by Declan Hill
Reis is absolutely right. It is time for European soccer to establish once and for all who has ethics, particularly as the Asian fixers are arriving amongst them.
Unfortunately, that does not seem likely to happen.
13
THE GUNS ARE FACING THE WRONG WAY
We are still behind the eight ball with the Internet. We don’t know what to do. It is a very scary problem. Betting companies sometimes supply us with information. But it is very difficult, as people can bet on games anywhere in the world.
I played my last ever organized game of soccer in Singapore. I wish I could say that my last game was one of those half-hours of brilliance that occurred to me so rarely. Instead, by soccer’s standards, I was a fat man, woefully out of shape, melting into the sandy pitch. Worse, by some misplaced sense of confidence, I had made the mistake of talking myself up. When I arrived at the field, a guest of the star player, I saw that most players, dressed in their large shorts, had tiny little legs that peeped out like twigs surrounded by billowing sails. Better yet, at least half of my teammates had larger stomachs than me. Ha! I thought, I am clearly better than this lot. I was not. The low point was when I slid in to take the ball off an opposing player – fairly I, and the referee, thought. He, however, did not think it was a fair tackle. He tried to jump feet first on to my chest. I raised my foot and caught him as he came down. A fight started. It was, all in all, a dreadful performance.
The best part of the game, for me, was that it was on the island of Sentosa, just off the coast of Singapore. Overlooking the field was the statue of Merlion, the half lion, half fish, that symbolizes Singapore. The other icon that so symbolizes Singapore to a certain generation of Europeans was a little farther away: Fort Siloso. It is the last remaining British-built fort against the Japanese from the Second World War.
The myth is that in peacetime the troops built the guns so that they all faced out to sea rather than the land where the eventual Japanese attack would come. It is one of those enduring myths that historians love to debunk. What is undeniable is that in the 1941–42 Malaya Campaign and the Siege of Singapore, the outnumbered Japanese outflanked, out-thought, and overran the British defences. They did so partly because the Allied generals underestimated the ability of the Japanese soldiers. They did so not based on intelligence reports, but on sheer racist ignorance. One set of Australian officers declared at the beginning of the campaign that they were disappointed because they wanted a “better enemy than the Japanese.” They said this because, according to the conventional European wisdom of the time, Asians had bad eyesight and therefore could not shoot straight or fly modern planes.
The awful truth is that similar attitudes still persist today. Every major investigation against Asian match-fixers in soccer by European law enforcement has, like the Belgian inquiry, been squandered in a mixture of ignorance and ineptitude. The fixers have, effectively, done what the Japanese armies did so brilliantly in 1941–42 in Malaya: they have outflanked and out-thought the European soccer associations, the legal gambling companies, and the police. These are the three defences that are supposed to be in place to defend the European game. There are many people who argue that these three are doing a superb job in defending the credibility of the sport in Europe against any fixers from Asia.
They are wrong.
To begin with the gambling industry. They hate fixing. It takes money from them. They become the victims of well-orchestrated frauds. But there is a worldwide revolution going on in their industry that is provoking fundamental changes in the way they do business. It is, of course, the Internet and it is changing the gambling industry as surely as it did the music business.
Lars Jensen (*) has been swept up in the revolution. He is one of the sports odds compilers for a Scandinavian national lottery. His company, owned by the government, offers gamblers the ability to bet on sporting events around Europe. “The growth in this field has been incredible,” he told me. “Five years ago, we had 90 per cent of the sports betting market in this country. Now our sports market has grown four times as large, but our share of the market has shrunk to 25 per cent.”
It is the same for the FBI cops working the investigations of the Southern District of New York. It is the place to be if you are a cop in the United States. It is from there that Rudolph Giuliani began to eat into the power of the Five Families of the New York mob. It is from there that the Department of Justice investigations into Osama bin Laden were held. And it is from there that the FBI is cracking down on illegal Internet sports gambling in the United States. Special Agent David Velazquez is one of the lead investigators on the frontline against Internet gambling. “The power of this industry is mind-boggling,” he told me. “We estimate that the size of the U.S. Internet sports betting industry – so that is including poker as well as sports – at $100 billion a year.”
Velazquez helped put together a case against two Canadian executives who ran an Internet gambling payment company, Neteller, out of an off shore haven on the Isle of Man. The company finances listed in court documents show the power of the revolution. In 2000, Neteller Inc, was a small company that had gross revenues in the United States of $289,000; by 2006, when it had changed its corporate structure to Neteller PLC, that number had increased by over 58,000 per cent to $169 million. Perhaps more pertinently, the amount processed by the company from all gambling transactions in the entire world had gone from the low millions in 2000 to more than $10.6 billion by 2006. And Neteller was simply one of dozens of companies that helped gamblers pay their debts online.
This revolution is, for the most part, benign: a case of people innocently wagering on their favourite team. Even at UEFA headquarters in Nyon, it is possible to find soccer officials betting on games from their work computers. According to the optimists, it has made fixing of any sports fixture in the world next to impossible. But listen to the pessimists and the Internet revolution has aided the fixers working for illegal Asian gambling syndicates in a clear and significant way. They are using this phenomenon of international Internet gambling to bring sophisticated match corruption to leagues that have never even dreamed of it.
