The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime

by Declan Hill

  Then, finally, the next June I was free. I handed in my thesis to my supervisor. The investigative wolf that lives inside me was let off the chain. I was off to track down what happened that last year.

  At this point, it is probably worth considering what I knew and did not know.

  First, there was some evidence that was purely circumstantial. Ghanaian journalists had told me that their national team may have thrown a World Cup qualifying match to Nigeria a few years before. So the idea of selling games was not as unknown as it might have been.

  Second, I had seen some matches that made me very suspicious: one where I was so convinced that I had seen a fix that I had cried. Big deal. In the cold light of afterthought, it still seemed unbelievable that a fixed game would be played at that level.

  The major piece of evidence that games had been fixed in the world’s biggest soccer tournament was, of course, that a well-known Asian fixer had told me the essential results of four matches before they were played. It could, of course, have been luck. The games all followed a particular pattern. If Chin was to be believed, all four matches were between relatively poor underdog teams and heavily favoured teams. The predictions of the alleged fixes followed what most gamblers would have said would be the result: Italy would beat Ghana and Ukraine, Brazil would beat Ghana, and England would beat Ecuador. Possibly then, Chin was having me on, telling me with great secrecy the results of games that any outsider could have predicted. But he had, of course, done slightly more than that; he had told me the gambling spread of each game.

  At one point in the year of the Big Wait, I asked one of the rising stars of the Sociology Department, Steve Fisher, for advice. Fisher is a statistician who, along with his work on tactical voting, does things such as help run the BBC’s election night specials as a number cruncher in the studio.

  We spoke a little about the situation. He said, “It is very simple. Just add up the odds for each of the games with the predicted results, because the odds depend on the result of each game. You should be able to figure out how lucky that prediction was….”

  I did so. The number was not particularly high (for I had been given only the exact result-win by more than the spread rather than the exact score), roughly 5.5 to 1. However, it is worth remembering that most bank managers-or drug dealers-would be very happy with a return on investment of 5 to 1.

  I had also seen things aside from the actual matches. I had not only spoken to the fixer, Chin, who was purportedly helping to arrange the fixes, but he had also shown me a meeting with a man he alleged to be a runner, in which they had discussed the possibility of fixing games.

  So along with the accuracy of the predictions, I knew that there was something going on. I knew that it was not whole teams; rather, the fixers were supposed to be small groups of corrupt players. However, I had absolutely no idea of the truth of the allegations about unnamed players on the Ecuador or Ukraine team. I did not have a single player talking about being approached to fix a game. Most importantly, I had no idea of who the runner was at the KFC. I had never seen the runner near the Ghana camp, nor had I knowingly seen any of the gamblers.

  I believed the possibility of something having occurred. If Chin had been telling the truth, the runner would have the following characteristics:

  He would have had some connection with the Ghana team, enough to be able to get easy access to the players.

  He would have been an Under-17 coach.

  He would have been involved with the Olympic team in Athens against Japan.

  He would have been in Würzburg, but there would have been some reason that I had not seen him. Either he was at another hotel or in deep hiding, which seemed unlikely.

  I decided to go to Ghana.

  To find that man, if he existed, I had a grainy photograph and my memory. On the surface it was a ridiculous task: to find one man who may or may not be in Ghana, out of all the millions of Ghanaians. I had spent hours in the hotel in Würzburg trying to find him. I had taken photo after photo of groups of Ghanaians and then had gone through them. I had found no one who looked like the man I had seen in the Bangkok KFC. However, if I did not go to Ghana I would always wonder about the truth of what I had seen in Germany at the World Cup.

  Ghana was one of the first of the former British colonies in sub-Saharan Africa to gain its independence. In 1957, the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister, was interested in uniting the rest of Africa into one country. One of the ways he tried to do so was through soccer. In Ghana, massive amounts of money were spent on developing soccer in a vain attempt to convince the rest of the continent that they should unite under African, read Ghanaian, rule. So it was ironic that the day I arrived in Accra, it was the opening of the African Union Summit: a huge shindig for African leaders to get together and talk about building a united Africa. From what I could gather, the meeting left most people in Accra completely unmoved, both literally and figuratively, so there were lots of complaints about the traffic jams that the meetings caused and the millions of dollars that were spent on refurbishing a downtown conference centre, but little enthusiasm and interest in the summit. Moammar El-Gadhafi, the Libyan leader, had driven with his entourage through the Sahara Desert to be at the meeting. It was an imaginative stunt, but the real problem facing most people in Ghana is not African unity – it is poverty. One of the older Ghanaian coaches would tell me that in the middle of a famine in the early 1980s, he motivated the national team during a tournament by providing them all with bags of rice and beans. Then he gave the players the weekend off so that they could take the food back to their families. This way, the players were not preparing for a major competition while worrying if their families would starve. The country has developed tremendously in the last twenty-five years and its literacy rate is among the highest in the continent, but over 75 per cent of the population still make less than $2 a day.

