September 30 – Italy’s Serie A has reacted to prevent recurrence of the match-fixing the league has experienced with the launch of an educational programme that will roll out to all 20 top tier clubs and cover 1,400 players.
The educational tour will be delivered by match-fixing detection specialists Sportradar and will take place over the current season. It started with a workshop for the youth teams of Inter and AC Milan.
Italian football has had a series of match-fixing scandals, the most famous of which was in 2006 which saw Juventus (then Ialian champions), Lazio and Fiorentina sanctioned with relegation to Serie B. The scandal saw the exodus of many top players including Fabio Cannavaro, Lilian Thuram, and Zlatan Ibrahimović. In total 30 players who had played at the 2006 World Cup left the league.
While this scandal was based around team managers influencing the appointment of referees, rather than betting, Italy has also had a raft of betting scandals. The Calcioscommesse investigation, which became a nationwide probe, found that matches in Serie A and B as well as Lega Pro, were fixed by organised crime syndicates, particularly from Eastern Europe, approaching individual players to fix game results.
As well as a series of education workshops Sportradar will also provide e-learning tutorials for each member of the Lega Serie A club teams. The workshops will explain why match-fixing is a growing problem, how fixers make their approaches and what the consequences of fixing are, using real-life case studies – of which Italy has a number of examples.
Lega Serie A President Maurizio Beretta said: “Thanks to the partnership with Sportradar, Lega Serie A marks a very important goal to protect Integrity in football today. The future of Lega Serie A is bright and exciting and nowhere is that clearer to see than in the youth academies run by our 20 clubs. At Lega Serie A, we take our responsibilities towards all our footballers, in particular toward the young players, very seriously: they count on us to develop them and protect them.”
Sportradar’s Managing Director Integrity and Strategy Andreas Krannich concluded: “Prevention is about more than a slide show or a booklet. This two-tier package of Fraud Prevention Services, involving interactive workshops and personal e-learning tutorials, means that the league and the clubs can take confidence in the fact that those destined to excite Serie A’s fans today and tomorrow have understood the importance of this fundamental issue and its impact.”
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