The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime

by Declan Hill

  James Bartholomew, the English journalist and author, writes of what a wonderful place Britain was before the establishment of universal education, pensions, and medical care. How he can miss the widespread child labour, poverty, and slums that our great-grandparents had to endure is beyond comprehension. But in his book, The Welfare State We’re In, he begins with a chapter entitled “From Stanley Matthews to Vinnie Jones.” Bartholomew writes that English soccer is in a state of decline, from the halcyon sport played in the 1950s by gentlemen like Stanley Matthews, who enjoyed a nice, clean game, to the game now played by low-bred thugs.

  I asked Harry Gregg about this view. He replied, “I don’t know what sport he [Bartholomew] is talking about, but it certainly wasn’t the one that I played.”

  Gregg is an intelligent, insightful, and deeply honourable man. He was also one of the best athletes of his generation. And his description of the toughness of soccer in the 1950s would curl your hair. For example, in the 1958 FA Cup Final when some of the Munich survivors of Manchester United played against Bolton, Nat Lofthouse, the powerful Bolton forward, fouled Gregg in an incident that became infamous. Gregg had the ball in his hands and Lofthouse bundled him over the goal line scoring the goal that won the game for Bolton and destroyed the dream of a nation. However, two things did not happen: one, Lofthouse was not sent off – charging the goalkeeper was simply part of the man’s game that was soccer of the time – and two, the injured Harry Gregg did not leave the pitch – he played on.

  The archival materials show clearly and consistently that some of the greatest players of the era were saying that British soccer in the 1950s and 1960s was, at times, deeply corrupt. A few examples include Brian Clough, Trevor Ford, Ken Chisholm, and Harry Gregg. Ford, Clough, and Gregg each represented one of the Home Nations: Wales, England, and Northern Ireland. Each of them played in the English first and second divisions, and each would write of the match-fixing that had occurred in that era.

  Trevor Ford was a fascinating, exhilarating man. An international striker for Wales and an early campaigner for a more aggressive players’ union, he was a fighter in every aspect of his life. Ford was also honest to a fault. In 1957, he wrote his autobiography, I Lead the Attack, based on his professional career. The first chapter, “Under the Counter,” caused a sensation.

  Since I first set my sights on Soccer as a career I have met almost every known type of football fiddle. I have been involved in quite a few myself and I am not ashamed. I, like hundreds of others, have been driven to it by the miserly attitude of the authorities in their assessment of fair payment for services rendered.

  Ford went on to claim that the “viper of bribery” was common among professional teams. Ford was, in all senses, an exceptional man. After the publication of the book, he was banned from the league, so he played in Holland. He was so successful there that he was able to petition the English League to overturn his ban. Ford returned to the English League and played until his retirement. He never retracted a single word of his autobiography.

  It might be easy to discount Trevor Ford as an exception to a culture of fair play, except that there are many other former players who tell the truth about the state of the British game at that time. Brian Clough – then an England international, and a man who would go on to be one of the game’s most successful managers – talked openly about the defenders on his team fixing games. When he publicly raised the issue of his teammates fixing, his team sold him. Years later in an interview, he was again perfectly honest about the conditions on his teams

  For five seasons in a row I scored forty goals and more, yet we never finished in the top four of our division. That’s because we had a few crooks in our side that used to sell matches …

  It was not the last time he would speak out against match-fixing. As a manager in 1973, when his team Derby County played Italian giants Juventus in a European Cup semi-final, he stood outside his dressing room and said clearly and directly to the Italian press, “I won’t talk to any cheating bastards….” His assistant was so angry that he had to be dragged back from hitting the Italian coach. They were furious because they thought that Juventus had paid off the referee. The incident started the great match-fixing investigation of British journalist Brian Glanville, which exposed a network of corruption among Italian fixers and European referees.

  Scottish forward Ken Chisholm was also a maverick. A former fighter pilot in the Second World War, he had little time for the niceties of the soccer world. He played for a range of clubs in both Scotland and England during the late 1940s and 1950s. Years later, Chisholm’s writing about the “arrangements” between teams would be included in Simon Inglis’s excellent book Soccer in the Dock. Chisholm wrote about how he had taken part in a fixed game between Cardiff City and his own team, Leicester City. The fix had all kinds of problems, he wrote, because one of his teammates had accidentally scored a goal. The rest of the match was “a farce as both sets of players tried frantically to score in our goal.” However, he defended himself by saying, like Trevor Ford, that fixes were nothing new:

  Before people get hot under the collar, this kind of “arrangement” was commonplace towards the end of every season in those days, and I know of many similar cases where points were given away to save clubs who commanded good support from being relegated, and also to get promotion.

  The list of players who are now willing to speak the truth goes on. For example, Ernie Hunt, who was one of the sporting artists of the late 1960s (his “donkey kick” goal was shown for years on the English television program Match of the Day) wrote of fixing games for his team, Coventry City. But the final and most convincing primary source is Alan Hardaker. Hardaker was the secretary of the English League, one of the highest-ranking soccer executives in the country. Publicly, during his tenure he had denied the existence of any kind of problem. However, thirteen years later in his memoirs, he was to admit that corruption was rife in the league and that:

  There are many men in football today, among them respected and celebrated managers, who have good reason to remember the great bribery scandals of the early 1960s. They were deeply involved in the mess but escaped because the Law and the League could not get the evidence to nail them … football was ripe for corruption.