  What really interested most people in Ghana, aside from their family’s survival, was soccer. The exploits of the Black Stars were still dominating Ghanaian social life. The heady brew of world attention is rarely tasted in the country and Ghana was still a little drunk from the events of the World Cup the year before. The politicians had ensured that the city was covered with flags and photos of the various African summit leaders. The people covered themselves, their cars, and their buildings with photos of the Black Stars players and the team logo.

  The obsession with the Black Stars was partly because of the positive attention the team had brought Ghana on the world stage, but partly it was that the players had won the lottery of life. And for the most part, they had won it fairly. They were not corrupt African politicians driving around in limos tying up traffic and giving windbag speeches in multimillion-dollar conference halls. Rather, the young men who played soccer in Europe and for the national team had achieved the Horatio Alger success story in a poor African country. They were mostly very poor, very young men who with nothing but their talent, hard work, and enterprise had succeeded in making relatively large sums of money. The sports newspapers reflected this phenomenon; they were dominated with news from Europe. The well-read magazine African Sports is twelve pages long. The issue of late June had seven and three-quarters of its pages devoted to the doings of the European Champions Leagues, and only four and a quarter pages on sport in Ghana.

  There was, however, one item of home-grown soccer news that was of great interest in the spring of 2007. Abédi Pelé had been the dominant African player of his generation. He was one of the players I had watched games with in the hotel in Würzburg. He was part of the golden generation of Ghanaian players from the early 1990s. He was an African Player of the Year, the lead scorer of the Ghanaian national team, a European Champions League medal winner, and in the spring of 2007, many Ghanaians thought that he had been involved in a fixed match.

  In March 2007, the team that Abédi Pelé owned, FC Nania, had been challenging for promotion to the Ghana Premier League. They had come to the fin
al round of the season tied on points with rivals Great Mariners. If the situation stayed that way, the championship would essentially depend on which team had scored the most goals over the season. Their games began at exactly the same time and at least in the first half seemed to be played normally: both FC Nania and Great Mariners were beating their opponents 1-0 and 2-0 respectively. Then things got strange, very strange. Goals started to be scored in each game, lots of goals, so many goals that one of the referees began to get dizzy. You cannot really blame the poor fellow; just writing down the numbers of goals scored must have put a severe strain on his wrist, let alone having to count them all. By the end of the game, FC Nania had, of course completely coincidently according to Abédi Pelé, won their last match of the season 31-0, while their rivals, Great Mariners, had managed to win their last game of the season 28-0.

  It was not the first time that such ridiculous scores had been recorded in last matches of a Ghanaian soccer season. But it was still hugely embarrassing. The equivalent would be Roberto Baggio or Wayne Gretzky or Sir Bobby Charlton owning a team that won by such an improbable score. Worse, Abédi Pelé is a luminary of FIFA, a member of their Football Committee. He is even one of FIFA’s ambassadors for the upcoming World Cup in South Africa in 2010. It was not just a problem for soccer in Ghana, but also for African and world soccer.

  To its credit, the Ghana Football Association (GFA) moved relatively quickly on this issue. Their disciplinary committee banned Abédi Pelé, the two teams, and most of the players involved in the matches for a year from the sport. FIFA had still to decide on Abédi Pelé’s fate when his wife started a lawsuit against the GFA. Abédi Pelé himself released a statement that said in part:

  I will go wherever I can to get justice as we have been banned on conjecture … The only possible accusation is that my team scored more goals. And if that is the case, my contention is that while the score line may raise eyebrows, it does not point to an irrefutable conclusion that the match was fixed.

  The excuses began to flow fast and furious. One of the coaches from a losing team declared that the reason his team played so badly was that they were all recuperating from food poisoning. One of the referees said that he “couldn’t understand what happened at the games.” Abédi Pelé himself, at one point, claimed that he had actually left the stadium before the end of the game. He was then contradicted by his own brother, who said that Abédi Pelé not only stayed to the end of the game but was carried shoulder-high around the field by the victorious players.

  It was not the first major case of alleged match-fixing to be seen in Ghana. One Internet blogger wrote, “I’m surprised that people are lambasting those 4 teams involved. Can somebody who is football fanatic [sic] tell me that no team in Ghana has not been involved in match-fixing[?]” The year before, two top teams in the Premier League had, allegedly, been taped arranging fixes. And I also spoke to a Ghanaian Premier League team owner, who assured me that match-fixing occurred regularly and that he had bought matches. “I got the other team’s goalkeeper to let in goals at 50,000 cedi each goal. Every time he gave up a goal he would raise his right arm as if swearing, but it was really a signal to me … The final score was 4-1 to us, so I paid him 200,000 cedi in all [200,000 cedi is about $20].”

