The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime

by Declan Hill

  Damba and I met again on Monday afternoon. Again we met at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Again Damba tried to waffle around. I had asked him to bring his passport. He was still maintaining that he had not gone to Bangkok in May 2006. He brought a new passport and claimed not to be able to find the old one. He started on another line of nonsense. I stopped him. I told him:

  Here is the deal I would like to propose to you. I will tell you exactly where you were and then I would like to have a no-bullshit conversation with you. You were in Bangkok last year. On May 25, you met people at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. At twelve noon. You sat with three other guys. They were Chinese. They wore white shirts. One of them had a round face and wore glasses.

  He interrupted me.

  Yes, that one was Alan! That was the guy I was telling you about. He lived in America for some time.

  The dam burst.

  For the next hour, we talked about his activities. It started with his description of meeting “Alan,” the Malaysian fixer. The same Alan had helped him try to fix the Iran game. They had met when Damba was playing in Malaysia. He had lost more than $100,000 in a deal to invest in a marble business. His business partner had taken his money and walked off with it. Damba was distraught. He had no way of getting his money back. He told his troubles to another goalkeeper in the Malaysian league. The goalkeeper introduced him to Alan. Alan’s reaction to Abu’s story? Kidnap the businessman’s children until he “found” the money to pay back Damba. Alan would then split the money 40/60 with Damba. Damba claims that he agreed to the offer, then decided against it. Alan was angry. “What?” He had already got his people in place to do the kidnapping. Eventually, they agreed not to kidnap the children and had a table talk with the businessman. Alan was able to get some of the money recovered by these means.

  They had first worked together during the 1997 World Under-17 Cup in Malaysia. Damba had introduced Alan to members of the Ghana team. It was, claimed Damba, their modus operandi. Damba would get access to the teams. He was, after all, one of the great stars of the past team. People looked up to him. However, he claimed that he never proposed fixing matches to the players, he just got Alan into the room with them. Then he would leave.

  “How could I ask the players to throw a match?” he asked me plaintively. “How could I ask them to do such a thing?”

  His most serious claim was that both he and Alan had been in Würzburg together. They had been at a hotel across the square from the Maritim Hotel but had contacted and got access to the players. It had been relatively easy, because by this time Alan knew one of the players himself:

  We were together in Würzburg, myself and Alan. He had established friendship with Stephen Appiah. They have a relationship. Not a friendship, but an understanding. Alan approached him to fix something up. I don’t know what happened.

  For the record, this is not what Chin claimed was Damba’s relationship to the team. Chin had claimed that Damba knew and represented a corrupt group of players on the team. He claimed Damba had flown out at his expense to broker a deal with the Asian fixers. But Damba denied this, saying his job was simply to get access for Alan. Any fixing that took place was Alan’s job.

  Stephen Appiah had told me that he had met someone who matched the description of Alan in previous tournaments. He had even taken money from him for winning games. But he absolutely denied fixing any game during the World Cup or any other tournament with him. I asked Damba about the Brazil game and whether that had been fixed. Damba claimed not to know, but felt there was a defender on the Ghana team that was very suspicious. He drew a long diagram on the napkin showing how ridiculous a number of the goals had been.

  On my last day in Ghana, Damba and I met again. We tried to talk in the restaurant of the Beverly Hills Hotel. But a man sat right behind Damba and was obviously interested in what he had to say. So we got nervous and shifted down the road to the Avenue Club. Damba told me about receiving a number of anonymous phone calls in the middle of the night. The caller would say, “Are you there?” Damba would reply, “Yes.” The caller said, “Just checking.” Then the line would go dead.

  “I tell you, I was very frightened the first time it happened at 2:00 a.m. Do you know anything about it?”

  I told him no, and despite the calls, Damba was more confident and more comfortable. We leaned back in the chairs at the club, and he told me that he was shocked to find out that Alan bet in the millions of dollars.

