by Declan Hill
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.
FORWARDS
It is, of course, no use signing up your defence and goalkeeper to fix a game if your star forward is knocking in goals. If the forwards score too many goals, the fix becomes very obvious. So the fixers have all kinds of strategies for the forwards to follow.
Keep the ball for a long time, to allow the opponents to take away the ball.
Dribble the ball straight at the opponent, allowing them to take away the ball.
Miss goal opportunities by either kicking directly at the keeper or missing the goal altogether.
Almost one hundred years ago in 1915, Fred Pagnam was a young Liverpool forward. His teammates subscribed to the Rafiq Saad school of match-fixing. Pagnam was one of the few players on his squad that decided not to throw a game against Manchester United. The game was at the end of the season, Liverpool had nothing to play for, and Manchester United was struggling against relegation. The First World War was on and in a few months most of the players would be in the army, so many of them decided to rig the match to give Manchester the points and themselves a little more cash. Pagnam was told on the way to the match by his corrupt teammates to follow the same kind of instructions that Saad would give: at all times lose the ball and if you are in front of the goal – miss.
Pagnam testified later that near the end of the game he even took a shot on the United goal, hit the crossbar, and then one of his corrupt teammates asked him what he damn well meant. After that, they made sure he never got another chance to score.
Because they usually do not play right in front of a goal, midfielders do not have as direct an influence on the game as goalkeepers, defenders, and forwards. However, they have an important job to do: controlling the fix. To lose a game against a strong team that really wants to win is not particularly hard, but for a strong team to lose credibly against a weak team is actually very difficult. Give the ball to an incompetent but honest team and there is no telling what they will do. They can even make such stupid mistakes that the fixing team will have to score.
So controlling the game for fixers is a complicated and important task. One fixer that I spoke to described having to coach his teams to lose by holding on to the ball for a few seconds, then passing backward, each corrupt player does the same thing, nothing is obvious, but in the fixer’s words, the corrupt players “buy time.”
In recent years, this skill of controlling is becoming increasingly important, as fixers are asking the players not only to lose the game, but also to change their game depending on the time of the match. Here is why. Almost any punter can bet on a team to win or lose, but the really skilful fixer wants to make the maximum amount of money. They can do this by winning bets that have far higher odds than just win/loss, such as predicting total goals scored in the match or when those goals will be scored.
Rafiq Saad described a similar series of movements for corrupt midfield players:
The midfielder will keep the ball for a long time to allow the other team to take it away.
The midfielder will interrupt the system of playing by passing the ball back to the defence.
The midfielder will make a pass that is 50-50, so that the opponents will get the ball.
The midfielder will keep the ball in his own area and will not allow the ball to get open.
Reading Rafiq Saad’s confession was interesting, but I really wanted to know if what he was claiming about playing in a fixed match was true. After all, who knows what people will say when they’re strapped up in the hands of torturers? I know if I had been in the clutches of a Malaysian police officer, I would have been offering them my MasterCard, Visa, and anything else to let me go within about five minutes. I wanted to know if there were any special indications that could predict a fixed match by the way it was played. So I devised a way to test Saad’s confession to find out if he was telling the truth.
3
EXPERTS IN VERBAL BULLSHIT
It is all the verbal bullshit before a game; they shout lots of stuff, “Come on, come on!” Then during the game it is just little tiny things like just mistiming a sliding tackle or letting a guy go through. These guys became experts in making it look like they were out there giving blood to their team. Coming in after the games and throwing themselves on the floor and screaming.
In all the legends that surround fixing in Asia, there is none more powerful than the disappearance of Michael Vana. It happened one day in 1994, but Singaporean soccer fans of a certain age still talk as if it were yesterday. There are always these mysteries that seem to haunt a nation’s collective imagination: the United States has Amelia Earhart, England has Lord Lucan, and Singapore has Michael Vana.
Vana was a star. One of the best players to ever tread on a Singapore soccer field, he was a Czech player who had all the talent to be one of the best in the world but never quite made it in Europe. He went to Singapore and there, in a league of much lower quality, set it alight. One of his old coaches in Singapore remembers him as “the best player I have ever coached. He had it all. He was an amazing player.”
According to the Singapore authorities, Michael Vana also fixed matches.