It is a daunting situation for any soccer association. One honest European soccer official told me, off the record, that:
We are still behind the eight ball with the Internet. We don’t know what to do. It is a very scary problem. Betting companies sometimes supply us with information. But it is very difficult as people can bet on games anywhere in the world.
On the record, of course, the soccer associations and some of the betting companies often say something else. Frequently, their spokespeople argue in public that the Internet has made fixing more difficult, if not impossible, because every bet is tracked and that honest bookies can see how the betting line moves. They can deduce what is going on. They can go to the soccer associations and can warn them about every possible fixed game that will occur.
This is dangerous nonsense.
Let us start with the facts. The most well-known case of Asian fixers in European soccer over the last few years was Ye Zheyun’s incursion into Belgian soccer. Bookmakers and their allies point out that the alarm was first raised by the British Internet betting exchange Betfair in October 2005 because of suspicious betting patterns.
However, Ye Zheyun started fixing games in the Belgian league in early December 2004, ten and a half months before Betfair raised the alarm. What happened in the fall of 2005, was that Ye Zheyun had fixed so many games so blatantly that the information about the fixes had got out of the immediate circle of people involved. A key part of a good fix is control of information. Between December 2004 and October 2005, Ye Zheyun and his associates had controlled the information closely enough for him to be able to fix without detection on the European gambling market. But gradually, the information surrounding the fixes began to leak out. It was a secret that was too good to be kept. Suddenly, the bets on the fixed games skyrocketed, as many people along the chain of information ei
ther bet themselves or told more people, who then bet.
The bookmakers and their allies point out that some of the major European gambling companies, including Betfair, have now signed deals with UEFA and even FIFA to share any information about possible fixes as it comes along. FIFA even trumpets its “early warning system” as an efficient net to catch any potential fixes. It is, however, a net with very large mesh. In fact, it is largely irrelevant, because Asian fixers do not bet with Betfair or the English betting companies or European sports lotteries. They bet on the Asian gambling market. This is why it took eleven months for a European betting agency to detect that there was something wrong in Belgium. The real fixers, the people close to the fix, kept the secret by betting on the Asian market.
Many people in the gambling industry claim, publicly, that if an Asian fixer put a bet on in Shanghai, Johor Bahru, or Jakarta, the market could still trace the bet. They say that the old market discrepancies no longer exist with the Internet. They are right in some ways. There used to be massive discrepancies between the Asian and European gambling markets. Information that almost every bettor knew in Europe was largely unknown in Asia. Ten years ago in the early days of the Internet revolution, vast amounts of money could be made in this information gap. Gamblers call it “arbitrage,” and there are some bettors who still specialize in playing the odds off between different bookmakers on either side of the planet. But now they have to be quick; it is rare that one bookmaker will be out of line with the worldwide betting odds for longer than ten minutes.
This is the public argument that gambling companies make: that because of the Internet there is no longer anywhere in the world where a fixer can work without being detected. Any bookmaker who takes a vast amount of money on one side from a fixer will quickly realize there is something wrong. There are even companies that specialize in scanning the gambling market for any shifts that may be caused by fixing.
The problem is that the fixers are not stupid.
They spend enormous energy calculating when to put their money into the market for a fixed game and the Internet has actually made it far easier for them to get money on to a fix. In the pre-Internet days, it was sometimes difficult for a fixer to get enough money into the gambling market to make the fix worthwhile. They had to hire “beards” and “runners” – people who could put their money on without seeming to be connected with the fixers. Now with a click of the mouse the fixer can place bets with a half-dozen bookmakers around the world, and with a few elementary precautions, no one is the wiser.
Two, while a bookmaker or an “early warning system” can tell that the odds may have shifted in the illegal Asian market on a particular game, they cannot tell how much money has gone into the fix. So if an Asian fixer has bribed the underdog team to lose – so the stronger team will win – the fix is virtually undectable. The odds will change, but all are just going the way of the team everyone expects to win anyway.
Most importantly, when a fixer fixes the gambling market, it is actually more difficult to do it in a small league like Belgium. Even carefully hiding their bets, there is so little money placed on these games that it is difficult to get a lot of money on to the fix. But ironically, the bigger the game, the easier it is for the fixers to fix the market. When there is a lot of money being bet, the fixers can get a lot on the fixed team. If they are discreet and fix the weaker team to lose, then no bookmakers, no matter how carefully they study the market, will notice the fix.
Finally, if the gambling industry detects a fixed match, it does not change much in practical terms. Betfair, ten months after the fixes began, notified the Belgian soccer authorities that there was something strange going on in the betting market. The Belgian Football Association misplaced the letter. However, even if they had managed to keep track of their correspondence, what could they do? In the Sarawak versus Singapore game that swamped the Singapore gambling company, the team officials marched into the dressing room and shouted at all the players, who hung their heads – but somehow the result the fixers wanted was achieved.
So if the betting industry is a willing but often ineffective partner in stopping fixes, what about the police? Have there been effective investigations by European police into the presence of Asian fixers? The answer is no.