  “I would like to propose that you and I work together. You are almost my agent, so to speak. Because I swear to you, what you’re telling me about the gambling market I had no idea about these sums of money. You and I should work as a team.”

  The last time I saw Damba, he was helping a little boy. I had seen the boy lying on the sidewalk. He looked unconscious. People walked over him or around him and ignored him. So we walked over, picked him up, and took him to a nearby food stall. The boy, who was mentally challenged and desperately hungry, did not seem to be able to take in what was happening. He claimed to be from another section of town. As I left them to pack before going to the airport, Damba was picking him up and putting him in his car. He told me he was going to make sure he got home.

  As I sat on the plane, I thought about what I now knew. I knew that fixers approached the Ghana team during the Olympics. The captain of the Olympic team claims that they were rebuffed. The fixers claim that some of the Ghanaians took money to lose a match. Stephen Appiah, one of the star players, says that he took money to win a game, after it was over, and he distributed the cash around the team.

  As for the World Cup, Chin, the Asian fixer, told me the essential score of four games before they were played. He then showed me a meeting with a man he claimed was the runner for the Ghanaian team. I found the runner in Ghana. He had all the attributes described by Chin. He was an Under-17 coach. He knew the players on the team. He had been in Greece during the Olympics. He confirmed that he had gone to Würzburg and that another fixer, an associate of Chin known as “Alan,” had contacted the Ghana team. Stephen Appiah also confirms that the fixer approached him, but he claims that the fixer wanted to give him money to beat the Czech team. Appiah claims that he turned down the fixer because he was so intent on winning the game. I want to stress that no one claimed all the players on the team were in on the possible fixes. Rather, it was made clear that some of the players would be playing as hard as they could, while others would not.

  So it comes down to what do you believe? There are two alternatives. One, it could be that the gamblers were lying: no one on the Ghana team took any money and they just got lucky with a series of predictions and strange coincidences. Two, it could be that the gambling fixers actually told the truth and that someone on these teams did take money and a fix occured.

  The very least is that all parties, soccer officials, players, and the fixers themselves, agree that organized crime gamblers do regularly approach teams to fix games at international tournaments. They are able to do so easily, and sometimes they succeed. The question is, who is trying to stop them?

  21

  WHO GUARDS THE GUARDIANS?

  I think it is not true. I think it is not true. I think it is not true. Or if something happened it did not influence the final result … [but if it were true] then I would say that then all the work that we have done in FIFA over the last thirty years, to develop the game, and to make the game accessible to everybody. To say that the game is an education, it is a school of life. It is part of a social cultural program. It is entertainment. It is emotion. It is passion. Then we have failed. We failed.

  On August 27, 1869, one of the largest crowds in England in a generation watched a sporting event. It was not a soccer match, not a horse race, not a track and field event. It was a unique race that caught the imagination of much of the Western hemisphere, in one of its most popular sports, rowing. Earlier that spring, the Harvard University rowing team had written a formal letter to both Cambridge and Oxford universities challenging th
eir teams to a four-and-a-quarter mile race down their home river, the Thames. Cambridge, to their shame, declined. Oxford did not.

  The Harvard team arrived a few weeks before the race in a storm of publicity. It was four years after the bloody American Civil War. The Northern states had won, but official British government sympathies had largely been with the Southern, slave-owning states. The two countries seemed to long for a symbolic resolution of all the tensions that the conflict had created. A contemporary British journalist wrote that the race, “is in the eyes of the public a race between England and America.” Charles Dickens, the greatest English writer and celebrity of the time, called the Oxford crew, in a speech dedicated to them at Crystal Palace, “the pride and flower of England.” In the United States, interest was even, if possible, more intense. The City Hall in New York was prepared with flags and a 100-gun salute in case of victory. The Aquatic Monthly wrote:

  In the city of Milwaukee preparations were instituted for a grand powwow in case the American crew should be victorious. A public meeting was called at the City Hall, a salute of fifty guns was to be fired, and the ringing of bells and blazing of bonfires, were to add their effects to the general rejoicing.

