‘Match-fixers active at World Cup’

17 July 2010
KOLKATA, 17 JULY: Declan Hill doesn't know precisely how many World Cup matches were fixed this time around but says match-fixers "were there" in South Africa. The journalist-author, best known for his investigations into football corruption at the game's highest levels, especially his sensational, proof-laden 2008 book, The Fix, has told The Statesman in an e-mail interview that south-east Asian and eastern European match-fixers were "absolutely active" during the World Cup.

"They were approaching players and football association officials to rig games," said Hill.
Hill, a consultant to the Anti-Corruption Training and Consulting Group who earlier probed the impact of the Russian mafia on professional hockey, writes match-fixers "are almost always at the big tournaments: the under-17, under-20, Women’s World Cup, Olympic Soccer tournaments and the World Cup itself." Hill, who "conducted over 220 interviews with players, managers, coaches, referees, Fifa officials, police, prosecutors, gamblers and the fixers themselves" whilst working on the book The New York Times remarked would "forever change the way you think and feel about professional sport," says the match-fixers' "presence is well-known to many people inside the world of international football." According to him, "the real problem is that many players do not get paid very well for playing in the World Cup.

“They are ripped off by their football associations, so some of them turn to match-fixing if they know they cannot win their games to get some money." Reminded of Lionel Messi's widely circulated photograph on the Internet in the company of a match-fixer, Hill says he is "one of the guys" he interviewed for his book. "Most sports journalists," he says, "fight very, very hard not to uncover anything controversial or scandalous about anything in sport."
Asked why anti-fixing efforts in Europe seem focused on smaller matches, Hill says: "The fixing in Germany and across Europe is impressive in its scale. It ranges from very low junior matches featuring teenagers all the way up to international competitions. So the fixers are concentrating on every game they can possibly corrupt to make as much money as they can. It doesn’t matter to them at what level. The thing is that for the anti-fixing people it is actually easier to detect if there is fixing in lower matches (less money is being bet on them). So there may be more matches at a higher level that are being fixed, but it is more difficult to tell if that is happening."

http://www.thestatesman.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=335016&catid=41