On the night of August 12, 1994, just before Vana’s Singapore team would win the league championship, the police moved in. They arrested Vana claiming that he had earned hundreds of thousands of dollars fixing matches. Vana was due to stand trial the following month. He showed up in court September 14, 1994, and posted bail of $500,000. He left the room and disappeared. Vanished. Vamoosed. This is not as facetious as it sounds. Singapore is an island. Living there is like taking part in a social experiment designed in a science-fiction novel. Its law enforcement is famous for its ferocity. Miscreants that chew gum or litter can be heavily fined. Hooligans are flogged. Drug dealers are killed. At the time, there was just one bridge to the Asian mainland. One passenger airport. One train line. The way in and out of the island is carefully checked. One day, Vana was on bail being monitored by the police in Singapore; the next day, he was discovered watching a soccer match in Prague, free as a bird, denying he had ever taken a bribe and with no intentions of ever returning to Singapore. How did he get there? How did he get out of Fortress Singapore? There are all kinds of tales told in Singapore bars as the night winds down and the alcohol mounts up. Vana was smuggled out in the personal limousine of a wayward, heavy-gambling Malaysian Royal Prince. Vana went out by boat to Indonesia. Then Vana took a flight back to Europe. He didn’t realize it, but the plane stopped at Singapore. Terrified, he spent three hours hiding in a cubicle in a men’s room of the Singapore airport. Whatever the truth of the stories, no one except Vana really knows how the greatest disappearing act in Singapore’s recent history was accomplished.
His former coach described the most blatant method of controlling a match that he saw Michael Vana employ during a game against a much weaker team:
I think the one that capped it was, we were doing very well … [and] the betting was that we would win by more than three [goals]. But we were missing goals from two yards out. In fact, there is one incident that I clearly remember when one of our players was in with their goal at his mercy when Vana ran across him, took the ball off him and passed it off to the right wing!
Usually, Vana and the other fixing players are not as obvious. They have to have other skills aside from soccer. A fixing player has to be a great actor. It is no use just playing badly; the player also has to pretend to be trying hard. Jackie “Mr. TV” Pallo was a popular British wrestler for three decades. Tall, good-looking, and utterly extravagant, he became famous as a “baddie” whose job was to torment the “blue eyes” (wrestlers who played heroic roles) and the audience. However, at the heigh
t of his career, he was excluded from a lucrative television contract. Accordingly, he wrote a tell-all autobiography called You Grunt, I’ll Groan. Pallo claimed the entire British version of wrestling was a fraud. Most of the “savage bouts” that thrilled the audience were actually scripted to decide who would win. In chapters called “The Six Commandments” or “The Office Hold,” Pallo even described in detail some of the fixes in wrestling and how they are performed. However, the thing that Pallo emphasized was the skill of “dying” at the end of the other wrestler’s fake moves:
… it is important for fighters to respond to one another’s moves … if I’d just dropped a man on his head with a fucking great bang, I’d expect him to roll around on the deck for some seconds, clutching his nut as if in agony. This is called “dying” to the other man’s move, or “selling” his move.
It is the same in a crooked soccer match: the corrupt player needs to “sell” the fix. As each move is sold in wrestling as a genuine, pain-causing manoeuvre, each match-fixing soccer player must do the same thing. They must act off the field as if the idea of fixing is the last thing in their minds. Scott Ollerenshaw played on a Malaysian team where police eventually discovered that some of his teammates were involved in fixing games. He claims before their arrests that even though he knew something corrupt was going on, he could not be sure which players were taking part.
It is all the verbal bullshit before a game; they shout lots of stuff, “Come on, come on!” Then during the game it is just little tiny things like just mistiming a sliding tackle or letting a guy go through. These guys became experts in making it look like they were out there giving blood to their team. Coming in after the games and throwing themselves on the floor and screaming.
It is professional suicide for a player ever to admit to fixing or not trying as hard as he could. Acting as if they are ready to give everything for their team plays on a clear and certain advantage corrupt players do have in fixing a game: few people, even trained coaches, can actually tell if they are really fixing the game. If carried out with subtlety, the Rafiq Saad guidelines can appear to be the simple mistakes of an otherwise hardworking player. This became a problem for the Singaporean police when they were trying to investigate the issue. One officer said, “Football is very subjective. So people can have a bad game, just because they are playing badly. Even if they are bribed … Who can tell?” This subjectivity is not only a difficulty for the police: it became an issue while I was researching this book. I witnessed a top international match that I think was fixed. Fixers told me that it would be fixed, they predicted the right score, but how was I to know for certain whether a match was fixed? Were there special features that could show a fixed match? I wanted to find out.
Nuffield College was founded by the British carmaker Lord Nuffield, who in the years before his death gave an enormous sum of his money to found a new Oxford college and a foundation that would be based on the principal of “helping humanity.” What he got was a college full of social scientists. During the term, the sociologists would meet in a cramped room every Wednesday at five o’clock for seminars. These meetings of the almost-living were dreadful affairs that would gladden the heart of any anthropologist looking for strange rituals of exotic tribes. Frequently, some poor lecturer from an outside university would be invited to present his or her work. The lecturer would, presumably, think it was an opportunity to share ideas and research with the bigwigs of Oxford. The actual purpose was to provide meat for an academic shark frenzy. He or she would stand in the middle of the small room. Faculty would be around the first row. By an unspoken and never broken decree, they had to ask the first set of questions. They would sit with their legs tightly crossed, frowns tightly affixed, toes, frequently untrimmed, waggling out from their sandals. Behind them would sit, packed in like galley slaves, the graduate students, all wearing their most unctuous expressions, ready to agree or disagree with the speaker depending on what their supervisors thought. The visiting academic would finish. There would be a silence while various mental knives were sharpened. And then one of the front row would speak out in a long, lazy drawl, and say something like:
That was all very interesting. But have you actually ever read the work of Sebastian and myself on the British Family Survey? I think you’ll find it very helpful. (Modest smirk from Sebastian at this point. The “questions,” usually long negative comments on the speaker’s research, would go on.) “It seems to me, looking at your data, that you have made the mistake, the rather elementary mistake I might add, of confusing correlation with causation …” (Translation: You’re a bloody idiot.)