  The day of the race, The Times reported that a million people lined the Thames to watch; Harper’s Magazine claimed there were more spectators than any other event in that generation, except “when the Prince of Wales first brought his wife home” and that the crowd during the competition was a “dense mass on shore [that] has been swaying and struggling, and now, like a mighty river, is sweeping on over fields and fences, ditches and hedges, wild, mad with fierce excitement, yelling at every breath, and with all its might.”

  Those spectators watched a tight race. For the first two miles, the American crew led. Then slowly, inexorably, the Oxford crew pulled them in. The Harvard cox made a fatal error that reduced the lead and Oxford charged ahead. But the Harvard team had not given up, not by a long shot. Coming into the final stretch, the home team was still two lengths ahead. The crowd, delirious for most of the race, now went crazy: shouts, screams, cheers. In the final five hundred yards, the Harvard team tore into the English lead. They reduced it to one length, then a half-length. Then, as the winning line came close, the Oxford team dug deeply into whatever resources they possessed and just held off Harvard on the finishing line. The painting of the two teams, with Oxford winning, is still, 140 years later, in print.

  The next day, the front page of the New York Times was dominated by news of the contest, a map of the course, and biographies of the Harvard rowers. This was not an accident of a slow news day. In the late nineteenth century, rowing was one of the biggest sports in North America and Western Europe. A large group of American newspaper correspondents had accompanied the Harvard team. In North America, sporting fans were obsessed with the fates of various rowing teams such as Biglins or Wards. The races between the top single scullers of each country were even bigger events. When the great Canadian Ned Hanlan (a.k.a. The Boy in Blue) raced an American champion on the Hudson, 200,000 people watched the contest.

  Now the popularity of professional rowing seems like a distant dream. Rowing, compared to soccer, baseball, or tennis, is a relatively minor sport. Even in England, apart, ironically, from the annual Cambridge versus Oxford boat race, it is largely ignored. The reason for rowing’s demise is partly societal – it is difficult to overstate the snobbery of some nineteenth-century rowing officials (“the ignorant prejudices of illiterate professionals” is how one official described working-class rowing coaches) – and partly technological; with the invention of the marine engine, far fewer people rowed at the turn of the twentieth century than one hundred years before. But one of the strongest reasons for the demise of rowing was fixing led by gamblers. Put simply, the hundreds of thousands of people who came out regularly to watch those races began to have less and less faith in the credibility of the sport. Even the Harvard team in the weeks before the great race down the Thames against Oxford had two sets of meals brought to them. The first were public meals that they pretended to eat. The second, a secret supply of food prepared only by “Harvard men,” were the meals they actually ate. The reason for all this dietary subterfuge? The same one that the German tennis star Tommy Haas claimed in the summer of 2007 when playing a Davis Cup match in Russia: they were afraid of being poisoned by match-fixing gamblers. This was not an isolated incident. As in modern-day tennis, the fixes in rowing were rumoured to be so prevalent that some would happen during the race. It was this constant gamesmanship, cheating, and fixing that meant eventually professional rowing became discredited and it faded into that graveyard of sports the public has largely abandoned, such as cockfighting, bear-baiting, and archery.

  The comparison with the demise of professional rowing is not to say that soccer will disappear overnight, but it is to say sports rise and fall. Remember the fuss over possible match-fixing in professional pedestrianism? You would if you had lived in the nineteenth century when it was one of the most popular sports of the era. Lets look at the situation of soccer, the most popular sport in the world today. We have seen that in Asia, the credibility of entire leagues have effectively collapsed due to corruption. We have seen that some leagues in Europe are plagued with consistent and chronic corruption. We have seen that matches in European-wide tournaments are being fixed. We have seen that match-fixers are approaching players at the biggest international soccer tournaments in the world.

