by Declan Hill
You know, for a country like Ghana, football victories mean so much. It is very, very symbolic. It’s one of the few occasions when this country really feels like it belongs to the world. Because constantly you can’t compete; you can’t hold on to your best doctors; you can’t hold on to your best teachers. People are completing first-degree programs and running away to the United Kingdom and the rest to do menial jobs scrubbing dirt, you know, do all sorts of jobs, wait on people and the rest. So you know, football is when we see them on TV, when they are the centre of attention of the world, [and it] provides a really good source of patriotism that nobody can channel.
I spent six days there, and each day the tension at the hotel increased a little more. Once the euphoria of beating the Czechs and the United States had faded, everyone’s attention, including my own, began to focus on the Brazil game coming up on Tuesday, June 27. Conversations focused on tactics, strategy, and preparation. One evening, I interviewed Stephen Appiah, the captain and talismanic player of the Ghana team, in the lobby of the hotel. He is a former Juventus player, now with Fenerbahçe, the Turkish league champions. He told me that their main focus for the Brazil match was to defend well:
We have to defend very well, because they have players, you can see their matches, they always come like three, no, four, five. They come to attack. We have to take our time to get a counterattack and if we can make use of it then I think we can put them into trouble. Because, they always go, they have players that they can’t even defend, only to attack. So we have to use our head to beat them.
He was charismatic, charming, and seemingly completely focused on winning the game. Surely this man, with so much money and talent, could not be tempted to take money from an Asian gambler?
Everything seemed fine on the surface. There was no sign of any fixers anywhere. There was no sign of any dodgy Under-17 coaches. I searched the squad again and again. I sat in the restaurant watching them all eat. I sat in the corner of the lobby and I took photos, sweeping the room and taking shots of everyone. Then, late at night, I would examine the shots to see if there was anyone I could recognize. But there was no one either in person or in the photos who reminded me of the people in the Bangkok KFC. I went up to every Asian man or woman I found in or near the hotel. I struck up conversations. Nothing. Not a stir of memory. Not a trace of recognition.
The truth was, there was absolutely no sign of any of the people around the table at the KFC. No sign of the runner who was supposed to have eight players and two officials ready to throw the match. No sign of any Asian fixers with briefcases full of cash. No sign of anyone who raised the slightest amount of suspicion.
As for the thought of players fixing a game, it dissolved almost completely from my mind when I walked down the corridor toward my room. In a meeting room at nine at night, the team would gather to sing Christian hymns, their voices echoing down the hall after me as I went to my room.
The idea of a fix being perpetrated now seemed like a dream. The Ghanaian team seemed like a group of good guys who held hands in public, were polite to idiotic fans, and sang hymns every night before they went to bed. The whole thing was crazy. An absurd trick had been played on me. My view of the Italy game must have been wrong. So what if some of the players had seemed dazed during the Italy game? It was a natural reaction to one of the biggest games of their lives. If Chin had got the score right of the game, it was simply by accident.
Another thought occurred to me: maybe Chin had switched countries on me for security reasons? Maybe he was actually fixing another African team at the World Cup? Togo, for example, was having huge problems. I had read in the newspapers that their German manager had ordered his team to not speak with Asian journalists. Togo had a game against South Korea coming up. The coach did not want any of the players to be bribed. His thoughts were that the journalists or fixers pretending to be journalists would approach his Togo players to throw the game. Then suddenly, the German manager announced his resignation. Then he was reinstated. Then the players went on strike, demanding that their appearance money be paid directly into their bank accounts and not to the Togolese Football Federation. The players feared that the Togo soccer officials would steal their money. In the end, the Togo team only played when they were guaranteed by FIFA that FIFA would pay the players directly. So if Ghana was such a peaceful team, maybe Chin’s real connection was with the Togo team?
While these thoughts floated through my head, I began to realize that there was something else going on at the hotel and among the Ghana team. Something that was odd and something that I couldn’t quite figure out. It was symbolized by an event that means nothing except in its image. I went out of the hotel on the Sunday morning. The sun was shining and for once the square in front of the building was empty. It was lovely, quiet, and deserted. I looked back at the hotel and there sitting at an open window was a gorgeous young German prostitute. She stood there, large breasts packed into a red boustière, blonde hair floating across her shoulders, silently announcing to the world who she was and what she did. She was absolutely certain of her effect on the world. She looked down at the square from her perch with wonderful self-assurance. And she looked down at the square from the floor where many of the rooms belonging to the Ghanaian delegation were located.
This is not an anti-sex observation. It is that there was some thing, some strain that was underneath the surface that I was not catching. Something that was at odds with the hymn-singing enthusiasm.
After a few days of eating and living in the same hotel, I noticed that there was a distinct class difference between the players and the officials. The players were the working-class. The officials were the Big Men of Africa. The officials strutted around the lobby and dining hall, showing off their control and power. The players actually looked like small-town guys. They did not seem to have the ego or swagger of North American athletes, but rather one got the feeling of a local team on tour. They were mostly surrounded by their friends, young guys from the same neighbourhood who acted as their gofers and aides.