  However, when I arrived in Accra, the GFA Appeals Committee had just overturned the ban on Abédi Pelé and his teams. The whole case was making its way through the court system, to the interest of soccer fans across the country. (A few months after I left the country, the official legal charges against Abédi Pelé were dismissed in court, but the bans against the teams and players all remained.) The situation may have been bad for Ghanaian soccer, but at that time it actually made my job easier. I was not looking forward to researching a possible case of corruption in the one institution in Ghana that people respected and admired as being utterly corruption-free. Now, with the Abédi Pelé case, no one would be particularly suspicious if I wandered around interviewing people about match-fixing.

  I hired Michael Oti Adjei, the intellectual turned journalist who had so impressed me the year before. He was to get phone numbers and help arrange interviews, but when I spoke to him I kept the actual story that I was working on deliberately vague. I did that for two reasons. First, because I wanted him to have deniability if anyone asked him what I was doing. It is relatively easy being an international journalist. At the end of the story, we get to fly out. What is often far more difficult is to be the local person who helps the international journalist. Those people have to stay around and carry the can with the people who have been upset by the story. It is often better not to fill them in completely so they can honestly say to people, “I had no idea what they were doing.”

  Second, for all my respect for his intellectualism, I noticed that frequently many Ghanaian journalists seemed to think that they were working for the soccer association or their favourite team. I was not sure if this would happen with Oti Adjei, but I did not want to take a chance. We met the night of my first day in Ghana. We sat in the front garden of the Avenue Club, an outdoor restaurant at the centre of Accra. There was a canopy of palm trees and stars. As Oti Adjei briefed me, I began to understand that there had been more, much more, going on at the camp at Würzburg than I had realized.

  The most important thing he told me in the darkness of the garden was that there had been a big fight in the camp between the players and the officials about how much they were to be paid. This story was confirmed later in the trip by both some players and the president of the Ghana Football Association (GFA). The meetings had included almost everyone in the team, all the players and the senior officials of the GFA. One of the players had stood up in the middle of the meeting and shouted at the executives, “You are not the people who deserve the money. You cannot play football. You are useless. We are the people who play the game, we deserve the money.” The argument had been over the allocation of the sponsorship and FIFA money. The players had thought that they should get paid well for their efforts. The officials claimed that they wanted the bulk of the money for the future development of the game in Ghana. For the officials, unfortunately there was a high level of distrust of the soccer authorities by players. Some of the players thought that the officials simply wanted to skim the money for themselves. The feelings between the players and officials were, evidently, so bad that a senior Ghanaian politician had to intervene personally to make sure there was peace. I asked Oti Adjei why few people had heard about these meetings. The fights between the Togo players and their officials were in the newspapers. He replied:

  I heard about it, but I managed to suppress it, along with the other Ghanaian journalists. We journalists tend to be motivated by patriotism. I think that other [foreign] journalists would have run big headlines on it. You know: “Key Meetings Over How to Share the Money.”

  His response made me glad that I had not shared too much information with him about the investigation. If this was the way Oti Adjei, one of the best journalists in the country, treated a story of salary discussions, what would he do if he thought I was investigating the possibility of some corrupt players on his national team fixing games? Would he work to uncover the truth, whatever it was, or suppress it? Possibly, he would want to uncover the truth, but possibly not. I have the highest respect for Oti Adjei, but I could not take that chance.

  However, the really important thing about the news of these salary negotiations was the timing of those meetings. The first meeting, which was very acrimonious, was in the first week of June. In other words, it was after the meeting at the Bangkok KFC on May 25. If there were dissatisfied players who resented the pay settlement, they would have a strong motivation if approached by the runner to say that they were willing to fix the game. They may have changed their minds after the meeting to discuss the salary, but certainly the mood of some of the players would have been very resentful at exactly the time the runner was going out to Bangkok.

  The timing of the second meeting was also in
teresting. It occurred after the match against the United States. The team had got through to the second round, and the players wanted to make sure their pay reflected that difference. It occurred at the same time that Chin was assuring me that some of the players had “100 per cent confirmed” that the fix would occur in the Brazil game. Again, this does not prove that there was a fix, but it certainly changed my perception that the camp was full of well-behaved, well-paid hymn singers. Rather, the players may have been singing hymns, but some of them did not consider themselves well paid.

  The second thing was another phenomenon that Oti Adjei noticed about his country’s sporting culture. At the Avenue Club, we spoke long into the night about the Brazil match and the ridiculous goals that the team had given up. Finally, he gave a long sigh and said:

  The thing is, who cares? Even after we lost to Brazil, we still celebrated. Getting to the second round is considered an achievement. Whatever happened after Czech and the U.S.A. games, the players knew they were going to be treated like heroes. The attitude was “We are not big boys, we have come in the world as far as we can.” The players were given the highest honour in Ghana. This is setting the bar too low.

  If this perspective were true, it again may have made the decision to fix a game easier for a corrupt player. They had got all the glory they were going to get at the World Cup. They knew that they would not have to face an irate press like the English do when they go out of tournaments at the quarter-finals. To paraphrase Jean-Pierre Bernès, if they were going to lose to Brazil anyway, why not lose with $30,000 in their pockets?