  If soccer is under threat, who is guarding it? Who is protecting it from the outsiders who will try to kill it? Who is safeguarding the sport? What is the organization that is mandated to stop soccer going the way of rowing, professional pedestrianism, and cockfighting?

  I have mentioned FIFA throughout the book. They are the organization that runs all soccer games everywhere. Well, almost all soccer games: the Saturday-morning matches with heaps of jackets for goals and teams that are thrown together are not run by FIFA. But just about every other organized game of soccer, from youth leagues in Arkansas and Zambia to the final match of the World Cup, falls under their jurisdiction. Or, to be precise, the jurisdiction of a national soccer federation that makes up FIFA. Every country in the world has a national soccer federation. In fact, there are some places that are not even countries that have soccer federations. It is often repeated that there are more countries represented in FIFA than there are in the United Nations. Each of these soccer federations officially make up both their continent organization such as UEFA or CONCACAF in Europe and North America, and also the world organization based in Switzerland, FIFA.

  Thirty-five years ago the president of FIFA was a suit-and-tie Englishman, Sir Stanley Rous. There is a certain nostalgia that creeps into many English journalists when they write about the days of Sir Stanley; presumably, it reminds them of the days of an empire purportedly run by decent chaps who could be trusted to do the right thing. Whether that is actually how FIFA or the British Empire was run is open to debate, but what happened for certain was that in 1974 a couple of new boys rode into town and changed everything in international soccer.

  The new boys were two men who understood better than anyone else the influence of sport for power and profit. They were the head of the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF), João Havelange, and Horst Dassler, the head of the giant German sporting company Adidas. Together, they revolutionized soccer. First, Havelange beat Sir Stanley Rous in a FIFA presidential election. Almost immediately, the English way of doing things went out the window and international marketing came in. Multi million-dollar sponsorship deals were signed with Adidas and whole host of other multinational companies. There were deals for international television rights. The World Cup was expanded from sixteen to eventually thirty-two teams, becoming the most popular sporting event on the planet. FIFA, from an organization that lived hand-to-mouth in the early 1970s, became one of the most powerful sporting organizations in the world.

  The organization was deeply hierarchical an
d allegiance to the President João Havelange was absolute. I saw Havelange once: on the train from Dortmund after the Ghana versus Brazil match. He was in the first-class compartment – tall and athletic even in his nineties. He was dressed in a beautiful suit and his presence shone through the carriage like a grey, diffused light. He had been an Olympic athlete for Brazil. A businessman who had made his fortune in the bus industry in Brazil. A soccer executive who oversaw the growth of the game in the poorer countries of the world. A man who genuinely transformed soccer from a place of first among equals to the preeminent sport on the planet.

  However, there was another side to Havelange. The British investigative journalist and author David Yallop claims in his book How They Stole the Game (marketed as “the book that the FIFA president tried to ban” when FIFA took out an injunction against the work) that Havelange was connected to the Brazilian intelligence agency responsible for many of the human rights abuses in the military dictatorship of the 1960s. An article in the Brazilian version of Playboy claimed that he had helped ship arms to the military regime in Bolivia, renowned for its human rights abuses. But worse, much worse, was the revelation in 1994 by a Rio de Janeiro attorney general of the connections between him and the head of a multimillion-dollar illegal gambling syndicate Castor de Andrade. De Andrade’s criminal gambling empire was infamous in Brazil. He employed tens of thousands of people to sell his Jogo do Bicho lotteries. He, allegedly, helped launder the profits of the Colombian and Brazilian drug gangs. And after a raid on de Andrade’s house, the Brazilian police realized they had a problem. Illegal gambling, as Joe Pistone the U.S. undercover cop pointed out, breeds corruption. The corruption in Brazil linked to de Andrade’s illegal gambling reached very high indeed. Top judges, politicians, and policemen were all found to have been paid off by de Andrade. At the same time, a personal letter of reference for Castor de Andrade written by none other than João Havelange surfaced.