Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | March 2013 8 COVER STORY “suspicious” games worldwide dating back to 2008, 380 of them in Europe, including World Cup and European Championship qualification matches, two UEFA Champions League matches and matches in several top intrastate leagues. More than 400 players, referees, club officials and “serious criminals” had been involved. This was corruption “on a scale and in a way that threatens the very fabric of the game,”Mr Wainwright said. It was, he added, “the biggest investigation ever into suspected match fixing,”and it only scratched the surface. Last year saw at least 50 nations conduct probes into corruption in football, almost one-fourth of FIFA’s total membership. The computer watchdogs at Sportradar, a private London- based company that monitors sports betting around the world, say that in Europe alone maybe 300 crooked games or more are played every year. (UEFA disputes this. Gianni Infantino, who heads the governing body of European professional football, says their monitoring turns up about 200 matches a year containing elements that might be questionable, “which does not mean they are fixed”.) Globally match-fixing rakes in upwards of US$15 billion annually, according to FIFA’s estimate. It is “absolutely endemic worldwide,”Mr Eaton told reporters covering the Europol press conference. Last year, 51 players, officials and coaches around the world were banned by FIFA, 22 for life. So far this year, 74 people associated with football in Italy and South Korea— players, refs, team officials—have been banished. “Football,” says Mr Eaton, “is in a disastrous state.” Four-time World Cup champions Italy has been so mired in scandals at the highest levels that outgoing Prime Minister Mario Monti has gone as far as to recommend shutting down the professional game for two to three years to clean it up. This season alone, 13 clubs in the top two divisions have been punished in the standings with points deductions. And Italy’s betting industry is considered one of the best-regulated in Europe. The problem is that licensed bookmakers comprise only 30% of it. The lion’s share of the action is funneled through unregulated Internet black markets, most of them operating out of Asia. Similarly, in South Korea, where only one bookmaker, Sports Toto, is licensed to accept bets, something like 1,000 illegal Web sites do a flourishing trade, according to the Korean Institute of Criminology. South Korean police estimate its value at 3.5 trillion won annually (US$3.1 billion). Corruption in South Korean sports had been a thinly veiled secret for years before Yoon Ki-won’s death lifted it away. Three weeks after his body was found, four players from the K League’s Daejeon Citizen were arrested. A few days after that, a second player under investigation was dead, also Nineteen months of legwork by Europol conducted in partnership with Interpol and police from 13 EU states uncovered 680 “suspicious” games worldwide dating back to 2008, 380 of them in Europe, including World Cup and European Championship qualification matches, two UEFA Champions League matches and matches in several top intrastate leagues. More than 400 players, referees, club officials and “serious criminals” were involved. RobWainwright elaborates on the findings of Europol’s probe into soccer match fixing during a press conference in The Hague, Netherlands, on 4th February. Four-time World Cup champions Italy has been so mired in scandals at the highest levels that outgoing Prime Minister Mario Monti has gone as far as to recommend shutting down the professional game for two to three years to clean it up. apparently by his own hand. He was a low- level midfielder named Jeong Jong-kwan, 29 years old, who once had played for Jeonbuk Hyundai. His body was found in a hotel room