14
NO POINT IN GOING OUT THERE
No one wants to know about this case. Everyone wants to believe in a clean game. So the German Football Association does not want to talk about this case.
The police investigation and subsequent trial of Bruce Grobbelaar in the 1990s so dominates the issue of fixing that almost everyone in Asia or the U.K. thinks of that case when they think of match corruption. Grobbelaar was one of the best goalkeepers in the world. It was his professional misfortune to have been born a Zimbabwean. If he had played for a country that had got to the World Cup, he would have become a huge world star. As it was, he did none too shabbily. He played for the same Liverpool team as Ian Rush. Together they won one European Cup, three FA Cups, and six league champi onships – all with a flow of exhilarating and exuberant soccer. The team was a giant of British soccer, and at the back of the team was the irrepressible Bruce Grobbelaar. He was a true character. He once kept goal with an umbrella. His spaghetti legs routine was supposed to have won Liverpool the European Cup in 1984. He also agreed to a corrupt deal to fix soccer games.
In 1994, the Sun, a British tabloid newspaper, secretly videotaped him talking about the alleged fixes with his best friend, Chris Vincent, who betrayed him. The recordings made for racy reading. Among the many purportedly sensational statements, Grobbelaar seems to be explicitly discussing the Asian fixers and their organization. He claims that “The Short Man,” later identified as a Malaysian living in London named Richard – Heng Suan – Lim, had linked him with a gambling syndicate in Kuala Lumpur. Here is an edited excerpt from the conversations about the purported head of the gang and his position in the country:
Do you think I went out to Kuala Lumpur on the off chance? Absolutely not. Because the Short Man had said, “Any time you want to go to the Far East, you and your wife can go – I’ll sort it out.” I got an offer to go to Kuala Lumpur to play, … the boss man there, if it is the same person, he’s fucking big in Malaysia. He’ll say, that man … pow! That’s it. Finished!
After the Sun published its exposé in November 1994 – “Grobbelaar Took Bribes to Fix Games” ran one headline – there were five trials in British courtrooms around the accusations. The score line going into the fifth legal proceeding was: one draw (mistrial) for criminal fraud; one win for Grobbelaar (acquittal) for criminal fraud; one win for Grobbelaar on libel against the Sun; one loss for Grobbelaar (on appeal). Grobbelaar’s defence was that he was an innocent man entrapped by an aggressive and sleazy British press. The unsuccessful criminal fraud prosecution team argued that they had been unable to get a conviction because the juries were so starstruck (during one trial, a juror had asked Grobbelaar to sign autographs) that they would never have convicted a top soccer player of anything. Grobbelaar argued that he had not been convicted because he was innocent. So it was off on the final appeal to the highest court in Britain, the House of Lords.
Essentially, each of the trials had boiled down to the following issue: Chris Vincent – Grobbelaar’s friend – was such a squalid, little fellow that it would be difficult to trust him if he said “I love you” to his mum. The only real, hard evidence against Grobbelaar was the transcript of the videotape where he purportedly discussed the tactics of fixing matches. The Law Lords looked long and hard at the Grobbelaar tapes. They wrote twenty-three pages of closely reasoned argument and by a 4 to 1 majority, they said, in essence, “Oh puuuuleeeze! Come on, of course, the tape shows that Grobbelaar had agreed to fix matches. What we cannot say is whether he actually fixed the matches.”
At the end of all the trials, there are two undeniable facts. First, there was a corrupt agreement between Grobbelaar and some Asian gamblers. We know who those gam
blers were, but we do not know the exact nature of their work – were they bookies or merely rich men who liked to bet? Why people don’t know about those gamblers is because of an extraordinary piece of investigative incompetence. David Thomas, a British journalist, wrote a superb book, Foul Play, about the trial. It was mostly a psychological exploration of the relationship between Vincent and Grobbelaar. However, toward the end of the book, it contained this excerpt about the investigation:
When the Sun returned from the first trip to the Far East without any solid leads, the police had known that there was no point in going out there themselves. They had no legal authority overseas, no power to detain or interrogate suspects. The only circumstances in which it would have been worth pursuing enquiries in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore would have been if they had known exactly whom they were going to speak to, what questions they would ask and what answers they would receive.
When I first read this, I thought it was so ridiculous that it could not possibly be true. The idea that police are supposed to follow tabloid journalists in their investigations or that they only conduct inquiries when they know the results beforehand surely must have been an error on Thomas’s part. It was not. I checked with U.K. law enforcement sources close to the trial and they all confirmed that no British officer had gone out to Asia. Indeed, they used the same language that Thomas had used about “there being no point” if they didn’t know who to talk to. I was so startled by this obvious ineptitude that I figured they must be trying to cover their sources. So I checked with some of the lawyers associated with the case. They, too, confirmed that no British police officer had gone out to Asia. I still thought that there must be a cover-up somewhere, so when I was in Asia I asked sources at the Royal Malaysian Police and the Singapore anti-corruption agency. None of the officers ever remembered any British police officer coming out to investigate match-fixing.