Soccer is falling under a cloud of suspicion asnever before, sullied by a multibillion-dollar web of match-fixing that iscorrupting increasingly larger parts of the world's most popular sport.
Internet betting, emboldened criminal gangs and even the economicdownturn have created conditions that make soccer — or football, as the sportis called around the world — a lucrative target.
Known as "the beautiful game" for its grace,athleticism and traditions of fair play, soccer is under threat of becoming adirty game.
"Football is in a disastrous state," said ChrisEaton, director of sport integrity at the International Centre for SportSecurity. "Fixing of matches for criminal gambling fraud purposes isabsolutely endemic worldwide ... arrogantly happening daily."
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EDITOR'S NOTE: This story is part of a months-long,multiformat AP examination of how organized crime is corrupting soccer throughmatch-fixing, running over four days this week.
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At least 50 nations in 2012 had match-fixing investigations —almost a quarter of the 209 members of FIFA, soccer's governing body —involving hundreds of people.
Europol, the European Union's police body, announced lastweek that it had found 680 "suspicious" games worldwide since 2008,including 380 in Europe.
Experts interviewed by The Associated Press believe thatfigure may be low. Sportradar, a company in London that monitors global sportsbetting, estimates that about 300 soccer games a year in Europe alone could berigged.
"We do not detect it better," Eaton said in aninterview with the AP. "There's just more to detect."
Globalization has propelled the fortunes of popular soccerteams like Manchester United and showered millions in TV revenue on clubs thatget into tournaments like Europe's Champions League.
Criminals have realized that it can be vastly easier toshift gambling profits across borders than it is to move contraband.
"These are real criminals — Italian mafia, Chinesegangs, Russian mafia," said Sylvia Schenk, a sports expert with corruptionwatchdog Transparency International.
Ralf Mutschke, FIFA's security chief, admits that soccerofficials had underestimated the scope of match-fixing. He told the AP that"realistically, there is no way" FIFA can tackle organized crime byitself, saying it needs more help from national law enforcement agencies.
The growing threat has prompted the European Union's 27nations to unite against match-fixing.
"The scale is such that no country can deal with theproblem on its own," said EU Sport Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou.
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Gambling on sports generates hundreds of billions of dollarsa year, and up to 90 percent of that is bet on soccer, Interpol chief RonaldNoble told the AP in an interview. Eaton, the former FIFA expert, has cited anestimated $500 billion a year.
The total amount of money generated by sports betting wouldequal the gross domestic product of Switzerland, ranked 19th in the world.
Match-fixing — where the outcome of a game is determined inadvance — is used by gambling rings to make money off bets they know they willwin. Matches also are rigged to propel a team into a higher-ranking divisionwhere it can earn more revenue.
FIFA has estimated that organized crime takes in as much as$15 billion a year by fixing matches. In Italy alone, a recent rigging scandalis estimated to have produced $2.6 billion for the Camorra and the Mafia crimesyndicates, Eaton said.
Soccer officials are well aware that repeated match-fixingwill undermine the integrity of their sport, driving away sponsors and reducingthe billion-dollar value of lucrative TV contracts.
FIFA earned $2.4 billion in broadcast sales linked to the2010 World Cup in South Africa and already has agreed to $2.3 billion in dealstied to the 2018 World Cup in Russia. The U.K.'s Premier League earned $2.8billion in broadcast rights for Britain alone in its last multiyear contract.Membership in Europe's Champions League is worth nearly $60 million a year toeach team, according to a lawsuit filed by the Turkish club Fenerbahce.
FIFA President Sepp Blatter has proclaimed "zerotolerance" for match-fixing, and FIFA has pledged $27 million to Interpolto fight it. Computer experts working for FIFA and UEFA — the European soccerbody — monitor more than 31,000 European games and thousands of internationalmatches every year, trying to sniff out the betting spikes that can revealcorruption.
