The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime

by Declan Hill

  … Castor de Andrade is a sportsman. I am President of the International Federation of Football Associations (FIFA) and Castor is an outstanding patron of this sport in Rio de Janeiro where he is patron of the Bangu Atlético Clube. For his distinguished contributions, Castor has received decorations from Football Federations of the States of Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais…. Castor de Andrade, a controversial man with a strong personality, is an amiable and pleasant creature, who can make friends due to a predominant feature in his character: loyalty … Castor de Andrade is a good family man, a devoted friend and is admired as a sports administrator … Those who attack him perhaps ignore these positive traits of his personality. I authorize Castor de Andrade to use this statement as he deems appropriate …

  If de Andrade’s crimes had been almost anything else – murder, drug-dealing, blackmail – it would have been better. To have the top executive of the world’s biggest sport linked to the head of an illegal gambling operation presented all the wrong images. Then Havelange and his son-in-law, the head of the Brazilian Football Confederation, argued with Pelé, the greatest of all former soccer players, who was trying to reform Brazilian soccer. It all began to be too much and at the 1998 World Cup, João Havelange, citing age – he was by now eighty-two – resigned. A set of administrators led by his Swiss general-secretary Sepp Blatter won the elections and took over FIFA.

  Blatter’s jump into the chief executive role was supposed to be the arrival of a new broom. FIFA would become a Swiss-run organization that would be administered efficiently by professionals, all of whom had ethics, codes of conduct, and morals. Unfortunately, ten years after the election it is not entirely clear that this has happened.

  There have been a whole series of allegations about voting fraud at FIFA elections, of money in envelopes for delegates’ votes, and ticket scandals at the last World Cup. In the fall of 2007, the Swiss police declared that they were charging a number of executives of the agency that managed FIFA’s marketing and television rights for more than twenty years. The charges the Swiss police brought against the executives included embezzlement, fraud, fraudulent bankruptcy, harming creditors, and the falsification of documents in a US$100 million case.

  It may sound incredible to an outsider that some of the top people connected to the administration of the world’s biggest sport are under investigation for a range of serious financial crimes. Actually to a FIFA executive it may sound all rather familiar. For the year before, in a multimillion-dollar court case in New York over competing sponsorship deals between MasterCard and Visa, four FIFA marketing executives, including Jérôme Valcke, their director of marketing and TV rights, were cited by the judge for deliberately lying and document forgery. Her judgment did not make for comfortable reading for FIFA executives:

  While the FIFA witnesses at trial boldly characterized their breaches as “white lies,” “commercial lies,” “bluffs,” and, ironically, “the game,” their internal emails discuss the “different excuses to give to MasterCard as to why the deal wasn’t done with them,” “how we (as FIFA) can still be seen as having at least some business ethics” and how to “make the whole f***-up look better for FIFA.”

  The judge even rejected some of the testimony of Chuck Blazer, the general secretary of CONCACAF and a current member of FIFA’s Executive Committee, writing it was clear that he had fabricated part of his testimony. A few months later, there was an appeal that referred the case back to the courts asking the judge to clarify which contract was in force at the time, but FIFA decided to settle with a $90 million payment to MasterCard. Jérôme Valcke, one of the men whom the judge had accused of lying to the court, was then promoted to the post of the secretary general of FIFA, second only to Sepp Blatter. With a corporate culture that was so distinctly odd how could this organization protect soccer?

  From England, I spoke to Jerome Champagne. Champagne, a former French diplomat, is FIFA’s director of international relations. He has a difficult job. He has to deal with almost every controversy, problem, or scandal that touches international soccer. A contact had told me that he was an honourable man, so I phoned him up, told him about the book, how I had spent three years researching it, and that I, unfortunately, had bad news for him.

  Champagne at first, without waiting to hear what the “bad news” was professed himself completely unmoved and said, “Life is made up of bad news.” He told me that if there was corruption in soccer, it was the fault of society in general. If there was racism in the stadiums, it was because there are racist people everywhere. He went on:

  Our societies are trying to evade taxation, or to violate regulations, that is why we have all these kind of things. Our societies are greedy that is why we have some people trying to use football in order to make money. So it is not bad news, it is a fact of life. And that is why we are fighting on the regulation aspects in order to try and correct these misdeeds. But unfortunately, we live in an unperfect world [sic]. We are very aware of these problems and we are fighting them.

  Champagne added that the international media, with their concentration on scandals and sensationalism, was unfair to FIFA. He claimed that he and his FIFA colleagues did not care, that they maintained “a cool distance from these things” because the media only focused on scandals and they never talked about all the good things that FIFA had done. Champagne spoke of building fifty-two artificial fields in Africa. “No one talks about that.” Champagne spoke of the construction of stands by FIFA in a stadium in Palestine: “No one talks about that,” he repeated. He spoke about FIFA’s efforts to stop government interference and corruption in soccer in Kenya, Peru, and Iran: “No one talks about that,” he ended. By this time he sounded far from cool or distanced, saying, “That is the reality. But, basically, we don’t care. Because we realize that people [who] are writing on football on the scandals or these things [are trying] to make money out of football.”

