Special report: Match-fixers run reign of violent terror from inside Greek football

By Matt Scott
May 1 – Knuckledusters, clubs, grenades and bombs have been the weapons of choice as a match-fixing cartel terrorises Greek football. That is the shocking finding of an Insideworldfootball special investigation into the deepening corruption crisis in the Hellenic Football Federation [HFF] and several of the Super League clubs under its jurisdiction.

In a series of exclusive interviews we have uncovered how chaos reigns in Greek football with:

· A FIFA referee’s business premises being bombed after he refused to do as instructed – giving favourable decisions to one team

· The assistant head of refereeing beaten by hooligans with wooden clubs

· Newspaper-and-television headquarters firebombed and attacked with grenades

· Armed thugs attacking independent journalists in the street

As outlined in yesterday’s Insideworldfootball exclusive [see related article below], numerous senior HFF and club officials are under investigation for alleged criminal offences. The inquiry has penetrated the very heart of what some have termed the mafia-style operation at the top of Greek football.

Everyone involved in the Greek game lives in fear of reprisals, as Vassilis Papatheodorou, editor of the SDNA.gr website, told me. “There’s no one these days who has a connection to Greek professional football who’s not worried about what might happen to him,” he said.

“That’s why the majority have chosen the path of silence. The examples are right here in front of us. People who’ve lost their jobs, people whose business have been bombed. Referees who’ve made a mistake – or are perceived to have made a mistake in the eyes of the vested interests – vanish from the face of the earth, in professional terms. They’re just removed from the refereeing lists forever.

“Then there’s the psychological element as well to those who don’t suffer these consequences because they’re afraid of what has happened to the next guy. There’s no doubt the word ‘mafia’ is an accurate one to use here. Even more so because the prosecuting judge says it’s a charge under laws governing ‘membership of a criminal organisation’.”

Naturally this has led many journalists to cave in to this pervasive pressure on their livelihoods, becoming lackeys prepared to do the bidding of those involved in this ‘mafia’-style system. Others who refuse have summarily lost their jobs without explanation, left wondering if the reason is because they have reported too close to the bone.

People like the highly knowledgeable Thanos Blounas, whose specialism is writing about refereeing matters and the HFF, have despite their professional abilities found themselves out of the sector for months or years on end. Even Kyriakos Thomaidas, a true celebrity in the country after 26 unbroken seasons as the anchor presenter of “Diki”, or “The Trial on Monday”, has found the most successful football chat show on Greek television being axed by six different channels.

These are men who have stood up against the vested interests, despite the very clear risks. Papatheodorou has bravely let it be known he has testified to prosecutors, though he refuses to divulge anything about any conversation he has had with the law-enforcement agencies. He certainly knows what is at stake: by his side as we talk is someone who has had unwelcome personal experience of the dark forces at work in the Greek game.

Like his boss, Aris Asvestas has a reputation for refusing to be cowed by the pressures that have caused others to be influenced in their professional activities. And this is despite the fact he has personally suffered for refusing to cooperate with what he and everyone else confronted by it calls ‘The System’.

“There are around 10 journalists who have either been threatened or physically attacked outside their homes, in press boxes or stadiums or at their places of work,” Asvestas told me. “Some of the victims are afraid to make proper complaints so the assaults never get reported to the authorities.

“I was the victim of an attack outside my home [in September 2012]. It’s something that had never happened to me before. I’d had plenty of threats but no assault. It scared me. Now I have to look over my shoulder all the time, so I’m left with a small psychological scar; I don’t go to matches any more. But it has also pushed me to keep reporting on the corruption.”

Asvestas’s scars are not only psychological. He bears marks around his mouth that required stitches after two men with knuckledusters ambushed him outside his own home. Asvestas’s experiences reflect a deep sense of paranoia among those who seek to punish and frighten journalists into delivering a certain type of reporting. And those who comply are inadvertently inciting thugs towards acts of extreme violence.

Media forced to boost security after grenade attacks

Yiannis Alafouzos is the softly spoken owner of Panathinaikos, Greece’s second-most-successful team with 20 titles as national champion. He is also the owner of a number of influential media outlets, including the Skaï television channel and the Kathimerini national newspaper.

But unlike most media buildings in many other countries, where security is generally light, Alafouzos explains that getting in to the Skaï HQ is necessarily now like gaining access to a military installation, with a number of checkpoints before visitors can reach the offices inside. “We have to do it like this,” Alafouzos told Insideworldfootball,

“Three times in this building we were attacked. Once men in hoods threw metal blocks through the windows and then threw Molotov cocktails and we had a small fire in one of our offices. Twice we had grenades thrown in. One had the pin out when it was thrown but it was old and so it didn’t go off. The other time was when a grenade was thrown that had had the mechanism removed. A police investigation is under way.”