It was like the story of the success at the Under-17 World Cups. On the first day after talking to Sam Arday and Cecil Jones Attuquayefio, I had become a gushing fan of the development of Ghana soccer. But I got a different perspective talking to the president of the Ghana Football Association, Kwesi Nyantakyi. It was late one morning. I was sitting, by mistake, in the team section of the restaurant. He was waiting for his coffee and seemed slightly officious. However, when I started to ask him questions, he was remarkably forthcoming. I asked him about the paradox of why Ghana had such strong teams at the youth level but, until this World Cup, not at senior level. He trotted out what I suspect were a roster of usual excuses: the players change all the time (they are supposed to, they are young), Ghana had no resources, no facilities. But most interestingly, and with great honesty, he told me that if Ghana had done well in the past at youth level it was because a lot of the players had not actually been under seventeen. They had really been nineteen-, twenty-, or twenty-one-year-olds pretending to be younger. His predecessor had announced that this practice must end, and Nyantakyi was doing his best to make sure that players were actually the right ages. However, since this policy of honesty, Ghana’s youth teams had not been as successful as in the past.
Later, some of the Ghanaian journalists at the hotel explained to me that the use of overage players was so common among their squads that many players had two ages: the official one, which was improbably young, and their real ages, which were at least two or three years older.
There were other more worrying stories of alleged corruption. Michael Oti Adjei told me the story of the Ghana national team losing to Nigeria in the last qualifying match before the 2002 World Cup. It meant Nigeria went through to the finals while Liberia did not. Ghana was already out of the running, and they lost 3-0 to Nigeria. At the farewell banquet after the match, the former president of the Ghana Football Association accepted $25,000 from the Nigerians, which he prom
ptly shared among the players and officials. The Nigerians claimed that this was simply a traditional gift in their culture.
Then I watched the Ghanaian delegation selling their ticket allocation. When Ghana got into the second round, FIFA issued a round of tickets to the team. Over the weekend, the tickets arrived for the Ghana Football Association. Outside the hotel, an orderly lineup of Germans formed immediately. The Ghanaians promptly ignored the line and went around to the side of the table and ordered dozens of tickets each. Not surprisingly, within twenty minutes the supply of tickets ran out. Then some of the Ghanaians went into the hotel lobby and sold the tickets for at least twice what they had paid for them. I bought a couple of tickets from Michael, who did not charge me anything extra, but the German fans were not happy. They started to protest. Some journalists began to take pictures of the corruption in action. Then the local police stepped in. They lost their heads. So in love with all things Ghanaian were the people of Würzburg, that the police did not stop the ticket scam from going on. Rather, on the “orders” of the Ghanaian officials, they told the journalists that we could not take photos of the corrupt ticket sales. They even threatened to arrest a Brazilian journalist who was demanding to do so. Why German police felt able to tell citizens in what was purported to be a democracy when they could or could not take photos is beyond me. It left a sour taste. It made me realize that although I had wonderful access to the team, I was not getting a complete picture of what was going on.
And then there were the phone calls.
While I sat in my room away from the carnival atmosphere of the hotel lobby, I would speak to Chin. He was back in Bangkok with his business associates, but we would talk every few days. On June 25, two days before the Brazil game, we spoke. We were watching the Ecuador versus England game, and Chin was telling me that one of his friends had helped to fix that game. The problem was England was so bad that they were having difficulty even beating a partially compliant team. But he had news of the Brazil versus Ghana game.
Chin: Yeah, yeah, my friend told me. But they called me and they are interested doing. Ghana and Brazil.
Hill: Brazil is going to win?
Chin: No, Ghana will lose. They will do the business with Brazil. [Really?] Yes it is confirmed.
Hill: Confirmed, confirmed?
Chin: Absolutely. 100 per cent confirmed. They say against Brazil, they really want to do the business.
Hill: I don’t understand why they would want to do that? They get paid by the football association.
Chin: Yeah. [laughs] But you gotta know, sometimes in football, there are players … they will do the business … But today the same guy told me that they arranged the game with Ecuador to England to win. 2-0.
Hill: Yeah, I don’t know, I am watching the game here, and England look as if they are much worse than Ecuador. Ecuador looks very good.
Chin: Yes, England is very very bad…. They are playing 4-5-1. It is a fucked-up arrangement, you know.
Hill: But I think the Ghana-Brazil one we have more information on. We have people inside the camp. We are more certain about that …
Chin: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s true.
Chin was saying two things. One, some of his associates had contacts with a few players on the Ecuadorian team who had arranged for them to lose to England. Yet the English team was so bad that they could not let them score a convincing goal. It struck me at the time as typical of the kind of Asian gambling talk that is common. England did eventually win 1-0, which is not the score that fixers would have wanted, but Chin was quite complacent saying that when he arranged fixes he would often get the team to play well in the first half and then have a bad second half. He thought that is what had probably happened with the game. I remain uncertain, knowing absolutely no other details of the purported fix. Again, I include this conversation because of the public right to know. However, Chin was guaranteeing that Ghana would “lose” the game against Brazil, which meant in gambling terms that for that particular game, Ghana would lose by at least a two-goal margin. The conversation was two days before the game. He predicted “with 100 per cent certainty” that Ghana would lose by at least two goals.