When I got back to this world, after months of talking with fixers, corrupt players, and police in Asia, I decided I wanted to test whether Rafiq Saad and the other players were lying. I wanted to see if there was a way of knowing if, and when, a game had been fixed. It got me thinking: at the university I was surrounded by smart, bright people who understood statistics. I needed to drop my intellectual snobbery. Yes, Nuffield Seminars were dreary affairs, blighted with personal politics, but so were many journalists’ story meetings that I had attended. Surely there must be a way of testing this idea of underperforming to achieve a successful fix, using some of the methods discussed in the seminars.
There is a rising new field, investigative economics, that became an inspiration for me. Investigative economics is where economists finally do something they have largely never done before: study the real world. Many orthodox economists deliberately exclude social factors when constructing their models. They find them too distracting. They search for intellectual holy grails, like the “perfect market” or an “equilibrium point.” It is the reason why you have to be educated for a long time to be as stupid as some economists. It is the reason why in the midst of the Irish potato famine or the Great Depression or any of the other economic calamities that have befallen our societies, there are always some economists to be found saying things such as, “wide-scale relief to the starving millions is bad because it would depress the market.” In the last few years, thankfully, that is changing. In particular, there have been a number of excellent studies on corruption in sports.
The American academics Justin Trogdon and Beck Taylor showed in their 2002 study that during certain seasons in the National Basketball Association, some weak teams would deliberately lose games at the end of the season to get better recruits for the next year. Charles Moul and John Nye of Washington Univer sity examined the Soviet chess system and revealed that there had been widespread collusion between Soviet players in international chess tournaments between 1946 and 1964 to help one another reach Grand Master status. And the great American economist Steven Levitt and his colleague Mark Duggan showed a similar pattern of corrupt collusion in Japanese sumo wrestling.
I did a series of similar experiments, with the help of a couple of statistical colleagues. I collected a sample of more than 130 soccer matches that were known beyond legal doubt to have been fixed and I compared them to a control group of presumed honestly played matches. I wanted to see if there were any patterns that made fixed games different from honestly played games.
I studied the confessions and interviews of the corrupt players and noticed one clear phenomenon: for the most part, players did not talk about committing a crime to fix a match, it was always omitting to do something. It’s a bit like Catholic theology. For the believers, there are two types of sins: omission and commission. Sins of commission are misdemeanours that come from actually doing something: “my neighbour’s house is on fire because I set it alight.” Sins of omission are the misdemeanours that come from not doing something that one should do: “my neighbour’s house is on fire and I did not phone the fire brigade.”
The first thing I realized was that it is impossible to measure sins of omission that a player or a referee may have committed in fixing a match. Television pundits, referees, and millions of fans all may argue that a player should have done better in making a tackle or passing a bal
l, but really, their judgment remains subjective. The only tests that I could do were on the sins of commission or the events that had occurred in games that could be quantified and measured in an objective manner. Three events suggested themselves: penalty kicks, own goals, and red cards (when a referee sends a player off the field for a foul with no replacement allowed). It seems reasonable to expect that there would be more of these events in a fixed game than in an honestly played match. For example, a source at the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) had told me:
There is a specific referee that we are investigating. He is betting on himself on the gambling market: when he gives out a yellow card [a warning given by a referee], to which team, etc. He did this in the qualifying rounds of the European Championship [a Europe-wide national team tournament]. I won’t give you his name. I have to wait for him to be charged, but let’s say that he is an Eastern European referee.
After spending months compiling the database, I finally began to run the numbers and discovered some interesting results.
PENALTY KICKS
What I discovered was that if players were fixing, there was no significant rise in the number of penalties. In other words, Rafiq Saad had largely been telling the truth. If a player wanted to give away a goal, he would not cut down an opposition player but simply let him get past without trying to stop him. Presumably, this is because to give up a penalty draws undue attention to the fixing player. By just screwing up in small ways, a player doesn’t get the coach screaming at him or the crowd throwing things. The unavailing slip, the attempt to get the ball, the mistimed tackle, all accompanied with Pallo’s “selling of the fix” grunts and groans, are as effective in accomplishing the fix and less conspicuous.