by Declan Hill
In the room were hundreds of members of the Liverpool fan club of Singapore. It was four o’clock in the morning. Any sensible person could see it was over. Their team was 3-0 down against the finest defensive club in the world. Any reasonable person would go to bed. They did not. Some of them, like their counterparts in the Istanbul stadium, sang. Most of them hunched over the television, willing their team to come back from the dead. Liverpool did. The players matched their fans in spirit and scored three goals in a six-minute spell in the second half – and then won the game on penalties. It finished at 5:45 a.m., Singapore time.
I am not a Liverpool fan. But that display of sheer bloody-minded refusal to accept defeat is what good soccer is all about. It is the finest part of the human spirit. For every cancer patient who has to walk into chemotherapy, for every rape victim who has to get up the next morning and face the world, for every person who stares at defeat and refuses to give up, it was an inspiration. This was not going gently into the good night; this was not feigning injury or giving up.
Then the party got started.
In Singapore, things are done well. The Liverpool fans hired a red double-decker bus and drove around the city. They went around dozens of times, each time with a largely different set of fans in the bus. There is a Manchester United shop on the Orchard Road shopping district, an entire shop dedicated to paraphernalia of the Red Devils. Liverpool fans are supposed to hate Manchester United. It goes along with the support. So the Liverpool fans of Singapore parked their bus in front of the Manchester United shop and cheered and sang; they did it every time that the bus went around the city.
When I went with them, there was not a single European among them. The whole group was Singaporean. Many of them had never been to England, let alone Anfield, Liverpool’s stadium. Wilson Li, who has a Liverpool crest tattoo, was typical: “Liverpool is my religion, my life. My tattoo is on my chest over my heart. I am still a Liverpool man, win or lose.”
His friends took off their shirts and stood, arms around one another, bellowing their lungs out. Even as a neutral, there was something oddly moving about standing in a modern car park in the middle of Singapore 11,000 kilometres from Anfield and hear a group of Chinese men sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” The hair on the back of my neck rose.
However, the scene begs a question: why?
Why does a group of people – thousands of kilometres and eight time zones away – cheer for a team that most will never see? Why are the streets and public spaces of Asia dominated with photos of such EPL stars as Frank Lampard, John Terry, and Michael Owen? Why are so many people deserting teams such as Brunei, Selangor, and Beijing Hyundai to follow Liverpool and Manchester United?
It is, in part, due to the widespread television coverage of European games in Asia. Any television viewer can see the difference in quality of play. It is in part due to the political repression of Asia. One is not allowed to speak too openly about the political situation in most Asian countries, so having a bread and circus show that is far away and politically undemanding suits the powers-that-be in Asia. If you are a repressive government, it is better to have people shouting on the streets about Liverpool versus Manchester United than shouting on the streets about freedom of the press or democratic reforms. But the lack of support for local soccer is mostly because the credibility of most of the Asian leagues has been destroyed by the fixers. Worse still, and almost everyone admits this fact, the fixing is still going on.
Privately, there was not a single Asian soccer official who told me that they had been completely effective in cleaning up the game. One comment from one top official is typical: “We lost nearly an entire generation of players, but if you are going to say that there is no corruption now, I wouldn’t believe you…. We had circumstances where the entire team, including substitutes, were in on the fix.”
Wilson Li and his Liverpool fan friends know all about the fixing. When I asked them why they did not support Singapore or any of the local teams, they were emphatic. “We used to. Maybe ten years ago, we used to drive up to Kuala Lumpur when Singapore played. It was great; there would be 60,000 people in the stadium. But now? There is too much bribery. The fans, they pay good money for the game, suddenly their team loses 2-0, 3-0 for nothing. Waste of money!”
Contrary to legend, Ian Rush is smart. Rush was one of the great goal-scorers of the 1980s, a lithe, lean man with a toothbrush moustache. He also had the reputation of being a thickie. He went from the hugely successful Liverpool team and played for one year with the Italian club Juventus. It did not go well. On being asked what he thought of Italy, he paused and is alleged to have said, “I couldn’t settle in Italy – it was like living in a foreign country.” English middle-class intellectuals who fancy themselves as a “footballerati,” people who cannot play but understand the game in a way that those who play it cannot, like to sneer at Rush as a typical example of a thick-headed peasant who plays it. They seriously underestimate him.
I met Rush in a Singapore bar a few months before the collapse of the betting line. We were fellow guests of ESPN journalists. ESPN broadcasts EPL, Italian, Spanish, and Champions League soccer to twenty-five countries in East Asia. Occasionally, they will bring in a big European soccer name to provide colour commentary. Rush was their guest. He was a goal-scoring coach for the Liverpool squad. He looked as he did as a player, lean and fit, although, thankfully, the moustache has gone. We talked about Liverpool’s chances, how they were doing, why they played better in the Champions League than the Premier League. He was smart and insightful, with an understanding of how players work and think far beyond that of any outsider. He was good company and we shared beers. Then he asked me what I did. I told him about my research into match-fixing and asked him about Bruce Grobbelaar, the famous Liverpool goalkeeper who, allegedly, accepted money to fix soccer games. He looked at me as if I just had crawled out from a hole. “I don’t answer questions at this time of night,” he said and then retreated to the other end of the bar, where he was fawned over by red-faced English fans of an indeterminate age. I never intended or thought that Rush was in anyway involved in match-fixing, but not for the first time my research topic had caused me lots of social embarrassment.