So far, however, sports authorities are "proving to beparticularly helpless in the face of the transnational resources"available to organized crime, according to a 2012 study on match-fixing. Thereport warned that the risk of soccer "falling into decay in the face ofrepeated scandals is genuine and must not be underestimated."
Some top soccer officials shy away from the dire warnings ofacademics and law enforcement officials. UEFA chief Gianni Infantino said in astatement that, on average, 203 games — 0.7 percent of the matches that UEFAmonitors a year — show some signs of irregularities, "which does not meanthey are fixed."
"It is a small problem, but it's like a cancer,"Infantino said. "We don't say 0.7 is nothing. We say 0.7 is 0.7 too much.We can say generally that UEFA competitions are very healthy in thisrespect."
Match-fixing has been around for decades, of course, and isnot limited to soccer. It has also infected sports like cricket, tennis, horseracing and even volleyball. The U.S. has its own sordid history of gamblingscandals, from baseball's Black Sox in the 1919 World Series to a handful ofpoint-shaving schemes in college basketball over the years, to an NBA refereetaking money from a professional gambler for inside tips on basketball games,including some that he officiated in 2007.
Still, nothing approaches the scale of the match-fixingallegations now hitting soccer, because of the sheer number of games played andthe enormous Asian betting interest in European games, according to DavidForrest, an economist at the U.K.'s University of Salford Business School, oneof the co-authors of the 2012 report.
In January alone, FIFA banned 41 players in South Korea fromsoccer for life due to match-fixing. That follows 51 worldwide bans last year —22 of them for life — on players, officials and referees from Croatia, Finland,Guatemala, Italy, Nicaragua, Portugal, South Korea and Turkey.
FIFA bans include some elite figures in the sport. AntonioConte, coach of the Italian club Juventus — a team whose winning traditionrivals that of baseball's New York Yankees — returned in December after afour-month ban for failing to report match-fixing.
Forrest's report said that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attackson the U.S., the war on terror relegated the fight against organized crime to adistinct second place, and that allowed gangs "to invest in new areas ofthe economy with relative impunity for nearly 10 years."
Eaton attributes the surge in match-fixing to an exponentialrise in online gambling — "at least 500 percent, and likely far more"— in the last decade.
Criminals have targeted every level of the game: the WorldCup, regional tournaments such as the Champions League, high-powered divisionslike England's Premier League and Italy's Serie A, "friendly"exhibition contests between national teams, all the way down to semipro gamesin the soccer wilderness.
Criminals are always trying to find the sweet spot betweenhow poorly the players are paid and how much bettors want to wager on a game,Forrest said. That's why fixers don't try too hard to target the Super Bowl, hesays, because "the bribes would be so high to convince the athletes tojoin."
World Cup and European qualifiers that face uneven matchupsare key targets because one team may "have no chance of getting into thetournament," Forrest said in an interview.
The same scenario applies to early rounds of majortournaments or late-season national leagues, where one team is desperatelytrying to either win a trophy or avoid being sent down to a lower league. Thosesituations propel teams upward into a whole new level of revenue or send themtumbling off a financial cliff.
Match-fixing has also branched out from traditional hotbedsof corruption — Asia and the Balkans — to places like Canada, Finland andNorway, which rank among the least corrupt nations in the world. Untilrecently, no one — including sports regulators — thought to look for corruptionin lower-level leagues. Still, given the vast amount of soccer betting, there'splenty of money to be made.
"It's liquidity of the markets," Forrest said."You can make serious money only if you can put on (bet) serious money. Inmost sports, the bet you can make is too small."
Goalkeeper Richard Kingson of Ghana says he was offered —but declined — $300,000 to lose a game to the Czech Republic at the 2006 WorldCup in Germany.
But prices have gone up. Italy's Calciopoli investigationfound it cost up to $516,000 to fix a match in the top league of Serie A;$155,000 for a fix in the second division and $64,500 for a third-divisionfixed match.
In Croatia, court documents show that first-league games in2010 could be fixed for as little as $25,600.
