Soccernomics. Simon Kuper
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most players aren’t rich. A majority of FIFPro members earn less than £50,000. Many earn much less. So don’t think of Messi or Ronaldo, but of struggling family breadwinners in Poland or Croatia with short careers.
Some fans fear their clubs would collapse without income from transfers. However, the reality is that a large fraction of the money simply circulates among the big clubs, as Stefan pointed out in a study commissioned by FIFPro to support their case.
If the transfer system is abolished, there will be far fewer opportunities for stealing. True, if all players become free agents, some will move even more often than they do already. However, others will prefer the stability of staying with the same club as long as they are fairly treated. No longer will agents and managers have an incentive to move players in order to make some illegal cash in hand.
The transfer system seems necessary because it is familiar, while abolishing it seems like a step in the dark. We don’t think abolition is nearly as risky as it sounds. But that is beside the point. Football’s system of ‘buying’ and ‘selling’ players is unjust.
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Match fixing was a well-known problem of the Olympic Games (original version) over 2,500 years ago. However, many people believe that this ancient scam has gotten a boost from the internet. Online betting sites have made it easy for punters to bet on any match anywhere on earth. Meanwhile, since about 2000 the giant gambling nation China has joined the global economy. The relatively small and regulated pre-internet world of sports gambling has become ‘a jungle with no borders, populated by tens of thousands of operators’, says the IRIS think tank in Paris.
In fact, sports gambling is now a bigger business than sport itself. The industry’s estimated total value – counting both legal and illegal gambling – is ‘anywhere between $700 billion and $1 trillion a year’, Darren Small, of betting and sports data analysts Sportradar, told the BBC in 2013. As we’ve seen, the total revenues of European clubs in 2014–2015 were about £15 billion. In short, there’s much more economic power in the betting market than in the football market.
But before we go any further, first a caveat. Stefan and Simon disagree a bit on match fixing. Simon is inclined to think it’s a big problem for football. Stefan thinks it’s a stain on the game’s reputation, but not an existential threat.
One thing we agree on is that buying off your opponents in order to win (fixing to win) has always been common in football. One of the Bundesliga’s most famous scandals broke in 1971 when the president of Kickers Offenbach played a tape at a garden party on which several players were heard offering to lose games for money to fix the league’s relegation struggle. In 1993 Marseille was stripped of its first ever Champions League title for fixing a domestic league game so as to rest players for the final. And arguably the biggest match-fixing scandal of this century was Italy’s Calciopoli scandal of 2006, in which Juventus was found guilty of fixing referees and rival teams in order to win titles.
There’s a long history of fixing-to-win allegations associated with the World Cup. Most of us remember South Korea versus Italy at the World Cup 2002. The Ecuadorean referee Byron Moreno gave the South Korean hosts a penalty, disallowed an apparently good Italian goal in extra time that would have won the match, and then gave Italy’s Francesco Totti a second yellow card after a collision in the South Korean penalty area. From a distance of 35 yards, Moreno was sure that Totti had dived. South Korea beat a very good Italian side 2–1.
Afterwards Italy’s minister for public offences, Franco Frattini, called Moreno ‘a disgrace, absolutely scandalous’. The Gazzetta dello Sport newspaper said he was ‘the worst referee, ever’. Soon afterwards, a set of new public toilets in Sicily was named after him.
Some Italians alleged that FIFA needed South Korea to reach at least the semis, in order to keep South Korean interest in the tournament alive as long as possible. Moreover, this was part of the well-known longstanding global conspiracy against the Italian people.
Many outsiders at the time thought the Italians were overdoing it. There have been weirder refereeing performances – for instance, the one by Egyptian Gamal Ghandour when South Korea beat Spain in the next round. Moreno seemed just your common-or-garden incompetent home ref.
But three months after the World Cup, the Ecuadorean FA gave Moreno a twenty-match ban for allowing thirteen minutes of extra time (when he had signalled only six) in a Liga de Quito–Barcelona Guayaqil match. In those thirteen minutes, Quito scored twice to win 4–3. The match also featured two controversial penalties and two sendings-off. At the time, Moreno happened to be running for a spot on Quito’s city council.
Freshly returned from his ban in 2003, he was suspended again after sending off three Liga de Quito players in a match. He then resigned from refereeing, saying, ‘I’m leaving through the front door with my head held high. I prefer to die standing up than to live kneeling down.’
In 2010, he suddenly popped up again at JFK airport in New York. After landing ‘visibly nervous’, Moreno was arrested when a customs official found ‘hard objects on the defendant’s stomach, back and both of his legs’. Italy’s least favourite ref was carrying ten plastic bags of heroin. He was sentenced to thirty months in a New York jail, but was released after twenty-six due to good behaviour.
Few media noticed his arrest. Nonetheless, this looks like an interesting story about how World Cups sometimes work. Nor was Moreno necessarily an isolated case. In 2012, a Chinese referee named Lu Jun was sentenced to five and a half years in jail for taking nearly $130,000 to fix seven league matches. Hardly anyone abroad paid any attention. However, Lu Jun had refereed two games at the 2002 World Cup. Football’s routine match fixing and FIFA’s endemic corruption may be shaping outcomes of the game’s biggest tournament.
But in recent years the focus of concern has shifted away from fixing-to-win towards fixing-for-gambling. Fixing-for-gambling, too, has a long history in sports. In baseball it goes back to the Black Sox scandal of 1919 and even beyond, while any serious basketball fan has heard of the City College of New York point-shaving scandal of 1951. One of football’s earliest betting scandals, in 1962, involved three players from Sheffield Wednesday making sure they lost a game they were already expected to lose. Two facts stand out: the fix only came to light because the fixer (Jimmy Gauld) later sold his story to a newspaper; and the amounts paid to the fixers were tiny by modern standards. They only needed a small bribe because players back then earned little more than skilled labourers.
It’s still cheaper to fix badly paid players and referees. (It’s easiest of all to fix those who sometimes earn nothing at all, such as the many players in small national leagues whose wages are routinely paid late.) There’s been a lot of evidence in recent years of gambling fixes happening at lower levels of the game. Wilson Raj Perumal from Singapore became notorious in 2011 when he was arrested and served time in a Finnish prison for fixing local games. He later co-authored a book explaining how fixes work, and pointing out the large number of meaningless friendly internationals played in obscure countries in front of tiny crowds. These games, he claimed, were largely vehicles for illegal Far Eastern betting syndicates.
But if big-name players have financial problems, they too can be targeted by fixers. Gambling addiction is an ancient problem in English football – just read Paul Merson’s memoir How Not to Be a Professional Footballer. In fact, fixers corrupted the German second-division side Vfl Osnabrück after first helping its players run up gambling debts.
Even some players at World Cups – many of whom are middlingly paid journeymen – might not be immune. Simon was in the stands in Cologne at the World Cup 2006 when Brazil beat Ghana 3–0, and never for a moment imagined he was watching a fix. But Declan Hill, author of The Fix, the seminal book on match fixing and someone whose research we take very seriously, produced a pile of evidence to suggest that Asian gamblers meeting in a KFC in northern Bangkok bribed the Ghanaians to lose by more than two goals. FIFA never even investigated his allegations, which the Ghanaians denied.
Hill says that if you are a criminal looking for a money-making scheme, football gambling is now a relatively safe option. The online betting market is global, liquid and almost anonymous. Whereas smuggling