The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime

by Declan Hill

  As I mentioned, the ideal fix should have a goalkeeper. So I went to speak to Richard Kingson, the man who played in goal for Ghana for all of the games in the tournament, to see if he had been approached.

  I went out to his house in an eastern suburb of Accra. It was an hour-and-a-half drive along the coast road. The neighbourhood surprised me. For a star player, and Kingson had just signed for Birmingham in the English Premier League, the house from the outside was surprisingly modest. The road was unpaved and had potholes three feet deep. I know because we saw a taxi stuck in one. The wheels were completely immersed and the back door would not open because the car had sunk so deeply into the hole. Kingson was not there and Oti Adjei and I sat for two hours waiting for him to return. We went into his compound and discovered that outside appearances can be deceiving. Beyond the gates, there was a large paved courtyard and a life-sized statue of a goalkeeper saving a ball. There were also four men sitting playing cards and whiling away the time. It is something of the nature of professional soccer players in Ghana; there are always three or four young men hanging around them. They are usually buddies from the former neighbourhood, and they control access to the players. It is also something of the nature of Ghana’s society and economics. It is a poor country and does not have the money to establish the great factories of bullshit, universities, government departments, and the like, that create so much employment in the developed world. So the streets in Ghana are full of young men just hanging around waiting for something, anything to happen. We chatted to them for a while. Finally, Kingson phoned me and apologized, saying we would not be able to meet that night.

  I caught up with him in a five-star beach resort the next morning. Kingson was not in a mood to be interviewed. He was a professional athlete, he had a three-hour training session ahead of him, and he wanted to train. However, he sat down with me for a few minutes in a little bar. I had arranged the situation so that there would be no other journalists or hangers-on around. But a few minutes is not a lot of time to do a thorough interview, so I was as blunt as possible. The first few minutes of our conversation went like this:

  Hill: Do you know about Asian gamblers who were trying to buy World Cup games?

  Kingson: No.

  Hill: Did anyone approach you to fix a game?

  Kingson: No.

  Hill: Did you fix a game?

  Kingson: No.

  Hill: Heard anything about games being sold?

  Kingson: No, nothing.

  Well, that was just about as clear as it could be. Our interview continued, with Kingson becoming more comfortable. He urged me to speak to Stephen Appiah, the team captain. He was uneasy at the thought of that game. But he said that if any fraud had happened he would have been the last person to be approached. All the other players knew him as a deeply religious person, he was almost the pastor of the team. He told me he, too, had cried at the end of the game.

  I feel like crying, feel like crying because of what you are saying. I didn’t know anything about this. I mean, before that game I was crying, because I was full of inspiration, ’cause I had the confidence and the faith that we are going to win the game, no matter what they do. Yeah … now, now I’m thinking back, and was previewing the game … [pause] maybe that is how they won it. It’s very bad, if that is going on, then it’s very bad. How can you sacrifice this? … After the game I was crying. I was crying. I was asking myself why? Because I saw the glory of God, we would become champions.

  Kingson was absolutely positive that no one would have approached him to fix the game and if they had done so he would never have taken any money. After the interview, I went along to his training. It was an extraordinary scene. On a white sandy beach beside the rolling waves of the Atlantic Ocean, some of the top goalkeepers in Ghana were having a private fitness session. Some thing that most amateur players do not have is the intensity of professional athletes when they practise. Generally, the lower the level of player, the greater the ego on the practice field: to most professional athletes, practice is work and most practices are conducted with complete focus. The training session that I saw was like that: a range of goalkeepers, either the ones who had contracts to play in Europe or the ones who wanted contracts in Europe, diving, jumping, catching, leaping, time after time for hours.