There is also a shift in the traditional match-fixingscenario in which players are paid to lose or referees are paid to make sureone team wins. With the rise of online spot betting — wagers made during thegame — criminal gangs can predetermine not only the outcome of the match butalso make money on bets like how many goals are scored, when they are scored,or who will take a penalty kick.
These live bets can "be particularly advantageous forcriminals," according to Forrest's report, because they increase thenumber of wagers placed on the same fixed game.
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As former Balkan warlords and Chinese businessmen havediscovered, owning a club means players don't need to be paid extra to fixmatches; they can just be ordered to lose. Corrupt team officials have alsodangled career advancement instead of money before vulnerable young players.
"There is an increasing worry about gangs taking overfootball clubs as a way to further match-fixing ... and then they could alsouse the club to launder money," Forrest said. "It's quite cheap tobuy a football club because so many of them are failing."
An American diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks quotedthe U.S. Embassy in Sofia as reporting that "Bulgarian soccer clubs arewidely believed to be directly or indirectly controlled by organized crimefigures who use their teams as a way to legitimize themselves, launder moneyand make a fast buck."
In 2011, Turkey's venerable Fenerbahce soccer club won 16 ofits last 17 national league games to stay in the coveted Champions League — abenefit it estimated as worth $58.5 million a year. In July 2012, FenerbahcePresident Aziz Yildirim was convicted of fixing four of those games and bribingto influence the outcome of three others. He did it by promising rival playersa roster spot or arranging for referees who would favor his team.
Yildirim was one of 93 people who went on trial in Turkeylast year for match-fixing — and only 14 of them were players.
Serbian player Boban Dmitrovic says he saw many instances inhis home country where two clubs simply agreed on the outcome in advance.
"Right before the match, a note was handed to theplayers. They had to cooperate because their careers would bejeopardized," Dmitrovic told FIFPro, the soccer players' union.
This "chairman-to-chairman method" of match-fixingis still common in Russia, Albania and the Balkan nations, according toForrest's sports corruption report.
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The vast majority of the world's wagering originates inAsia, according to Forrest, but its own bettors shun that continent's games forthose in Europe because Asian soccer has been so corrupt for years.
In 2011, China's main TV network refused to broadcast thecountry's soccer games because match-fixing was so widespread. Last year, twoformer heads of China's soccer federation were sentenced to 10½ years inprison.
In Finland, eight African players with ties to a Singaporecrime gang were banned in 2012 for match-fixing. Their handler, Wilson RajPerumal, was convicted of fixing games in Finland and is being investigated forallegedly fixing other matches in Europe and Africa. On Dec. 15, the SouthAfrica Football Association said Perumal allegedly used tainted referees tomanipulate games for betting purposes in 2010.
Experts say a typical scenario can go like this: Bookies setthe odds for a game, not knowing it has been fixed. Right before the gamestarts, gangs unleash a torrent of bets, sometimes employing hundreds of poorworkers on laptops. The wave hides the mastermind of the bet. If there is livewagering — on what the score will be at halftime or other topics — several betscan be made on the same fixed game.
Ninety or so minutes later, the bettors hand over theirwinnings to the boss.
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In the past, the perception was that greedy players werebehind match-fixing. Yet a study of eastern Europe released last year by theFIFPro union portrayed a region where players often are not paid for months butinstead are intimidated, blackmailed or beaten up.
Many said they had been approached by match-fixers — anaverage of 11.9 percent across the region, with spikes in Greece (30 percent)and Kazakhstan (34 percent). In Russia — host of the 2018 World Cup — about 10percent of players had been approached to throw a game.
In four nations — the Czech Republic, Greece, Russia andKazakhstan — at least 43 percent of players said they knew about tainted gamesin their leagues.
Almost 40 percent of the eastern European players whoreported being asked to fix a game also said they had been victims of violence.
