Paul Rouse: How prevalent is match-fixing in sport?
Clean and fair: The FAI have investigated match-fixing allegations in the League of Ireland. Pic: Stephen McCarthy / SPORTSFILE
Detective Superintendent Catharina Gunne, of the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau, laid bare the problem: “Match-fixing and corruption is a threat to all sports at all levels. It can allow organised crime to infiltrate sport in order to use it to make illicit gains or launder proceeds of crime.”
Detective Superintendent Gunne was speaking after ten men were arrested last month in raids across Cork, Limerick and Dublin as part of an investigation into alleged match-fixing in the League of Ireland.
The arrests took place after the gardaí began an investigation in 2019 after suspicions emerged that League of Ireland matches had been fixed. There were betting patterns around deliberate fouls, margins of victory and actual scorelines, for example, which “raised concerns”.
How prevalent is match-fixing in sport?
That is a question that is exceptionally difficult to answer. The nature of the act makes it usually extremely challenging to prove. This is true for the organisations who run sport and for the police. Finding hard evidence of matches being fixed is painstaking work. It is one thing to indulge in rumour and high-stool speculation, but altogether another to deliver conclusive proof that a match has been fixed.
Unsubstantiated allegations or whispered suspicions too easily allow people to use one of the most odious of all claims: that there is never smoke without fire. What we know with certainty is that smoke-without-fire is one of the great realities of the modern world.
And we know also that there are malignant people out there who just make up lies about others to destroy them. And still more who just make things up because they can.
Allowing for that, all available evidence suggests that match-fixing is a major threat to the conduct of modern sport. It suggests also that although it is not just a modern phenomenon, it has worsened as gambling has increased its grip on modern life.
Sometimes matches are fixed by clubs who wish to win competitions, secure promotion or avoid relegation in various sports. Match-fixing has also been associated with bribery, blackmail and the raw desire for material gain.
But, most often, the fixing of matches is related to gambling in some shape or form.
And a growing modern phenomenon is the manipulation of certain elements within a match to secure a bet. This is something that has become much more prominent in recent years, with the growth in online gambling, the diversification of the nature of bets available and the capacity for in-game betting.
What is clear from history is that people have deliberately sought to distort the result of sporting contests across many centuries.
As the English historian Mike Huggins has recorded, back in the year 388bc a boxer whose name was Eupolus was fined when he bribed three opponents to let him win during the Olympic Games. The three defeated men were also fined.
In England, a match-fixing scandal in 1907 involved Manchester City’s Billy Meredith, who was accepted as the best player of the Edwardian era. The Football Association (FA) undertook an investigation which revealed widespread abuses.
That this took place during the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of British sport when all were deemed to be pure and virtuous shows once again the nonsense of nostalgia.
As Huggins has shown the “end-of-season fixing of promotion and relegation matches in Britain was quite common, with one manager claiming that ‘this kind of thing happens all the time’.” Across this time, even famous athletes in all manner of sports were prone to accept bribes to fix matches as the money they were making was so little money even in their pomp.
In boxing and wrestling, for example, the phrase “taking a fall” related to competitors who chose to lose. Similarly in horse racing it was understood to be commonplace that sometimes a horse would be run in order for it to lose.
This practice dates at least from the 18th and 19th centuries when the modern sporting world was evolving from traditional forms of play into the big business of modern sport.
Famously, 8 Chicago White Sox baseball team were indicted for “intentionally losing” to the Cincinnati Reds in the 1919 World Series. It was claimed that they were paid off by gamblers. That the team were paid wages that were notoriously low even by the standards of their game and of that era added another dimension to a story that continues to weave its way through popular culture in novels and films, not least the epic ‘Field of Dreams’.
The fascination of match-fixing is rooted in human frailty and in a very simple question: what am I prepared to do in return for this money? This struggle of athletes to resist temptation to succumb (whether in desperation or greed or under threat) is a complex thing and is too easy to decry and not engage with.
But, of course, the context of all of this is that the foundation of the idea of modern sports is that it must for fairly conducted to a common set of rules. At its core, this is something that depends upon the integrity of all parties to proceedings.
And there is a view that this integrity has been increasingly compromised in recent years. Sports such as tennis and cricket have had their whole basis questioned after a series of scandals revealed the extent of the fixing that was occurring. For its part, of course, horse-racing has had a notorious reputation. Even polo – just about the most elite of all sports – had its own match-fixing scandal.
But what of soccer, now by some distance the most popular sport in the world, where vast sums of money are involved on a daily basis?
There is an extraordinary line in a piece by the writer R.W. Johnson in the ‘London Review of Books’ in the months before the playing of the World Cup in South Africa in 2010. Johnson wrote: “The number of countries in the world where a game of soccer is still a fair contest may be quite small.” He then went on cite a match-fixing scandal in Germany which “suggests that the results of hundreds of matches in Central and Eastern Europe were also fraudulent”, and alluded to the belief that things had happened in “most countries in Africa and Latin America”.
Other writers record how soccer in India “has been crippled by match-fixing”. A huge scandal in Greece revealed huge levels of match-fixing. The publication of wire-taps by the Greek National Intelligence Agency demonstrated the scale of what was going on, destroying the credibility of the national league.
In this context, it would be ridiculous to imagine that Ireland might remain untouched. The study of the past tells us that the Irish are as interested in material gain as any other group.
And – in general – everything we know about history, about people and about life tells us that this is a problem which will recur. The notion that sport might somehow manage to avoid being tainted fells impossibly naïve. Imagining that match-fixing will never exist is not realistic. The challenge is to limit the incidence of occurrence and to ensure that that almost all sporting contests are credible ones, where the result is the outcome of the contest and not of some pre-ordained deal.
It is apparent that this is something that is not the preserve of a few sports, rather it is common across many. So, to finish, a question: are we to believe that no GAA matches have fallen foul?
