by Declan Hill
Ljubomir Barin had been telling the truth.
In fact, the more one examines the culture of international refereeing in the 1990s, the more of these tales are revealed. Englishman David Elleray, a former top referee who is now on UEFA’s referees committee, claimed that the chairman of the UEFA referees’ committee had said at the time: “Only accept gifts if they are small … and expensive!” In his biography, Elleray also provided a stirring example of a stiff upper lip in a tight corner. It was during an evening of convivial company in a Romanian brothel before a European match. The Romanian club officials arranged the evening’s entertainment, and the unwitting English referees made sure that the company did not get too convivial by all gathering together in one of their bedrooms to keep out the women. That is more than can be said for Welsh referee Howard King, who was banned from the game in 1996 when he told a British newspaper that before twelve to fifteen of the forty-four European matches that he refereed, women were made available to him. King claimed, “I never said no to the ladies.” According to him, he never said no in Russia, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Holland, and Denmark. However, he also insisted that his sex life had never influenced a match, despite at one point canvassing Russian officials to provide him with a blonde before a European Championship match with Norway.
Luciano Moggi, the Italian fixer for Juventus, was in an earlier incarnation a club official with local rivals Torino. He was linked to another example of this culture: providing women for the Belgian referees in the UEFA Cup match versus AEK Athens in 1991. UEFA decided to believe that the women who spent the night with the referees were simply over-enthusiastic translators who were culturally challenged. Torino won the game. And Moggi ended up at Juventus, one of the top clubs in Italy.
Annie was delightfully sexy and in my drunken state, I pawed her tight, lithe body with great vigour. I was in Singapore, interviewing the businessman and convicted match-fixer Ong Kheng Hock. In 1995, Ong had become involved with a former international player attempting to corrupt the Singapore national goalie David Lee with an $80,000 (Singapore dollars) bribe. Ong ended up serving a couple of years in prison. So, late one afternoon, I showed up unannounced at his downtown restaurant – the unaptly named Mr. Bean’s Café – and began asking him difficult questions about his past. Ong was very kind and, for the record, claimed vehemently that he never fixed any soccer games. However, he took me out for drinks and we talked about his experiences in prison and my research. I told him about the culture of sex corruption of some European referees.
I can’t quite remember how many drinks we had together. Certainly at one point we had a lot of beers and not too much food at a little drinks bar, Crossroads, across from his restaurant. I seem to remember a bottle of Scotch as well. Then suddenly in the brusque way that Chinese businessmen often have, he said, “Come on, this place is boring. Let’s go.” I, who was deeply entrenched in a conversation with a woman who claimed to be a Singapore Airlines stewardess, disagreed, but I went along.
It was now dark and we drove out to Eastern Singapore and entered a surreal shopping mall. Surreal because it looked like a normal shopping mall: escalators, plastic roofing, sliding-glass partitions. But where there would normally be shops, there were bars. And where there would normally be shoppers, there were women. Dozens of women with short dresses and hungry eyes. Ong took me into one bar, where he seemed to be known. We had more drinks – beers and whisky – and talked more about corruption in soccer. Various women came up and offered themselves to us. Most were women from the Philippines. One said that she had met Ong when she was a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl who never wore panties. He seemed to regard her with the benevolence of a favourite uncle. I wish I could say that I was so handsome that women found me irresistibly attractive, but really it was my position as Ong’s “friend” that was my strong point. Without him, I was simply one more red-faced, drunken man in a small crowd of red-faced, drunken men, encircled by a much larger crowd of Filipina women.
We went to another bar. Ong seemed to be known there as well. Annie came up, and Ong signalled for her to take care of me. At first, I was quite standoffish. This was, after all, an interview with a controversial subject. The circumstances may have been a little unusual, but it was still supposedly a professional meeting. However, Annie followed us from one bar to the other. I got drunker and drunker. At one point, I think the most gorgeous woman I had ever seen was dancing on a chair in a corner of a neon-lit imitation English pub. Her hair hung down over her face; her shirt was open to show beautiful breasts; and the red-faced men in tennis shirts ignored her. I was well gone. At this juncture, Annie moved in and started rubbing herself against me and stroking my penis through my suit trousers. Her friend Karen rubbed herself against my back. Before I knew it, I was in a corner alternating snogging and groping with Annie and her friend.
I screwed up. I made exactly the same mistake that some of the referees that I wrote about in this chapter have done. I got drunk. I got lonely. And I mixed sex with a professional situation. When I came to my senses, Ong was laughing at me. Worse he was looking at me sadly, with the loss of respect that always attends moments when you discover others’ frailties, even those who show up on your doorstep and ask about your criminal record.
“So you were saying about referees and sex?” he asked.
I was an idiot.
When I interviewed him, Ljubomir Barin was facing his seventh major heart operation in six years. He portrayed himself as a victim. I asked if he meant that he was singled out because Bernard Tapie was a socialist politician. He agreed saying he was simply caught in the middle of a French political battle.