Zimbabwe's national team players were threatened at gunpointin the dressing room and ordered to lose matches by their own soccer officialsin 2009, the country's new federation chief, Jonathan Mashingaidze, said in aninterview in December.
Sometimes the threat comes from a teammate. In Italy, agoalkeeper under heavy pressure from organized crime to fix a game in 2010resorted to drugging several of his teammates so they would play badly. Theydid — and one even crashed his car after the match, prompting a policeinvestigation that uncovered the fix.
Former player Mario Cizmek of Croatia says he agreed to fixone match in 2011 after he and his teammates had not been paid by his club formore than a year. That led to repeated demands by the fixer, a well-knownformer coach who used to drink at the same bar as Cizmek's team. It was aclassic case of a trusted acquaintance approaching a player to throw a match —a method that Forrest's report says is used often.
"As a sportsman, I know I destroyed everything, but atthe time I was only thinking about my family and setting things right,"Cizmek said in an interview.
Now broke, unemployed and divorced, Cizmek has beensentenced to 10 months in jail by a court in Zagreb.
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Because scoring in soccer is so low, its referees have anoutsized influence on the game. In a Jan. 22 memo, FIFA urged its members todemand that referees tell soccer authorities immediately about "anysuspicious situations, contact or information."
"Our global experience is that referees and assistantreferees are the primary target of match-fixers," the memo said.
FIFA has been trying to improve its referee ranks with moretraining and taking proactive measures such as paying referees with checksinstead of cash.
Dmitrovic said when fixed games in Serbia were not goingaccording to plan, corrupt referees would step in with questionable calls to"achieve the desired result."
"The referees always knew what was going on," hesaid.
Tainted referees also are believed to be at the heart of oneor more games involving South Africa in 2010, with a FIFA report in Decemberfinding "compelling evidence" of match-fixing.
In 2011, two friendly matches in the Turkish beach resort ofAntalya — one between Bolivia and Latvia, the other between Bulgaria andEstonia — appeared suspicious when all seven goals came from penalty kicksawarded by referees. The German magazine Stern later reported that $6.9 millionwas wagered on the Bulgarian game alone.
FIFA banned the six eastern European officials involved inthose games for life.
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Officials who govern the sport can't stop match-fixing bythemselves and need the cooperation of law enforcement bodies and governmentsacross borders, said Schenk of Transparency International.
Noble, the Interpol chief, agreed.
"It's definitely beyond and above the world of sport,above and beyond FIFA," he said. "It's fair to say we haven't caughtup to the scale of the problem."
During the 2010 World Cup, police in China, Hong Kong,Macau, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand arrested more than 5,000 people inInterpol-organized raids on nearly 800 illegal gambling dens. Interpolorganized other raids in 2011 and 2012, but does not make arrests or conductnational investigations itself.
Schenk and the players' union say soccer authorities mustalso make sure their own ranks are free of corruption. One World Cup ticketscandal was linked to the family of a senior FIFA vice president while theformer head of Zimbabwe's soccer federation is accused in a corruption scam.
"There is a strong link between good governance in thebodies that run sports and the sport organizations' credibility in the fightagainst match-fixing," Schenk wrote in a commentary. "Unless sportorganizations are accountable and transparent, they will not have the authorityto tackle the problem."
Both Schenk and FIFA chief Blatter say whistleblowers mustalso be protected better.
In 2011, Italian defender Simone Farina turned down afixer's offer of $261,500 to throw a game and reported it to police, settingoff an investigation that led to scores of arrests. Despite being honored byFIFA, he found himself shunned by many in Italy who considered him a snitch.
"I said no because my immediate thoughts were of mywife, son and daughter," Farina said. "How could I look them in theeye if I said yes? What kind of husband and father would I be?"
Cizmek — the Croatian player who said he took $26,100 buthanded back all but about $650 to police — says his scars from match-fixingwill last a lifetime.
"This turned my life upside down," he said."I should have just taken my football shoes and hung them on the wall andsaid 'Thank you, guys' and gone on to do something else."