I turned to the ESPN journalists. They were very, very nice guys. We chatted, but I think I may have been inadvertently patronizing. I did not mean to be, but the Rush incident had thrown me off and I said something like, “I watched your program the other night. It was quite good. What is the average audience that you have?”
One of their announcers looked at me from under his brows.
“On a good match, a final or a really big game, around 280 million people,” he said, straight-faced. “On an average night, an EPL match midweek with not very much at stake, maybe only 140 million people.”
One hundred and forty million people is a significant proportion of the total population of North America watching a run-of-the-mill European soccer match. For the really big matches, the TV audience in Asia climbs to more than the entire population of Western Europe. So we have a situation where there is a large population who really, really loves to gamble. They, with the rise of the Internet, have the ability to bet on games anywhere in the world. Their own leagues have largely collapsed into a state of disrepair and chaos partly due to match-fixing. The perfect storms of the collapsing lines, such as the one that hit Kevin Kim and the Singapore Pools, have diminished the credibility of the leagues. In fact, now many Asian punters prefer to bet on the fixes. They try to guess which particular games will be fixed and by whom, and bet on that rather than the games. And just as all this is occurring, television coverage of European matches has suddenly been introduced and the following of European clubs has grown so exponentially, that the audience for a midweek match stands at 140 million people.
So what’s a hard-working Asian match-fixer to do?
Go to Europe.
PROLOGUE
(Verbatim transcript of an e-mail exchange between
a European soccer player and Marc Carinci of Soccercapper.com, the researcher for this book, January 2008)
Player: I want to offer you 1 fixed soccer match that coming and its 1000% fixed.
Why i am so sure about that?
Because i will play on that match and i know that we have to lose this match.
The first match that we played at home we won and now we have to lose.
3 points for 3 points was the deal.
If you are interested just write me.
I will give you the match for 200 euro cause i sold out this information for very huge money.
date for this match is XX.03.08
Carinci: Please provide more information. thanks.
Player: This soccer match is in Macedonian league. i dont know yet what odd it will be but i am sure that it will be not under 2.00. Macedonian league is one of the most fixed league in whole europe, especially the second half of the championship every round has a fixed match. I send information in many websites for this events and they paid me. i am sure that no other website for this fixed matches does not have the right information as i do and 200 euro is nothing compare to other website for which must pay thousands of dollars. i have soccer friends in almost every team in macedonian league and we have contact if some fixed match is coming. i have played in several teams in macedinia, XXXX and XXXX [names two other European leagues]. If your company is interested about this match just write me and i will send you the payment link. thanks for your interested
Carinci: Thanks for your reply. If what you say is true then we could have a very good partnership together. But how do I know you are the real XXXXX and not just some Internet scammer? Also will you or your friends have any info on matches in any other league too?
Player: i will scan my passport and send you via email if you want. i am sure that you checked my name via Internet search. my name is XXX. born XX-XX-XXXX. i am still active professional soccer player. former national player … i have soccer friends in almost every league in europe germany, italia, ukraine, serbia, croatia, poland, turkey and macedonia. i have very confidential information for example if fixed matches income. my information is 1000% accurate. i sold this fixed soccer matches very expensive in italy and singapoure …
The player did send his passport, and the result of the game was exactly as he predicted.
8
THE ARRIVAL OF THE LOCUSTS
It was quite dangerous … I was going to the plane and I got an anonymous phone call saying if I should come, they would kill me. So I was not too happy. They are really mafia boys. It’s not that I am a coward, but I prefer to stay alive.
Pietro Allatta is officially known as a Belgian sports agent who has an interest in a number of footballers there, including the sometime national goalkeeper Silvio Proto. Allatta does, however, have an interesting background. He was once both an associate and then construction business rival of Carmelo Bongiorno – the former head of the Belgian Italian mob. Bongiorno was convicted in 1994 of arranging the disappearance of Stéphane Steinier, a Belgian journalist. He and his gang kidnapped Steinier, killed him, dosed his corpse in acid, and then disposed of the remains underneath one of the many buildings that Bongiorno was having constructed in southern Belgium. Steinier was not the only person who disappeared in that era: a local football goalkeeper who was a close friend of Pietro Allatta, vanished April 23, 1988. He has not been seen since and no one is entirely sure of what happened, but he is presumed to have irritated Bongiorno and received the same acid bath as Stéphane Steinier. Allatta’s own brush with the law came when he and his brother were convicted of tax fraud in connection with the construction industry and sentenced to several years in prison. While Allatta’s brother Salvatore went to jail, Pietro Allatta never served a day in prison.
Despite his conviction for fraud and knowledge of Italian mobsters, officially, Allatta is a soccer agent. He even has a FIFA agent’s licence, although it is not from Belgium but from the Republic of Togo. He was the partner of a Ye Zheyun, a mysterious Chinese businessman who arrived in Belgium in the fall of 2004 ostensibly as the head of a textile firm – Cecilia Bilanci, of 29 Rue de Pyramides, in Paris.