After the interviews with Zen-Ruffinen, UEFA officials, and the other top international referees, it was difficult not to have a slight sympathy for him. He was, in his pimping arrangements for referees, simply doing what seems to have been a common practice for some clubs. Were all top European clubs doing these things? No. But enough soccer clubs provided women for the referees that it came as no surprise to anyone.
A key question remains: if offering women and gifts to referees was a relatively common practice in the 1980s and 1990s, does it still happen in the world of soccer now?
If you listen to some UEFA officials, you’ll believe it does not. They claim that after another scandal, this time featuring a heavy-gambling referee soliciting bribes, everything was changed. There were new rules and regulations to stop any corruption. For example, referees are now no longer paid directly by the clubs. In the past, at the end of the game, the club officials handed the referees an envelope with cash in it for their match fee. (You have to wonder why it took them forty years to figure out why that might not be a good idea.)
However, if you listen to Robert Hoyzer or Carolina Salgado, you’ll believe that it is business as usual in the world of soccer.
In a Teutonic land of purportedly humourless public rectitude, Robert Hoyzer was an example of all that could, but shouldn’t, go wrong. He is a tall, gorgeous German man who had a great career ahead of him as a referee. In his mid-twenties, he was being groomed and brought up the refereeing ranks. But he also fixed a series of matches with a group of Croatian gamblers.
In January 2005, four of his refereeing colleagues claimed that he had fixed matches. Hoyzer originally denied the charges; but then, urged on by his girlfriend, he confessed. His girlfriend quickly dumped him, and the German public turned on him with a display of hatred rarely seen.
Two weeks later, he and his lawyer appeared on television to state his side of the story. The studio audience booed him. The host was astonished, claiming that he had never seen anything like this before: his program was no Jerry Springer type show, and it was after all Germany. The lawyer talked of “the middle ages.”
Hoyzer was at that time the chief prosecution witness for an investigation that would, he claimed, spread across Europe. “With the time I have spent and the contacts I made in this business I suspect it isn’t only limited to Germany
, and could affect the whole of Europe.” He claimed in the interview: “They [the German Football Association] thought it would be limited to just one referee, but they nailed the right one with me. It was like hitting a hornet’s nest. I’ve got a lot of information.”
It seemed to be remarkably similar to Barin’s allegations to the French prosecutors ten years before. The same things were said about “tidal waves” spreading across soccer. And the investigation, at first, seemed to go well. Based on Hoyzer’s confessions, the German police raided nineteen homes and offices and claimed that they had at least twenty-five people under investigation – including four referees and fourteen players. Hoyzer’s information led police to allegedly fixed matches in Germany, Austria, Turkey, and Greece. The betting ring had also placed wagers in a range of countries, including England.
A number of Bundesliga referees, including Torsten Koop, were removed from their duties for not telling the authorities they had been approached by Hoyzer to fix a match. Koop claimed he rejected the proposal, but the German soccer authorities, at this point, talked tough: “The name Koop won’t ever surface on the referees’ list again,” spokes-man Manfred Amerell told the German news agency DPA.
But four days after Hoyzer’s infamous interview and the storm of negative publicity, the German police arrested him and he was charged with eight counts of fraud.
There followed twenty-eight months of convoluted investigations and courtroom appearances, but at the end of everything only one referee, out of all the ones accused, ended up in prison: Robert Hoyzer. There were a few suspended sentences handed out, two of the Croatian gamblers ended up in prison, but no players went to jail. The honest but overly kind Torsten Koop even went back to refereeing Bundesliga matches.
This leaves us with two situations: either Hoyzer is a corrupt referee who is lying and this was an isolated case that affected only a few matches; or Hoyzer is the Gong Jianping of European soccer: a corrupt referee who actually told the truth about how corrupt soccer was and then paid the price for everyone else’s corruption.
I followed the story over those months. I visited Germany a couple of times and spoke to sources close to the investigation. Some of these sources, at one point, told me the second version was true and that the German authorities were trying to limit the story of Hoyzer because they were embarrassed about the upcoming World Cup. Later, that seemed to change their minds and assured me that all was well with the investigation.
Whatever the truth, Hoyzer made a few more allegations that, by now, will sound very familiar. He claimed that it was “standard practice” for club officials to take referees to brothels before matches. He said he had direct experience of this with other officials in the lap-dancing bars of Leipzig.
But more importantly, much more importantly, he alleges that he saw, in the car of the Croatian gambler, lists of UEFA referees and delegates for upcoming Champions League, UEFA Cup, and national team games a week before the matches. These lists are supposed to be top secret and available only two days before the matches. A group of gamblers, purportedly linked to organized crime, according to Hoyzer, had those secret lists and presumably they did not have them simply to inquire on the referee’s health.
I asked some UEFA contacts about this alleged breaking of the sanctity of their organization, and they claimed rather vaguely that, “Yes, we wondered about that, but we don’t understand how he could have got those lists.” When I asked the German police, they said it was outside their jurisdiction to investigate.
I am not trying to excuse Hoyzer’s actions in working for a Croatian match-fixing gang. His is a story of almost ancient Greek proportions: a good-looking man who almost had it all and threw it away to get a little more. But is he a pathological fantasist or is there still a deep vein of corruption running through European soccer?