  As I was watching, I got into conversation with Yussif Chibsah. He is a midfielder and he had just finished practice. We stepped away to do an interview in a little hut along the beach. Chibsah is one of Ghana’s top players; he had just missed making the World Cup squad. He had come to Germany and had been cut from the team a week before the tournament. But he had been the captain of the Ghana team in the Olympics, the one that Chin had claimed took money to lose to Japan. He very quickly confirmed that Asian gamblers had contacted the team during the Olympic tournament. Chibsah said:

  They approached us, I think it was the game against Paraguay and then the game against Japan. Against Paraguay they said, they have a bet. They are gambling. They went for Paraguay, so they would like us to lose that game. Yeah. We told them for lose, we cannot lose this game. Already our first game, it was a drawn game. So we cannot afford to lose the second game. They tried and tried. But we did not give in. Stephen was telling us something about Malaysia in 1997, when they went there. Those kind of things were common over there during the Malaysian tournament. Those kinds of gamblers were around. It was common over there.

  I was equally blunt with Chibsah. I asked him directly if he had ever taken money from gamblers either to win or lose a game. He said, “No, no, never. But I have heard there are a lot of gamblers at all the big tournaments. They approach a lot of the teams.” I asked him if he knew if any gamblers had approached the Ghana team at the World Cup, and he said he would not know because he had been cut at the last moment.

  In the first week of my stay in Ghana, I interviewed two more stars of the Ghana World Cup team: Asamoah Gyan and Sulley Muntari. I did not suspect either of being involved in any type of fix: they had both scored goals in the World Cup. Both denied right away that there had been any fixing going on. Muntari is surprisingly nice. I say surprisingly because he has the reputation of being the Ghanaian Roy Keane, the former enforcer for Manchester United. Muntari, who had just signed for the English Premier League team Portsmouth, is an absolutely ruthless midfielder who has walked out on international camps because of disagreements with the management. He is just about the last person you could imagine taking money to throw a match. But he did say something interesting: that the team was very unsettled by the money situation during the Italy match. That part of the problem with the players, that I had thought might have been corruption, was actually that the top stars could not concentrate because of the financial argument that was going through the camp. But he, like almost everyone else in Ghanaian soccer, urged me to talk to Stephen Appiah: “We are leaders, we are all leaders, but Stephen is our main leader.”

  Sulley Muntari is not alone in his respect for Stephen Appiah. Appiah’s name towers over Ghanaian and African soccer like a colossus. He represents the dream for millions of young men across the continent. He came from a small house in the middle of the Accra slums and by sheer talent, focus, and drive has now earned millions for himself and his family. I went to Appiah’s home neighbourhood, Chorkor, a fishing village-cum-suburb on the outskirts of Accra. Say the name of the area to most people from Accra and they look worried. It is a tough area. The roads are paved, there is some electricity, and most houses are cement or brick. But definitely a very, very poor neighbourhood. Appiah would tell me later that Chorkor has the reputation of a hard, dangerous place: “I see my old friends. And I see myself. I feel that God has blessed me. I know what I have come through and all of these guys they dead, they have been killed for armed robbery. And some of them are spoiled with drugs. So I see myself like this … the type of level that I am on now. I really feel that I have come from a long way.”

  Appiah’s brother Ernest took me on a tour. He wor
e cheap flip-flops, a black T-shirt, ill-fitting white pants, and a diamond earring. In his clothes and manner he was utterly indistinguishable from anyone else in Chorkor, except for the earring. He and another brother were repairing the family house where Stephen Appiah was born. It is a low-slung building where half a dozen people still live. Nothing shows the lottery of life that the players have won better than this house and the comparison with his brother. I saw one of the pitches that a young Stephen Appiah played on when he was a boy. It was beside the ocean, covered with garbage and without a scrap of grass.

  Appiah has not forgotten where he comes from. I caught up with him after he appeared at an event promoting a national health insurance program. Appiah had posed for a photo shot to publicize the scheme and then had personally paid the fee for a hundred elderly people from Chorkor to be insured. When Michael Oti Adjei and I got there, Appiah had just left, pulling away in a gleaming, black Infiniti 4 x 4. However, in the midst of poverty and altruism came near-Hollywood glamour to save our day. Oti Adjei introduced me to Appiah’s press attaché-cum-general factotum, Akosua Puni. She is a former beauty queen and was utterly glamorous in completely unlikely circumstances. Thankfully, she felt sorry for me, smiled when I asked about the possibility of an interview, and said she would make it happen.