In 1992, in a largely forgotten series of hearings, the U.S. Congress investigated Asian organized crime, which included dramatic testimony from actual Asian triad members about the transglobal links of the organization. The eventual report that was produced was called “Asian Organized Crime: The New Inter national Criminal.” Ye Zheyun is a sterling representative of a “new international criminal.” His goal was to corrupt soccer leagues in Europe while making enormous profits thousands of kilometres away, in the gambling markets of Asia.
The Belgium that Ye Zheyun entered had a colourful history of match-fixing and organized crime. In 1984, a controversial conversation of the “referee liaison officer” Raymond De Deken at Anderlecht, the biggest club in Belgium, was caught on tape. De Deken was arranging with a criminal, Jean Elst, the attempted bribing of the English referee Keith Hackett before a vital UEFA Cup tie. They discussed the amount of money that the Anderlecht official was ready to give the referee if he accepted the bribe:
Jean: Wow! Then there won’t be many referees who will say no to that amount of money.
Raymond: Yeah, but there are always some, eh, Jean? The ones in Belgium, I know all of them. But this one, I don’t know. Well, I mean, I do know him, but whether he will be interested or not, I don’t know.
De Deken and Elst failed with the honest Hackett, but they would go on to successfully corrupt the referee of the UEFA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest. The referee got Anderlecht through to the final by disallowing a Nottingham Forest goal. But after the game, De Deken and Elst had a falling-out. Elst alleges that at a meeting at the Brussels Hilton De Deken stole 200,000 Belgian francs from the payoff to the referee. The referee began to shout loudly in the hotel restaurant, so to avoid a scene Elst paid him the money and then exposed De Deken to the management of Anderlecht, who promptly paid Elst hush money to go away.
In February 2006, I felt like suggesting to the management of the Brussels Hilton that they should put up a plaque announcing that it was the scene of the corruption of one of Europe’s most important games. It would not be the last time one of their hotels in Brussels was unwittingly linked to criminals and match-fixing. At the behest of Finnish television, I was examining the situation in Belgian soccer, and one of the first people I interviewed there was Senator Jean-Marie Dedecker. Senator Dedecker is fifty-five years old, but he could probably kick your ass. He could certainly kick mine. He was an Olympic judo coach for twenty years, inspiring the small Belgian team to eight medals in four Olympic competitions. He has broad shoulders and a pugnacious charm that makes him good company. When I asked him about the only other martial arts expert I know from Belgium – Jean-Claude Van Damme – he sniffed dismissively. “Van Damme is nothing. He has too much muscle. Too much push. He has done too many weights for Hollywood. Any of my team could take him.”
I met him for lunch in the ornate and elaborate Belgian Senate building. In the late 1990s, Dedecker entered the world of Belgian politics and quickly stirred it up with his outspokenness. One typical incident saw Dedecker accompanying an undercover journalist into a maximum-security prison to interview a sex criminal. The prisoner had not gone to trial in six years, and Dedecker suspected that there might be a high-level cover up going on. His party was so upset with Dedecker’s action that they suspended him. Dedecker professed himself completely unmoved and has turned himself into a kind of political gadfly of the cozy world of the Belgian establishment. All in all then, Dedecker is not the kind of man who lacks either physical or moral courage. But when he began to investigate the world of Belgian soccer, he had a series of warnings that made him very cautious. “It was quite dangerous,” he told me, “I was going to the plane and I got an anonymous phone call saying if I should come, they would kill me. So I was not too happy … they are really mafia boys. It’s not t
hat I am a coward but I prefer to stay alive …”
Despite several death threats, in 2001 Dedecker brought out a report stating that various organized crime groups were bringing in players from the Third World to conditions that resembled modern-day slavery. It brought a flood of publicity but very little reform. He explained to me that most of Belgian soccer officials were like much of the country’s establishment: relatively old, not particularly competent, and complacent of corruption so long as it did not interfere with their position.
This was the world that Ye Zheyun moved into as “a soccer investor” in the fall of 2004. Ye Zheyun and Pietro Allatta worked together. Allatta helped Ye Zheyun approach teams in the Belgian league, and then Ye Zheyun tried to get the teams to fix matches. (When I spoke to Allatta, he denied having anything to do with the fixing, claiming he was only “a soccer manager.” Belgian authorities seemed to believe him. At one point they had arrested Allatta, but now they had dropped all charges against him.) One Belgian law enforcement source was amazed at Ye’s success: “In total, Ye contacted fourteen Belgian professional soccer teams. They did not say anything to one another. From November 2004 to November 2005, Ye worked and not once did the teams say anything.”
In what might be a prophetic warning to the English Premier League and rich foreign owners with unknown backgrounds, the law enforcement source said: “They [the soccer clubs] lose their mind when they see money. If Ye Zheyun had been smart, he would have asked to invest 1,000,000 euros. Then he could have been the managing director. He could have controlled all the teams if he had worked slowly; he could have done it all.”