  However, at the time, Ford and Clough were exceptions to a sometime culture of dishonesty covered up by a conspiracy of silence. It took an eccentric but pioneering young journalist, Michael Gabbert, to publicly uncover some of the truth about the soccer world.

  Gabbert was a one-off in a profession renowned for oddballs. He became the founding editor of the Sunday Sport, a newspaper that featured few journalists but lots of pictures of women’s breasts. Gabbert’s career took off when, working for the tabloid The People, he along with sports reporter Peter Campling uncovered widespread match-fixing in the English league. They did it by using then-innovative techniques of investigative journalism, like secretly taping the players’ and fixers’ conversations. The eventual result was a series of articles published over two years, 1963 and 1964, which exposed a network of soccer players who were linked to gamblers fixing games. The middlemen were a number of former players who gave the orders for which games would be fixed. Ten players were eventually convicted, and four of them actually served jail time. One of the bookies was so upset that he committed suicide rather than give evidence.

  Many English people still remember the story of the most prominent Sheffield Wednesday players – David Layne, Peter Swan, and Tony Kay – caught by Gabbert and Campling. Swan and Kay also played for the English national team. In December 1962, the three of them fixed a game against lowly Ipswich Town for £200. Gabbert and Campling caught them on tape talking about it. In his autobiography, Setting the Record Straight, Swan writes of how even years later, Brian Clough, still upright, still principled, still determined to fight against match-fixing, turned his back on Swan and refused to acknowledge his presence.

  However, what most people do not recognize i
s how widespread the match-fixing was in the league in those days. Neither Michael Gabbert nor any of the law enforcement officials thought they had even come close to tackling the real scope of the problem among the players. Roy Mason, an MP, declared in the House of Commons that “only a third of this iceberg has reared its head.” Simon Inglis, who wrote of these events, claims that there was another match-fixing syndicate among Southern clubs, with a hundred players co-operating in the fixes.

  For all his work and ingenuity, neither Gabbert nor his newspaper The People were thanked by the soccer industry for exposing the fixing. Rather, they were treated as if they had organized the fixing, not exposed some of it. Alan Hardaker, the secretary of the soccer league, attempted to ban The People’s journalists from all soccer stadiums following their stories: a difficult punishment for any newspaper, but a draconian one for a tabloid whose readers crave sports stories.

  The reason why a lot of the British players of the 1950s were willing to fix a game is very simple: they were, for the most part, players from poor backgrounds who were ruthlessly exploited by their clubs. The list of what the clubs could do to them would make a modern union member blanche with horror. The clubs controlled whether they played or did not play; if a player left, the club still controlled whether he could play for another team. When and if a team paid its players, they paid a maximum salary that meant that a star player was paid the same rates as a much less valuable player, and in the off-season, they either did not pay them or paid them less. The clubs even controlled how the players dressed, drank, and ate.

  In 1955, Jimmy Guthrie, the head of the powerless players’ union, addressed the entire British Trade Union Congress. His description led to lots of applause but little real action:

  Mr. Chairman and delegates, I stand here as a representative of the last bonded men in Britain – the professional footballers. We seek your help to smash a system under which now, in this year of 1955, human beings are bought and sold like cattle. A system which, as in feudal times, binds a man to one master or, if he rebels, stops him getting another job. The conditions of the professional footballer’s employment are akin to slavery.

  The soccer books about this era are filled with more, much more, about how the players were treated. It is an intellectual antidote to the right-wing crap, like James Bartholomew’s book, about the past being a kinder, gentler age. One shocking theme for a modern reader is the treatment of injured players. There was simply no widespread proper medical care of the players. If it were a less serious injury, often the players were dosed up with powerful painkillers which allowed them to keep playing, but exacerbated the injury. In his autobiography, Ian St. John, the Scottish international player turned TV personality, who also attempted to fix a game during that era, wrote, “If I could stand the pain of it I would write another kind of football book … about how the game treated some of its greatest performers. It would be a story filled with regret and sadness.” He describes his former teammate Andy Weir as “a brilliant little winger,” but Weir was injured in a match against Third Lanark, received utterly inadequate rehabilitation, then was pensioned off with a handshake and couple of pounds. He ended up in a wheelchair and died soon afterwards.

  Harry Gregg spoke of the attitude to injured players in the Manchester United squad of the time. “When you got injured at Old Trafford [Manchester United], nobody would talk to you … you shouldn’t get injured. That was just the unspoken thing. It was as if you had done something wrong.” It sounds like a Monty Python sketch, but Gregg actually practised for six weeks with a broken leg bone, before the training staff would accept that he had an injury.