  I said, “Jerome, can I clarify something for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I risked my life to get this information. I’ve put my physical safety on the line for football … [and] I am talking about matches organized by FIFA at the very, very highest level.”

  “Which ones? The finals?”

  “Yes, the finals.”

  “Yeah. Well I am ready to listen.”

  A few weeks later, after intense negotiations by phone and e-mail, I went to Zurich to FIFA headquarters to meet Sepp Blatter. I was prepared to dislike him. Instead I found Blatter to be a mixture of the deeply charming, the utterly dictatorial, and the oddly moving. It started well: in the morning I was gazing around the science-fiction-like reception hall of the FIFA headquarters. (It is a completely modern, emissions-free building and the staff’s fingerprints are coded into a central computer that opens doors for them.) Blatter was in the hall with a group of executives. He stopped talking to them for a few moments, came over, introduced himself, and said he was looking forward to our interview in the afternoon. It was a small, but beautiful example of professional diplomatic manners that was very engaging.

  The beginning of the interview was enjoyable as well. Blatter roared with laughter talking about his own, modest, soccer playing ability, “I was a striker. I was number nine [and] my coach said [to his teammates], ‘When you give the ball to Sepp and he is thirty metres from goal, then all of you should go back to the middle line, because either he scores or he will lose the ball!’ ”

  However, once I began to get into the more controversial questions the mood changed. I asked him about the 2004 game in China, the match-fixing scandal, and when he was booed at the stadium. He drew back, folded his arms across his chest and looked at me as if I had farted in an elevator, “My recollection [of the game] was a wonderful atmosphere. I would not believe in a Chinese stadium that someone would take the risk of booing an official speaker. It is not up to my recollection.”

  It was a strange Emperor’s New Clothes moment. All his aides agreed and nodded sagely at what B
latter had said, but his recollection is at odds with a number of other witnesses that I interviewed, several newspaper articles written by journalists who were in the stadium, and, presumably, tens of thousands of Chinese fans. But it was clear that he had spoken and that his mind would not change. So we talked about the match-fixing attempts by Asian gamblers and he told me that he had known of this phenomenon since the late 1970s. I asked for his reaction to the fact that I had been told the essential scores of games by an Asian gambler in the World Cup Finals before they had taken place. He paused for eight seconds, his manner now utterly stone-cold, then:

  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.

  It might be important to consider exactly what FIFA or any soccer association could do to prevent widespread match-fixing. Blatter is very proud of the “Early Warning System” or a method of using the information from betting companies to monitor the gambling markets for fixes. The idea is that if a warning comes in, FIFA executives will swing into action and stop any problems from occurring. I explained to him why I, and many gambling executives, consider the warning system a good, useful tool but not particularly effective at detecting all potential fixes at a World Cup Final. (The amount of money bet on a World Cup match is so great that you cannot see many of the betting anomalies caused by fixing, particularly if the fixers are helping the favourite team win.) He replied that the system was so good that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was considering implementing it at the Beijing Olympics to monitor any potential rigging of their games.

  Blatter is also very proud of his work over the last ten years on increasing the standards of referees. “The most sensitive person is the referee and I have been advocating [for] professional referees. It took a long time to realize they are not only in their hobby, they are in their job. And if you are in your job, you take it more seriously.”

  I suggested the implementation, as in North American sports organizations, of security departments made up of former police officers who can specialize in action against match-fixing. (In the morning, I had suggested the idea of promoting women referees to counteract the boys-only culture of top referees to one FIFA executive, who dismissed it as “nonsense.”) Blatter replied that they did have one person who was very experienced and that besides security is something that everyone at FIFA should take seriously and they did not need a particular department.

  We did not have time to discuss the dozen other methods that I believe can reduce the chances of match-fixing in international tournaments, but the conversation ended amicably. Blatter seemed both shocked and disbelieving about the possibility of a fixed match at a World Cup tournament. But he did speak about a game in the last World Cup that he watched and wondered if it were fixed. (He was not suggesting, in any way, that he had information that the game had been fixed.) Then he said, “I have spent over thirty years working at FIFA. Football is my baby. I want to protect it. Thank you for your investigation, but if you are right, it hurts.” Then with a significant, backward look at me, he walked out of the room.

  If those are the words of the chief executive of FIFA, how have the organization’s actions been towards potential match-fixing, particularly since the foundation of the “early warning system”?

  This book began in China; it ends in China.

