equalizer for you.” Ten minutes later, there was a corner kick against Juventus and one of their team rose magnificently in the air to head it into his own net. The game ended 1-1, and everyone went away happy, except the fans, who were so enraged with the game that they pelted the players with snowballs.
At the international level, there were the same problems delivering a fixed match in Singapore in 1986. The Merlion Cup was an international tournament featuring Indonesia, Malaysia, China, North Korea, Singapore, and Canada. An outsider may have thought that of all those teams, the one least likely to accept a bribe would be the relatively rich Canadians. However, on the Canadian team, a group of players had arranged with some gambling fixers to lose the semi-final to North Korea. One of those players was furious with Paul James, a defender whom he thought was in on the fix, playing honestly. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he screamed at James for passing so well that the Canadians almost scored a goal. However, all went well in the end for the fixing Canadians, and the Koreans were allowed to win 2-0.
If a player who is fixing a match wants to avoid all the craziness of the Venezia game or the problems of the Canadians, how does he play? There are essentially three problems for the player in a fixed match: how do you deliver the promised result, how do you make sure that no one guesses that you are fixing the match, and how do you play badly enough to lose but not jeopardize your place on the team?
Those were the questions that the Malaysian police officers asked Rafiq Saad in his long, dark night in the police cell. And in his confession he includes a two-page list of all the different tactics that the players in each position can use.
GOALKEEPERS
Goalkeepers are obviously key to guaranteeing a good fix. According to Rafiq Saad, the key strategies for the goalkeeper are the exact reverse of how to play well in goal: for example, a goalie should leave his area as much as possible: “On a breakaway, the goalie will deliberately leave the goal and play so far up that the goal is clear.”
This is a key tactic: if a corrupt defender can ensure that an opposing forward is running on to the net alone, an honest goalkeeper could still do a lot to stop a goal by playing the angles of the net. A corrupt goalkeeper, however, will immediately rush out of his net and allow the forward to step around him and score. The goalkeeper, of course, flails wildly about and curses as if he honestly missed the play. It is almost impossible for a bystander to judge if the goalkeeper has made the mistake deliberately.
A Finnish player who fixed games in his country’s Premier League in 2004 helped to describe how a corrupt goalkeeper will roam out of the penalty area in a fixed match:
… [The goalie] comes outside the penalty area to collect a pass but he comes up against a forward. The forward now has an easy job to put the ball in the goal … Team A scores again. Team B loses in big numbers, just as people expected.
A good fixing goalkeeper doesn’t have to act like an idiot; he doesn’t have to wander around on the other side of the goal. Saad talks about a goalkeeper “putting himself in the wrong position.” This can be by standing one metre away from where he should be. As the forward shoots, it allows the keeper to throw himself bravely but vainly, as the ball whistles past his outstretched hands.
Another tactic goalkeepers use allows them to seemingly innocently misplay the ball: “Goalkeeper drops the ball: he could catch it, but he just pats it away.”
This strategy is the most obvious and it is, of course, the exact opposite of what every childhood coach tells their young student: “Catch, smother the ball with your body.” By pushing the ball out into the area, or dropping it, the fixing goalie can cause all kinds of problems
for his teammates. One player remembered one incident clearly:
There was one game, and the other team had a corner. I was on the goalpost. I was defending. And the corner came in. And it was floating. It wasn’t played with any pace. I was standing right beside the goalkeeper. And it was like something in slow motion. The goalie went up, caught the ball, and then dropped it right at the feet of their player who scored. And I was so frustrated that I went up and pushed him. I was boiling. And I shouted “You fucker! I know what you were doing!” And he said, “Oh come on …” And you know they act all innocent. But I was convinced I knew what was going on.
You need to get defenders onside for a successful fix because one mistake by them can so easily lead to a goal. In a 1960 exposé, the Daily Mail revealed one nasty tactic: the Suicide Pass. “The ball is placed by a defender too far away for the goalkeeper to clear it or gather it, but near enough to the opposing forward for him to nip in and score a gift goal … Every soccer fan has seen this happen, but sometimes it is not an accident,” they reported that “a famous goalkeeper” told them.
Rafiq Saad’s strategies are more commonplace:
The left back and right back will not assist the sweeper when he is being attacked.
The sweeper will not assist the left or right back when they are being attacked.
The defence will not play all out and will purposely allow the attackers to get by us.
Like the goalkeeper dropping the ball or patting it loose in a crowded penalty area, these tactics are the exact opposite of what every soccer coach has taught young players to do since the ball was first invented. One Singaporean player told me: