By Paul Nicholson in New York
November 3 – The biggest threat to sport globally and football in particular is not corrupt administrators or athletes doping, but the infiltration of organised crime and the fixing of matches, said Chris Eaton, Director of Sport Integrity at the ICSS, speaking at the Securing Sport 2015 conference in New York.
“Believe it or not, corruption in sport administration is NOT the major integrity problem confronting sport today,” said Eaton.
“Bigger than corruption. Bigger than doping. Both of which are big enough, critical enough and potentially disastrous enough of themselves; but bigger than these, is the infiltration of organised crime into sport to fix matches and to manipulate competitions.
“For the first goes to the heart of structures created to join-up common interests in an administration, whereas the other goes to the very heart of sport itself – bringing distrust into the field of play. Organisations can always be rebuilt, but to rebuild trust in the sport itself is far more difficult.”
With international media interest focused on FIFA’s corruption scandals and athletes caught doping, Eaton says that this has served to hide the real dangers facing sport from betting fraud in the $2 trillion legal and illegal global sport betting markets worldwide.
Eaton points out that it is “a sport betting market that is many times fiscally larger than sport itself. And sport betting is even more seriously vulnerable than sport itself is to corruption.
“These past few years have seen clubs, and even entire minor leagues, co-opted by organised crime to manipulate results and betting. We have seen so-called ghost matches – in some ways ghost matches are the criminal equivalent of fantasy sports! We have seen fake matches, referees and umpires corrupted and intimidated, players and athletes bought and sold by criminals. And in these examples sport has palpably not been able to cope by itself.”
Eaton says that banning sports betting is not the answer, in fact on solution is just the opposite. He says governments should end their sports betting restrictions as they only drive sports gamblers into the hands of criminal organisations. Instead they should legalise and regulate the market.
“Sport itself can only do so much,” said Eaton. “Governments need to take a bigger role in match fixing investigations. They need to audit players, referees, and leagues. They need to dedicate resources to investigations.”
Eaton also points the finger at betting firms themselves saying “they need to share intelligence and information across borders so they can catch the fix before it’s in.”
While Eaton says that the cause is not lost, his warning is bleak: “Here is the nub of the problem, sport governing bodies are being squeezed by corruption from top and cheating and fixing from the field. And fans are disenfranchised in all this. They will ultimately vote with their feet and their wallets, and some sports will whither into obscurity as a result.”
For anyone sceptical of this potentially apocalyptic outcome for sports, then in the quote above substitute the word ‘leagues’ for ‘sports’ and then compare this with the situation with the Greek Super League and the dramatic drop in attendances, revenues and interest as match fixing and corruption took control.
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