I tried to interview him to find out. I visited the jail where he is currently serving time. If I had to go to prison, I would like to be there. In the front office was a note taped to the wall: “The prison closes at six o’clock. Prisoners are requested not to climb over the fence and sign in and out when they leave the building.” Hoyzer was there, but he declined to see me, and the next day I got a frosty note from his lawyer asking me not to contact Hoyzer again. I respected his wishes. However, someone who was much more forthcoming was one of the men who was supposed to have seduced Hoyzer into match-fixing: Milan Sapina.
We met over coffees at his bar – the Café King – in central Berlin. Sapina was the oldest brother of the Croatians who ran the gambling fixes. He was dressed in jeans, a tight tan T-shirt, and a tighter smile. His left leg shook intensely throughout the interview, but he was remarkably cordial and polite. I had shown up at the bar late one night and asked to speak to him about match-fixing. He was with a couple of muscular friends in a booth. We shook hands and then discovered that neither of us could speak one another’s language. My German is restricted to ordering coffee and polite greetings: he claimed that his English was better, but not enough to have a conversation. I said I would return the next morning with someone to translate, Sapina agreed, and I left feeling that he would not show up. However, the next morning he was there on time and spent almost an hour talking about match-fixing with me.
Ironically, he completely supports Hoyzer’s view that sex is still used frequently between clubs and referees:
This is normal. Normal. It is standard that the club will pay an exreferee to meet the referee at the airport. He welcomes them to town. Takes them to a pub. He tries to be as friendly as possible with them. Some are successful in doing so, others not. But it is part of the culture. A lot of referees go out and have some fun. It is normal to go for a beer. Women are normal. Everyone wants women. It is not necessarily that you are influencing the referee. However, referees are also men. They are human. But to influence them properly you do not say anything direct. It is all the indirect way.
He also thinks that his brother and Hoyzer were “small fish … and that there are much bigger fish in the aquarium.” I asked who the “big fish” were. He smiled and said, “It is better that I don’t say. It is better that I keep my head down at this moment. Both me and my brother know a lot of stories, but it is better to keep our mouths shut.” The answer led us right to the key question: how did they get hold of the list of the UEFA referees? He looked at me quizzically and smiled a very, very ironic smile. “Look, we have a lot of good relations with people. There are a lot of people who care. We are friends with lots of people … [But if the authorities say it did not happen?] They are right.”
On the other side of Europe is Carolina Salgado. Salgado was a prostitute who slept with a sporting official. In fact, she slept with one of the most powerful men in Portuguese and European soccer: the former boss of Jose Mourinho and owner of the team – Porto – that won two European Champions Leagues, the European Cup, one UEFA Cup, and the Portuguese league championship twenty-one times, Jorge Nuno Pinto da Costa. Ask some Portuguese people about da Costa and a resigned expression creeps across their face; they look like English people do when they speak about the dreadful English weather. He is a Portuguese phenomenon that is so dreadful, so powerful, and seemingly so natural to the environment that there is a sort of perverse, resigned pride in him.
Salgado was working in a brothel called No Calor da Noite (The Heat of the Night) when she met Da Costa. They ended up together for six years. But Salgado wrote that the world of Portuguese soccer, “compared with what I saw and experienced at No Calor da Noite, the world of brothels is almost like a daycare centre.”
I am not sure what a Portuguese daycare centre looks like, but Portuguese soccer has long been beset by claims of corruption. Allegations of mafia involvement are almost routine. The use of sex bribes for referees has been detailed in several editions of the comprehensive book by Marinho Neves, Golpe de Estadio. João Vale e Azevedo, the former president of the top club Benfica, served four years in jail for soccer-related fraud. And for Europea
n fans, there are allegations of top fixes stretching back to the 1984 semifinal of the Cup Winners’ Cup, when Porto played against Alex Ferguson’s Aberdeen. The referee of the game was allegedly bribed by a man, Fernando Barata, a former president of the Farense soccer club, working on behalf of … Pinto da Costa.
So it was with something of an air of resignation that Portugal woke up on April 20, 2004, to find that Portuguese police had arrested sixteen people after listening to more than 16,000 covertly recorded telephone conversations. Pinto da Costa was implicated. Among other charges, he denied arranging a referee’s visit to a brothel and his entertainment with several Brazilian prostitutes. He claimed that it was impossible, as the referee was gay. The referee threatened to sue him. And the investigation against da Costa seemed about to disintegrate into a farce. Then Salgado, by this time da Costa’s ex-girlfriend, published her autobiography.
As successful acts of vengeance by an ex-girlfriend go, it is pretty well up there. The book became an immediate bestseller and a topic of conversation across the country. In it, she alleged that da Costa would regularly invite referees to their home to seek their favours. She also claimed that someone, somewhere in the police tipped him off about the investigation, so da Costa was able to escape to Spain to give him time to prepare his defence.
The captain of Porto defended da Costa, saying he was “a great president [who is] very ethical.” But Vitor Reis, the then-head of Portugal’s Association of Football Referees, welcomed the police’s action. “It is time to once and for all establish who in football and refereeing has ethics and who does not,” said Reis.