By Andrew Warshaw, Chief Correspondent, in Doha
March 19 – Chris Eaton (pictured), one of the world’s leading experts on match-fixing, has warned that the recent investigation into possible rigging at lower-league English level could be the start of something far more sinister.
The English Football Association last week contacted every club in the Conference South – six rungs below the Premier League – after being made aware of suspicious betting patterns in a number of matches.
Eaton, who left FIFA to become director of sport integrity for the International Centre for Sport Security, said that while match-fixing normally starts at the bottom end of the scale, it invariably percolates upwards.
“The allegations in the UK today are exactly replicated in other countries where they started in lower leagues and worked their way up,” said Eaton, speaking at the Securing Sport 2013 conference in Doha.
“All sportsmen start on the grass and dust fields on villages across the world. The allegations about the lower leagues in England should give them cause for concern. To say that the higher games are not targeted is untrue, even if they are more difficult to fix.”
Eaton warned that players brought up in countries where corruption in football is less regulated were easy targets when transferred to more affluent leagues. “Some of the enormous number of foreign players come from countries who have a history of corruption. We know that players have been recruited, definitely in their early teens, often in a totally unconscious way. Football needs to do due diligence tests on players in the transfer system to check on their background.”
Meanwhile, Friedrich Stickler, president of The European Lotteries which covers the entire continent, painted a grim picture of efforts to combat match-fixing.
“It’s very hard to control this with the monitoring systems because maybe the game is being played in Europe but the manipulation was done from somewhere else and the bets are being placed in Asia,” he said.
Stickler believes governments should define manipulation as a criminal offence. “This is big business and really frightening. We are not just second division and leagues in countries no-one has heard of. If you smuggle drugs maybe you lose your head but if you fix matches you may just be sent home and told not to do it again.”
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