  The interview with Appiah was like something out of a movie. Akosua Puni did make it happen. We, Oti Adjei and me, raced in the taxi to a little industrial sideroad in another area of Accra. On one side of the street was a Volvo backlot; on the other was an empty lot with steel girders piled on top of each other. Pulled up on the sidewalk was Appiah’s black Infiniti. The licence plate read “demost1x.” There were, as in any good film, two tough-guy aides, Vladimir and Moral. One of them, with his red-ringed eyes, looked very much the worse for wear. The two glamorous aides, Akosua and her sister Coco, had their wraparound sunglasses on.

  Appiah sat inside the Infiniti. He looked smaller than he does on television, and he was wearing a tight white shirt with three buttons in the collar, and two jewelled earrings in the left ear: one silver, the other diamond. We leaned back in the front seats; they were white leather. He was very friendly, and his English was shaky but good.

  We talked about his career, how far he had come. I asked for a piece of advice to the millions of people who wanted to be him. Appiah told me that it was very hard, starting in Chorkor; often they did not have enough to eat. But he urged people “to do everything possible to make the dream come true. You cannot give up.”

  Then I asked if anything had happened in the Brazil game.

  “Nothing happened. I think we made some mistakes with underestimating the quality of the players that they have. Every mistake you do, they will get their goal, so, that’s what happened.”

  Then I asked him about the fixers. He was staggeringly direct about them.

  Hill: Have you ever been approached by gamblers to fix games?

  Appiah: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember in Malaysia in 1997 at 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, little round face, very friendly. 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.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay, let me talk to the players.”

  “No,” he said. He wanted to give the money to me.

  I said, “No, I’m not going to take any money.” If I take the money, maybe something will happen, it will be a shame for me, so I said, “Let me talk to the players. There is this guy who wanted to … how do you say? To promise the team, if we [score] our first goal he will give us this amount of money.” So yeah, I approached the players, and they said, “Okay. Fine, fine, fine.”

  But I called the guys and said, “Okay, we are not interested in our distance.” So when we played against Uruguay, semi-finals, the guy came to me and said, “Hey Stephen, we are gambling a lot of money. You know what? Talk to your goalkeeper. So they will score the first goal.”

  I said, “What are you talking about? I can’t do that. I can’t do that. We don’t need your money, I’m not going to do it.”

  Then Appiah talked about the Olympics in Athens.

  Appiah: When we went to the Olympics, Athens 2004, this guy came to us and he said, “Okay, here is $200,000. You have to let in first goal.”

  And I said, “No, because we wanted to go far …” So you know what he said, you know you have to try, and win the game.

  Hill: Go all out?

  Appiah: Yeah, yeah, go all out. So this guy gave me $20,000. And I share with the players. Yeah after that game, we won 2-1 and I shared the money with the players.

  Hill: What did they do this last World Cup? Did they approach you?

  Appiah: Yeah, yeah, they came to me and they said, “You have to win the game against the Czech Republic.” Because we lost the first game, I didn’t give them a chance to talk to me. I said, “Hey, man, don’t talk to me, I am concentrating on the game.” I don’t want to talk about anything.

  Hill: Okay. But do you know if that guy goes to other teams?

  Appiah: Yeah, I think they go, go, go around. They go around.

  Stephen Appiah, the captain of the Ghana national team and a top international player, had confirmed that there had been an approach made to him by fixers during the World Cup tournament. The fixer, and others like him, go to many of the international tournaments that Appiah had played at. He had known the fixer who had approached him for several years. In the 2004 Olympics, he had taken $20,000 from the fixer for winning a game and then had distributed the money around the team. I phoned Appiah a few months later to check these details. He again confirmed everything that he said, adding only that when they received the money at the Olympics, he had waited until after the game to make sure that there was no ambiguity from the fixers. They win, they get paid, no other stuff going on. I asked him about other fixes and he laughed. “If you go writing this in your book, these people will come and kill me.” I asked again and he assured me that he was only joking.

