By Andrew Warshaw
November 28 – One of the world’s leading match-fixing investigators says it was “only a matter of time” before English football was targeted and says the latest case should serve as a wake-up call in the battle to bring down the criminal gangs and their ringleaders.
Chris Eaton (pictured), who spent 10 years at Interpol before becoming FIFA’s head of security, was not involved directly in the latest investigation uncovered by the Daily Telegraph newspaper, in which six people have been arrested, but said it proved nowhere in the world was any longer immune to betting fraud, the work of criminal gangs operating out of south-east Asia.
“The surprise for many people may be that this case involves England, with its untouchable environment where integrity has been upheld,” the outspoken Australian told Insideworldfootball. “To see this falling on the English FA is probably shocking to many people but not to me.
“If anything needed the cornerstones of football to start reacting to what is a real threat to their sport, I hope this is it. Match-fixing has come to the home of football and now we need to see global action. It’s time for governments collectively to take control.”
Eaton, who is now director of sport integrity at the International Centre for Sport Security which has offices in Qatar and Paris, says there are definite “similarities” between the new case and the arrest in Australia two months ago of a group of British footballers caught up in allegedly rigging minor Australian league fixtures.
The culprits were reportedly recruited by Tan Seet Eng – otherwise known as Dan Tan -and almost as infamous as Wilson Raj Perumal, football’s most notorious fixer. The arrest of Tan was an important breakthrough but Eaton said the English case proved he was just a cog in a well-oiled wheel.
Eaton is convinced he knows the identity of the match-fixing voice he heard in the recorded conversations in the Daily Telegraph sting operation but cannot say for legal reasons. “He is a very close friend of Perumal. These guys are fearless at being caught.”
With no professional clubs involved, he says, the English case is not among the most damaging when compared to some of the other scandals that have seriously undermined football’s credibility but should nevertheless still raise alarm bells.
“I’m pretty sure this involves the English Conference,” said Eaton. “On a footballing scale that’s at the lower level. But in terms of confirmation that this is endemic, it is the final nail in the coffin. Sports authorities and governments worldwide can no longer avoid having to face up to it.”
“Fans have got to the stage where nowadays any poor performance is looked at cynically which is a sad indictment of the integrity of the game.”
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