  It was the Women’s World Cup in 2007. The tournament was held in China, the same country that had suffered a collapse of the credibility of its own soccer league three years before due to gambling match-fixing. It is the same country where the Beijing Olympics, including a soccer tournament, will be held in the summer of 2008. It is the same country, that is now bidding to host the 2018 Men’s World Cup.

  The tournament in China was, for the women’s game, a big event. If you consider that almost every player there had faced some form of discrimination in playing a “man’s game.” If you consider that only fifteen years before the women’s sport had trouble attracting more than a few thousand players outside of North American and Scandinavia. If you consider that three years before, Sepp Blatter had said that women playing soccer should consider wearing tighter, smaller shorts to attract more attention to the game. If you consider all those factors, the Women’s World Cup was, publicly, an immense success. Hundreds of millions of people around the world watched the matches. There were high-profile sponsorship deals. There was widespread television coverage. There were matches in five different cities, with the final between the exhilarating Brazilians and the efficient Germans (how little national styles change between the genders) attracting more than 30,000 people.

  There were also two cases that brought the very credibility of the sport into question. They were discovered and then went utterly unpunished.

  The first case attracted widespread attention in Scandinavia and was largely ignored everywhere else. It happened to the Danish team. They were drawn in their first group match to play the hosts, China. The day before their match, the Danish coach was to hold a strategy meeting with his team. It was to be in a meeting room in their hotel. At the back of the room was a large mirror. Just before the meeting started, one of the coaches noticed that there was something very odd happening behind the mirror. He went up to the mirror, peered in and realized that it was not simply a mirror, but behind the mirror was a small room and in the room were two Chinese men with a video camera who were about to film the team talk.

  The Danes were furious. They blocked the entrance to the room and called for the hotel security. When the security people arrived there was an embarrassing stand-off. The hotel security staff would not open the door and when they finally did, they took away the two men, but did not give the Danish team the tape or their names. It left the whole incident surrounded in mystery.

  Was the Danish team being filmed for some sexual perversion? Would the resulting tape have been peddled on the web with an exotic title like Hot Scandinavian Babes in their Hotel? Were the two men members of the Chinese government who wanted to give their own team an advantage and simply could not understand that the rest of the world does not appreciate the corrupt tactics of a repressive government practiced against their sporting guests? Or were Chinese organized crime fixers filming the Danish team, intent on doing to the Women’s World Cup what they had done to their own league?

  We do not know. We do not know because when the Danes went to FIFA, the organization who is supposed to protect international soccer, a FIFA representative claimed that they and the hotel security people had investigated the entire incident and determined that it was not related to soccer. When Danish journalists asked how they knew it was not related to soccer or who they had investigated, a FIFA official told them: “We don’t have to give details on how we conduct an investigation … Everything that we have had to say on the issue has already been said.”

  The Danish Football Association wrote a letter requesting FIFA tell them how they knew that the men behind the mirror were unrelated to soccer. They really wanted to know as this was the second case of mysterious Chinese men videotaping their team. The previous day during one of their purported closed-door practices they had caught someone else filming their team and again nothing had been done about it.

  At FIFA headquarters, I found the same executive who in China had refused to reveal how they knew the two men filming the Danish team had nothing to do with sport. I asked him directly for a copy of the report on the incident or if he could simply explain to me how the investigation had proceeded and how it was possible they could rule out any connection with sport. Yet again, he refused to provide any details on the investigation.

>   However, when I spoke to Sepp Blatter, he told me that it was a case of “tactical spying by a Chinese television station,” so all the questions over the incident still remain open, as does the mystery of why FIFA had allowed a television station to act in this appalling manner, or whether anyone was punished or sanctioned for “tactical spying.”

  There was a second series of incidents in the same tournament, featuring FIFA and match-fixing, that is even more worrying for the sport. It has not been reported outside of Ghana until now, but even there most of the following details are unknown. Blatter told me that he had been at this particular game, but that he knew nothing of the case. The executive who would not talk about the investigation into the filming of the Danish team claimed that this particular series of events did not happen, until I told him, in front of Blatter, that I had the FIFA documents concerning the case and gave him the reference number of the file.

  It concerned, again, the Ghanaian team. They were staying at the Radisson Plaza Hotel in Hangzhou. The team had not had a good tournament. They had lost their first two matches, and had only one more to play – against the heavily favoured Norwegian team. Two days before the game, a couple of the players reported that fixers had approached them to throw their last match against Norway by five clear goals. In other words, the team had to lose by a score like 5-0 or 6-1. The fixers were not trying to make a deal with the whole team, just selected players: the goalkeeper, defenders, and a midfielder. The fixers phoned them a number of times, and one of them was reported walking around the hotel lobby trying to find the room numbers for the players.