JUNE 27, 2006: DORTMUND STADIUM, GERMANY
I cried. I stood in the stands and I cried.
I’m sorry to write that I was so emotional. It may seem silly. It may seem undignified or not masculine. But I want to be honest. I am not sure why I cried. I think I cried for the lonely, dignified Ghanaian man who picked up the garbage at the train station. I think I cried for the millions of people around the world willing their team on against the greatest favourites in the sport. I think I cried because of the couple beside me in the stands: a forty-year-old father and his twenty-year-old son. They had never met until a few weeks before the game. And now they were so in love with one another, it made you smile. I think I cried because of the Brazilian man with a twisted face dressed in a chicken outfit outside the stadium. A man so intent on seeing his heroes in action that he had spent an enormous sum of his money in travelling to Germany and now he desperately begged for a ticket outside the game. I think I cried because of all the emotions and symbolism that gets placed in the great and beautiful game. I think I cried because at an emotional level, I am sure that game was fixed.
I watched the match in the Dortmund stadium surrounded by tens of thousands of chanting, flag-waving supporters. The Brazilian fans had all the accoutrements the world has come to expect of them: the samba drum, the gorgeous women in bikinis, the casual arrogance that comes from being the world champions. The Ghanaians had hope. I stood among the supporters of the underdog team. To many of the supporters, their soccer team represented their dreams, aspirations, and dignity. They cheered on their team with desperate enthusiasm: every successful pass, every successful tackle, every successful run seemed to mean so much more to them than a mere soccer game.
I don’t know how. I don’t know the mechanics. I watched the game skeptically. I had heard Chin’s story before the match. But I still watched the game with disbelief that anything corrupt would happen. It was simply impossible. The teams came out. They seemed to play with all their hearts. They seemed to be trying as hard as they could. They seemed to be doing everything they could to win the match. But there were a string of stupid mistakes: shots were missed, offsides were not played well, defenders’ attention wandered, and three stupid, silly goals were scored. They were goals that a youth team would have been ashamed to give away.
There was something not right about the game, something that stunk.
The final score was the exact one Chin had told me it would be. I was – and still am – convinced that something went on in that game. I had watched a fixed match take place.
The supporters left and I stood alone. It was then that I cried. I did not cry for long – a minute or so – but there were tears. Then I pulled myself together and phoned Chin.
I congratulated him on his victory and told him that I had never quite believed him, but now I did. He was remarkably calm. “If I’m such a genius,” he complained, “how come I can only make a couple of hundred thousand?” Then he said, “But I have another one for you. Another fixed match.”
The match was Ukraine versus Italy. According to Chin, another of his associates had a few corrupt players on the Ukraine team. They were willing to throw the game against Italy. The score would be above the Asian goal spread, so more than two goals. He told me this before and during the game. Frankly, I didn’t have the same emotional attachment to the Ukraine team. I had not seen a KFC-style meeting. I had not met with the players before the game. I watched the game on television. All the Ukraine team seemed to be trying their best; they seemed to be charging about trying to beat a technically superior Italian team. They still lost, though. And they lost by the result that Chin had told me that they would lose.
The situation was now incredible. In four games in the World Cup Finals I had been told before the matches started
or during the matches what the results of the game would be. In three of those matches, the results had been absolutely accurate. In the fourth, the result had been off by only one goal. Was it all coincidence? Was it all just sheer luck and a good story by Chin? I desperately wanted to investigate. I desperately wanted to find out what was going on.
And then I was stopped from investigating.
19
THE GOLD COAST
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember in Malaysia in ’97 in the Under-20 World Cup. There is one guy, I see him everywhere, even during the World Cup, he was there. I think this guy is from … Japan or China. So he came to us and he said, “Hey, you people have to score first goal and we are going to bet, because they are gambling, and I am going to give you this amount of money.”
For the last few months, it had been difficult to juggle the roles of a doctoral graduate student and an investigative journalist. At this point, for a variety of university-related reasons, I had to promise the Sociology Department not to conduct any more research or investigations outside of my academic, now mostly statistical work. I could not phone Chin or any other of the Asian fixers. If I broke the agreement, I would have faced very serious academic consequences.
I kept my word. For a year, I did no work on investigating the possible match-fixing at the World Cup. It was the year of the Big Wait. It was a year of cooling my heels. It was a year of statistics, dark walls, and bits of paper thrown off a pier. It was a year of glorious Oxford, of long runs with friends over the beautifully green Port Meadow, of swims in the Thames and sunsets making the whole town glow. But all the time at the back of my mind were the questions of what I had seen and what it all meant.