  If what he said were true, Appiah and his teammates were breaking a number of FIFA regulations about accepting money from outside interests. However, it in no way proved that there had been a fix at the World Cup. Quite the opposite, all the players told me that they had nothing to do with any corruption.

  Then I saw the runner.

  20

  I SWEAR, I’M INNOCENT

  He came to my room, knelt, and said that he was sorry, he’s not a bad person, but he was tempted by the devil, and all that. Well, I thought he should go tell that story to a priest, I’m no priest, I’m a football administrator.

  The inside of a live television studio is the same the world over. It does not matter if you are in the CNN studios in London when they are interviewing their Jerusalem correspondent or putting out an overnight program for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation or the TV3 early morning sports show in Accra, Ghana. There is a kind of organized chaos in the director’s studio during a live television broadcast. The editors and producers sit in a row of chairs staring at a bank of television monitors. In pretty much any of those studios there will be at least one producer who complains constantly: “Who do we get to film these pieces? Did you see the shot of the watch in the middle of the interview? What are we now, an advertising program?” They are generally ignored by their colleagues, who have heard them complain about everything countless times. The director is the conductor of the technical orchestra, dealing with five different issues at once, calling which shot should go to air, talking in the host’s ear about which segment is coming up next, or telling one of the cameras to close in.

  No, it is a nice watch, which is why they focused on it. Camera two, go in tighter. Thirty more seconds for this section. I like it when the cameraman show little details like the watches the players wear, it makes it easier to cut. Camera two, have yo
u got the shakes this morning? Have a coffee and focus in. Okay, let’s come out of this item in five, four, three, two, one – go!

  TV3 in Accra had all of those things. I was sitting at the back of the studio at 8:15 one July morning watching Michael Oti Adjei in action. As a performer, he was very good. The same cerebral intellect he shows in daily life was useful in the bustle of a live show. Asamoah Gyan, the star forward for the Ghanaian team, had cancelled his appearance at 7:10 a.m. The show began at 7:30. They had no studio guest and an hour and a half of blank air to fill. They had twenty minutes to fill it. Many TV performers would have thrown a hissy fit, stomped on the floor, and shouted at the least powerful person they could find in the room. Oti Adjei did none of those things and kept a program going almost by pure improvisation. To fill the time, they decided to take a lot of viewers’ calls.

  The callers were from across Ghana, some who spoke in different languages that Oti Adjei would translate off the cuff, and they were the same as they are everywhere, from the deeply insightful to the utterly inane.

  Caller: Hello, hello. [Screech of feedback]

  Oti Adjei: Hello, caller. Please turn off your television.

  Caller: [Presumably staring at the TV screen in a vain effort to seem themselves live …] Hello, hello. I want to talk to you about football.

  Oti Adjei: Yes, you can talk to me, but please switch off your set!

  [More feedback]

  Caller: Hello. Hello. Hello

  Oti Adjei : Yes, hello. Please turn off your set.

  Caller: Hello, yes I can hear you.

  (More feedback)

  (Oti Adjei finally ends the call.)

  The producers had scheduled the items in the following way. First, there was a discussion about where Stephen Appiah was going to play in the next season. Would he go to Glasgow Celtic or the Ukrainian club Shaktar Donetsk or stay in the Turkish league with Fenerbahçe? Then there was an item on the visit of a couple of the Black Stars to an unbuilt stadium. Asamoah Gyan, the star who had cancelled at the last moment, had earlier that week decided to record a CD of music. Then there was a filmed item on him playing music, followed by a general discussion about whether that would distract from his soccer career in the Italian league. Finally, just dropped in as a news item, they mentioned that a Ghanaian coach had been fired for allegedly trying to fix an international match the week before between Ghana and Iran.