  I spoke to the great Sir Tom Finney, who, like Gregg, never fixed a match in his life. He played for the no-hoper team Preston North End. He was a superb forward, who also played for England, and could have played for Palermo, the Italian team. In 1952, they offered him £10,000 just to sign for them, plus a weekly salary ten times higher than his English wages. The Italians were offering to pay him, in just one fee, what it would have taken him decades to earn with Preston North End. Some believers in the Golden Age claim that Finney stayed in England out of loyalty. I asked him why he stayed, he replied, “Well, the club just said no and that was it… You were treated really as … it is very bad to say what you were treated like. I mean, I was always treated quite well at Preston, but the chairman said to me when that offer came in from Palermo, ‘If tha doesn’t play for us, tha doesn’t play for anybody.’”

  To combat against this system that gave them so few rights, some of the players did anything they could to get money. Trevor Ford wrote in his book of the prohibited practice of players selling FA Cup Final tickets to ticket touts. According to Gregg, even an icon like Sir Bobby Charlton, still rightly known around the world for his gentlemanly behaviour and decency, sold his Cup Final tickets to “heavy characters” to earn extra money.

  But of more importance to fixing is the widespread presence of illegal gambling networks. In the days before gambling was legalized, the big English companies like Ladbrookes and William Hill who were offering the relatively benign “pools system” had to print their coupons in Holland or Belgium to get around English laws. Betting in person in a shop, which is now utterly normal in the U.K., was completely outlawed until 1961. One football coach remembers his childhood:

  I remember in England in the 1950s there were illegal bookies on every street. The only way you could make a bet legally, if you lived in Birmingham, was to go to the Doncaster Races. So every street had their own gambling ring.

  The mental arithmetic is simple. If gambling is illegal, then the people organizing it will be criminals. In this environment moral, honest, non-fixing bookmakers (whom the law still calls criminal) are at a competitive disadvantage against the really dishonest bookmakers. There is no one to police the industry and the immoral bookmakers will survive and thrive. One of the ways that the truly immoral gamblers can thrive is by fixing lots of games, and if the players are relatively badly paid, the bookies can do a lot of fixing.

  It did not help that many of the team officials of that time were also corrupt. Some of them were kind-heartedly corrupt. They organized under-the-table payments, free housing, and illegal gifts to help their badly paid players. They also organized their own fixes if their teams were in danger of being relegated, dipping into their own pockets to help their team by buying off the opposition. But many of the officials were simply venally exploitative men who were out to squeeze as much money out of their players as possible.

  In 1961, the players had enough of their poor treatment at the hands of the owners. They began to talk about a strike. A meeting was called at White City, in west London. It was a historic occasion. The organizing committee was on the stage, in front of them was a room crammed with many of the league’s players, from the great Stanley Matthews to the journeymen players of the lower divisions. At the beginning of the meeting, there was a general discussion about the merits of a strike, with the leaders on stage urging for a strike. Harry Gregg remembered what happened:

  One young man stood up and said, “I do not agree with you; my father works down the pit and he only gets eight or ten pounds a week and I think that my father does a better job and we should be happy with what we get.” The young fella killed the room completely. It went dead. Tommy Banks, the Bolton leftback, a really broad Lancashire man, said, “Mr. Chairman, can I answer that man? Lad, tell thy dad that I’ll do his fucking shift down the pit between three o’clock and twenty to five on a Saturday afternoon, if he can mark brother Matthews here.”

  The players decided to vote for a strike.

  The year 1961 signalled the beginning of the long and complex socio-economic battle for British soccer players that lasted from the strike vote right up to the Bosman case in the 1990s, where all players in the European Union were granted the right to play for any club. But the fixing, to a much lesser degree, went on into the 1970s. Why? Because some of the fixing players, usual
ly the leaders or project managers, were scumbags who would have fixed games no matter what they were paid. There are always business executives on Wall Street who are paid $10 million a year and will still cheat to get another million. Or American football stars, such as Michael Vick, who will make $100 million and still design ways of torturing dogs for fun and profit. There will always be players who would sell a game no matter what their salary. Harry Gregg is absolutely sure of this. He claims that exploitation and low salary had nothing to do with the fixers who betrayed the memory of the Munich air crash in those Manchester United teams. To him, they were

  people I wouldn’t want my choice to be my company in life. It was the lowest of the low. It was to betray your fellow players. It was nothing to do with suffering or the shortage of money. I cannot excuse it. There is no excuse morally or otherwise for what those players did. Maybe I would have to be fair to say, maybe a couple of them that I knew about were decent blokes who were dragged into it and regretted it for the rest of their lives. But the other bastards did it and regretted nothing. I would swear, what we were earning had nothing to do with it.

  The bribery and match-fixing in English soccer in the 1950s and 1960s is an intriguing story, but why is it relevant in a book about contemporary soccer? We need to know the reasons for match-fixing in British soccer because they are repeated constantly throughout the sporting world today. Understand what was going on in that golden age and you can understand why similar things happen today in similar circumstances, even if they occur in the greatest soccer matches in the world. Some of the conditions necessary for match-fixing to flourish include: