The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime

by Declan Hill

  As it was, Ye Zheyun bought an interest in two teams in the Belgian league, but he did not work slowly. Stupidly, Ye Zheyun seemed to always be in a hurry; never more so than when he moved into the Finnish League. In the summer of 2005, after at least a dozen successfully fixed matches in the Belgian league, Ye Zheyun decided to buy the Finnish club Allianssi. Allianssi had been formed a few years before, but now its owners were looking to sell. The team was in good playing condition, high up in the league but deeply in debt. Ye Zheyun and his helpers promised to invest heavily in the club and turn its finances around. In one of his first games, he brought in five new players from Belgium and insisted they all play the match. It was to be a tough game against Allianssi’s rivals Haka. But if the fans were expecting a close game, than they got a complete surprise. Their team did not just lose, but like the Singapore versus Sarawak game, they lost big: 8-0. The odds on the Finnish state gambling site, of this exact 8-0 score were 8787-1. The coach and players declared it was an accident. As in Belgium, it was not the first incident of its kind. The tabloid newspaper Ilta-Sanomat would reveal a few months later that a number of players had either been approached or had taken money over the years to fix games in the Finnish league.

  “I have taken money for a few games. This has been going on already for years,” one of the players said. “I am by no means the only one. I know by name at least two other men from other teams.”

  Almost unbelievably, no official authority in Finland ever said that the Allianssi versus Haka match was fixed. The Finnish police investigation seemed to start with great enthusiasm and then got bogged down; no charges or arrests were ever made. The same curious lack of action was seen when Betfair, the British Internet betting exchange, told the Belgian Football Association in the fall of 2005 that there had been “unusual” betting activity on several Belgian matches. The Belgian Football Association claims it never got the warning letters.

  Soccer officials did not stop Ye Zheyun’s criminal activities; but his libido finally did. Ye met an eighteen-year-old Belgian girl. He invited her out. Their first date? To see a fixed soccer match, where Ye Zheyun, presumably to impress the girl, explained how he fixed the match, which players were on the fix, and the score of the game before it took place. Then he promised her a career in modelling if she agreed to some of his conditions. One of his “conditions” seemed to be that he could come and visit her late one night in her hotel room – ironically – at a Brussels Hilton Hotel. However, she had brought her mother, possibly the most sensible thing she would ever do in her life. When Ye arrived at midnight at her door, suggesting a more active, hands-on approach to managing her career, she and her mother called the police. They told them what they had seen and what Ye had told them, and that was the beginning of the end of Ye’s fixing empire.

  Ye Zheyun was interviewed by the police, released, and then he too fled. He has never been seen by officials again. The police investigation dragged on for a year. At first, it seemed to be going well. The officer in charge, Marc Piron, was a tough, no-nonsense character who seemed like the Jean-Marie Dedecker of the Belgian police. He did not last long. He was pulled off the case for allegedly speaking to the media. No arrests have been made since then. The charges against Pietro Allatta were all dropped; he continues his career as an agent and vehemently denies any involvement in fixing games.

  Two months after Ye’s disappearance, the Belgian television program Panorama aired a program that claimed that at least fourteen people – including players and managers – were involved in helping Ye with his activities. But the Brussels player Laurent Wuillot, who had been approached by one Ye Zheyun’s people to fix a game against Lierse SK laughed when he heard that number:

  Fourteen players, are you joking? They are a lot more numerous than that. You have to understand these types. They can make more money on one fixed game than in an entire season, they are so badly paid at these clubs who are desperate to survive.

  Wuillot was not the only, or even the most important, player that Ye Zheyun’s people approached. According to the confession of Laurent Fassotte, the captain of Lierse SK, Ye Zheyun was essentially able to control almost the entire team – management and players.

  For Ye Zheyun, it was perfect. There are number of key reasons that he was able to operate so successfully in Belgium and Finland. First, the leagues were in Western Europe, so they had a reputation for honesty among Asian gamblers. Ye and his fixing syndicate could get a lot of money down on the illegal market. Two, despite this apparent honesty, the players and clubs were often so badly paid that they could be bought easily. An investment of a few thousand euros could net a potential return of millions. Finally, the Belgian league has long been complacent about corruption.

  The Asian fixers scan the European leagues trying to find these conditions, and then they move in. There is one set of tournaments, however, where the paradigm of a high reputation for honesty mixed with relative corruptibility of teams is easy to find: early Champions League, UEFA Cup, and Intertoto Cup matches. Most people think of the Champions League when the big, well-known teams enter it in September. Then the national champions from the most powerful European countries – Italy, England, Spain, and Germany, plus a select group of other top teams from across Europe – compete for the trophy. However, between June and August, there are three preliminary rounds of Champions League matches, where teams from smaller and poorer European countries play one another in hopes of getting to the advanced rounds of the competition. In these rounds and in the Intertoto Cup – a trophy, ironically, designed by the European sports lotteries to give soccer gamblers something to bet on when the main leagues have closed for the summer holidays – allegations of fixing have become widespread. The games between relatively obscure teams attract more gambling than normal simply because there are no other high-level soccer games in Europe during June and July.

