By Andrew Warshaw
June 28 – Players who are approached to fix matches or who suspect games are being rigged will be able to push a ‘panic button’ on their mobile phones to report their suspicions. The plan has been devised with European funding so that footballers across the continent can download an anti-match-fixing app to their phones and will be given a password to blow the whistle on fellow professionals via a red button.
The international players’ union FIFPro will make the system available to all players ahead of the new season.
Harri Syvasalmi, a member of Finland’s sports ministry and chair of the European Union’s Expert Group on match-fixing, revealed details of the system this week in Brussels and said FIFA needed to do more to combat the problem.
“This will be available to all players through FIFPro,” Syvasalmi told the Press Association. “A player gets a password and he can push the red button anonymously and the message goes to a place that will investigate it. He does not have to identify himself if he or she does not want to do so.”
Syvasalmi said players would even be able to report suspicions about matches they are watching on television. “That’s a possibility as well as you need those guys who watch games and understand what is going on,” he said.
Both Interpol and the European agency Europol are trying to crack down on match fixing but Syvasalmi said the problem was more widespread than law enforcement bodies had acknowledged.
“That’s the problem with the Interpol statistics – there are four or five times more cases. In the last five years there have been about 1,000 cases, and they can report only 70 a year as they don’t have any system in place. It’s 200-300 a year globally,” he said.
Syvasalmi gave credit for UEFA’s efforts in tackling match manipulation – two of Turkey’s top clubs were heavily sanctioned this week – but said FIFA needed to do more.
“We need to improve the monitoring systems markedly. UEFA is on the right path. They are monitoring 30,000 matches-plus but FIFA only 1,500. I think what UEFA puts in to that is really professional but absolutely FIFA needs to do more, and not only FIFA most of the sports federations need to do more. People think this is just a problem in football, there are a lot of cases in football but it’s is also problem in other sports – tennis, cricket, rugby.”