  One European soccer official told me of a typical example in these type of games:

  We had a case recently in the Intertoto Cup. There were strange betting patterns going on. The first game had ended in a 1-1 draw. The second leg was lost by the home team 4-0. Even the referee’s report said that it was a fix. He said that the home team was trying not to win. The bets on the game were that the home team would lose 5-0.

  Another gambling executive gave me a list of some of the games that his organization thought were suspicious in these tournaments. The countries fitted the same paradigm – Cyprus, Belarus, Romania, Lithuania, and Greece – all countries that have long soccer traditions but all places where 10,000 euros buys a lot of influence. Many of the European sports gambling companies have already suspended betting on many games in the preliminary rounds. Indeed, it is a rare week that a game is not pulled down by bookmakers who are afraid of matches being fixed. A high-level European sport lotteries executive told me that the amount of suspicious games has increased so much that at one point the European Lotteries and Toto Association even considered the idea of abandoning the Intertoto tournament altogether.

  In the fall of 2007, a source at the Europol, the European-wide police association, leaked the news to a German newspaper that UEFA had asked them to investigate fifteen games for match-fixing. In private, UEFA officials admit the problem is far, far bigger than simply fifteen games, but the teams will not co-operate, the cases are going nowhere, and one of the investigators has already been threatened with death.

  The locusts have arrived.

  If you ever have a choice of going to either the University of Oxford or Cambridge, and everything else is equal – size of scholarship, quality of supervisor, personal matters – then you should always choose Cambridge. The reason dates back to the 1640s. At that time, England was engaged in a furious civil war, and the losing Royalist Army was besieged in Oxford, with King Charles the First using Christ Church College as his headquarters. The story goes that as the siege continued, Charles was so deeply engrossed in a book he was reading in the university library that he wa
nted to take it away, read it, and then return it. “Oh no, your majesty,” the librarian is supposed to have replied. “The rules state no books can leave the premises; you must read it here.” Now, if you ask to borrow one, the librarian usually tells you that story, finishing with some sentence such as, “And if we wouldn’t lend a book to King Charles the First, we certainly cannot lend a book to you!”

  This was all very charming for the first few months of my time at Oxford, but then I got to thinking about the circumstances. It was during a civil war. King Charles was about to lose the war, be captured, imprisoned, and then executed by the rebels. No wonder the librarian did not want to lend the King the book; he knew he would never get it back. On the other hand, Cambridge, Oxford’s main educational rival and an equally historical institution, treat their contemporary students like adults. Cambridge students are actually allowed to take books out of the main library, read them, and then return them. To make it worse, at Oxford, academics cannot actually see the book shelves, either. Most of them are kept in vaults deep underground or at offsite storage. If you are interested in reading a book, you have to make an appointment two or three days in advance; it is then sent to a location in the library, and you go there to read the book.

  I tell this story because the original material for the next two chapters was not gathered, at first, in interviews – although there were many interviews done after the archival material had been collected – but rather in a dusty, obscure corner of the Bodleian Library, the central library at Oxford. To be honest, if you have to be imprisoned in a library to read books, then the Bodleian is probably the best place in the world. Established in 1602 by an Elizabethan courtier and sometime spy, Thomas Bodley (who came up with the idea of not taking books out of the library), it is a catacomb of living history. Some of the bookshelves were designed by former prime minister William Gladstone; some of the buildings were designed by an acolyte of the great architect Christopher Wren; some of the paintings on the walls were painted by superb artists of distant eras. Amid the desks are marble statues and busts of ancient benefactors. It is so redolent in history that while I was there, parts of the library would be closed down and used as the backdrop for the Harry Potter films.

  It was at a dusty wooden table that I sat and began to read the books and papers that revealed the long, long history of corruption at the heart of European soccer. I read about the foundation of the first professional leagues in the nineteenth century, in part as a defence against gambling and the fixes that were thought to inevitably attend the sport. I read about the revelation, almost seventy years too late, by the International Federation for Football History and Statistics that a 1934 World Cup qualifying match between Italy and Greece had been fixed by Mussolini’s officials desperate for a triumph in the tournament. And I read, with great surprise, about the match-fixing corruption that existed at the heart of the league that enjoys the reputation as the most honest in the world – the English.

  9

  THE GOLDEN AGE

  There were millions of people who would pay millions of pounds to do what these guys were being paid to do. There were peoples with injuries. There were invalids. There were disabled people, people who would have given everything they had to go on a pitch and do everything these guys were doing and getting paid for it. To me, they were lowlifes who were selling the club, the supporters, and themselves for a shilling. I can’t accept that.

  There was blood in his mouth. His head hurt. All around him was darkness and silence. He lay on his side amidst the tangled metal, still strapped to his seat. He unfastened himself, started to crawl free of the wreckage, and then saw the first dead body.

  It was one of the most significant moments in British sport since the Second World War, and it happened at a German airport. Munich, February 6, 1958. The plane carrying the Manchester United team had crashed on take-off. This was no ordinary team: this was the Red Devils, the Busby Babes, the champions of England, carefully selected and crafted by their manager, Matt Busby. They were on the way back to England after a European Cup match against Red Star Belgrade. They had drawn the difficult game 3-3 in an intimidating stadium before a tough team. There is a photo of them taken before the match. They stare out at the camera. Beautiful young men in their athletic prime: muscular with the cockiness of youth, invulnerable, immortal. Now many lay in the wreck of their crashed airplane. Eight of them were dead or dying. Two others would never play the game again. But one of them became a hero that night: Harry Gregg, their tall, forceful goalkeeper from Northern Ireland.

  After he got free, he staggered down the plane. The pilot appeared, a tiny fire extinguisher in one hand: “Run, you stupid bastard, it is going to explode!” Gregg could see five people scrambling away. But he turned and crawled back inside the wreckage.

  It was dark. He could hear a baby crying. Frantically, he pushed and pulled at the debris until he found the infant. He checked there was nothing wrong. Then he carried the baby out and handed her to another survivor. He went back inside the plane. The fire continued to burn.

  He found the mother of the baby trapped underneath the wreckage. She was unconscious. Gregg could not lift her, so pushed her out of the plane with his legs.

  He still could not understand what had happened. It was too surreal, there was too much devastation: whole sections of the airplane had disappeared; the ruins of half a house tottered near the fuselage; and as the fuel caught fire, there were constant explosions.

  Again, Gregg went back toward the burning plane. He found two of his teammates lying there. They were too injured to move. But Gregg managed to get hold of two others – Bobby Charlton and Dennis Viollet – and drag them by the waistbands of their trousers away from the plane.

  The explosions threw flames high in the air. Finally, there was one massive blast that knocked a doctor who was tending the injured off his feet, and ended any hope of saving anyone else. Gregg was loaded into a truck and driven to the hospital.

  In all, the Munich air crash killed twenty-three people. It devastated the team and its impact was felt across England.

  For Manchester United, this was the very bottom for the club. Before the game, they had been in third place in the league. Now they scrambled to get enough players just to fill the team. Players were drafted in from not just the reserves, but their youth team as well. They were asked to fill in for the best players in England, the players who had died in the flames and wreckage of the Munich air crash. The roster of the players who were killed is extraordinary, including five internationals: Roger Byrne, David Pegg, Tommy Taylor, Liam Whelan, and Duncan Edwards, the man who had it all: skill, athleticism, modesty, decency, hard work, and the good looks of a movie star. The survivors who could never play again included Jackie Blanchflower, who as a player on the Northern Ireland national team had helped get them to the 1958 World Cup.

  The next game at Old Trafford, Manchester United’s home ground, was a sell-out crowd. Thousands more were outside the stadium, and knowing they could not enter, they stood in silence, some with tears streaming down their faces, desperately urging their team on to victory. Bill Foulkes, one of the few men to walk out of the plane, captained the team that day. Years later he wrote: “It is strange that up to the moment of the game I had been thinking so much about the boys and missing them, but when the game started all I could think about was that we simply had to win.”

  The shattered remnants of the team won that day. Then they won again and again and again. In the spring of 1958, against all odds, they reached the final of the FA Cup, the highest knockout competition in England. The team’s emblem on their shirt was a small phoenix: from out of the ashes, they would rise again. The final was against another northern team, Bolton, and almost the whole country cheered United on as they ended up heartbreakingly losing 2-0. It was the beginning of a love affair that has continued in England and then around the world since then: through eleven league championships, nine FA Cups, and three European titles, throug
h the rise and fall of the gifted George Best, the mercurial Eric Cantona, and the never-tiring Bryan Robson. But it is the teams that arose in the years after the Munich air crash that most speak to the hearts of the English. They were England’s sweethearts. They were champions. And a few of them were cheats.

  That final verdict is given by the one man whose courage exemplified the Busby Babes, the heroic Harry Gregg. The same man who risked his life to save his friends and strangers from a fiery crash now claims in his autobiography, Harry’s Game, and in an interview with me that on the team a few years after the crash was a small group of players that were selling matches to gamblers. Gregg claims that he was approached to fix matches by a couple of “low-life” Manchester United players, neither of whom had been in the crash. They were out to make money off illegal gambling. He went to the manager, Matt Busby, who, Gregg claims, swore, slammed the desk, and shouted, “I bloody knew.”

  The Manchester United team was not untypical. This is what astonished me as I read the files. This generation of soccer players were my father’s heroes. In my mind, they were cloaked in a glorious light. I don’t think I am alone. Ask modern English football fans about that era and many will wax nostalgic. The National Football Museum in Preston refers to this time as the Golden Age. The war was over. The world was at peace. The men wore baggy shorts, their hair swept back. The list of players is a roll-call of British soccer immortality: Denis Compton, Tommy Finney, the young Bobby Charlton, Stan Mortensen, and the greatest of them all – Stanley Matthews. They were lions. They brought light to the dark age of post-war England. And many of the players of the time, although not the ones listed, fixed games.