Had those grenades not been duds, the consequences would have been unthinkable. But again it is clear how psychological pressures are being exerted against those who stand up to The System. Some understandably find the trauma unbearable. Hugh Dallas, the former head of referee development at the Scottish Football Association and a UEFA refereeing officer, was engaged by the HFF to oversee match officiating in the Greek Super League.

“Hugh Dallas came here and for the first two or three games The System continued to appoint the referees,” Alafouzos told me. “Then he took over and started correcting things with a mixing of the referees. The standard of refereeing improved immediately. Then they had this fiasco at one match in particular. Hugh Dallas said it was the worst refereeing he had ever seen in his life. More or less immediately after that he disappeared and retired from the HFF.”

Shortly before Dallas left Greece, his assistant, Christoforos Zografos, was taken to hospital for treatment on head injuries after being attacked in the street by two men allegedly carrying wooden clubs. Small wonder Dallas, not a man who can be accused of a faint heart after he was himself struck by a coin while refereeing a fractious Old Firm match between Celtic and Rangers, chose not to continue in his HFF post. These are the intolerable strains honest officials have faced in the Greek game. Indeed for one in particular, his principles almost cost him his life.

Bomb attack turns Crazy Wolf baker and referee into MP

Without question the most chilling testimony emerging from this investigation came from Petros Konstantineas, a former match official. He had never intended to become a referee but, after injury cut short a promising basketball career that had seen him feature in the Greek national junior squads, he fell into it upon the advice of a family friend.

Konstantineas is a larger-than-life character: a tall, handsome man in his mid 30s with a ready laugh. He had obtained the name ‘the Crazy Wolf’ over the course of his refereeing career on account of his effortless running, his thick, black beard and his penchant for biting back. “I started as a referee’s assistant and I was very immature at the time,” he told me.

“It’s usual that you are sworn at all the time as a match official. Every week there are stories in the newspapers about how referees are being beaten up. But when I got sworn at I lost my temper and jumped into the stands. The story was that the referee has beaten up the fans! I was very immature. But in the local referees’ union I was a minor hero because it was the first time that anyone had fought back. They all wanted to referee with me!”

It was clear that this Wolf would not be tamed by The System. Those in charge of the refereeing lists knew Konstantineas was spirited and independent. As he rose through the leagues, and despite a number of exceptional performances with the whistle, the expectation was that he would not be handed Super League matches. But Konstantineas was impossible to overlook.

“The news in the media was that I wasn’t going to be included in the Super League’s refereeing lists,” Konstantineas told me. “Then [the HFF] President Pilavios said, ‘You’ve been included.’ I promised before God to him that I would be the best referee that year, and that if I was not by mid-season I would leave of my own accord. Mr Pilavios was laughing at my response and said, ‘I’ve only met this guy twice, what kind of bollocks is this?'”

But despite the few who warmed to him, Konstantineas sensed there were powerful forces inside the HFF that wanted him to fail. “They were waiting for a mistake from me to take me out of the refereeing tables,” he said. “There was huge pressure in every match.

“But this season, after the end of it, the referees gathered together in the summer and announced who the best referee that season had been. I always expected that the same three guys would receive the accolade. But amazingly I had come out on top and even those who didn’t like me gave me a standing ovation. Even my enemies were laughing and saying, ‘He had a great season – give it to him and he’ll get off our backs!’

“After that award I had a tailwind and I took the exams to become an international ref. Things were much more favourable and I was nominated as an international. They couldn’t do the opposite now.”

The FIFA status Konstantineas achieved gave him a profile but still The System mistakenly believed it could control him. Early in 2012 he was handed an important match, entrusted with delivering the decisions that would guarantee a certain team achieved the prescribed result.

“I said, ‘I am the wrong man for the job.’ I told them the best and the luckiest team would win. I understood then that something really wrong was happening at the HFF. But I also knew I was trapped. I had to make [that team] win or my career was finished.

“The easiest thing to say would have been that I’d got an injury and they would appoint someone else. But this was against my set of values because if I did this I would go from being a wolf to a sheep. I looked up to my wife’s and my parents’ moral values. They had built something and I shouldn’t tear it down. I became very emotional about this.”

His voice cracks as he says these words, demonstrating how emotional he still is about it all. But despite his sentimentality as a man, he remained steadfast as a referee and, in the absence of a corrupt official, the favoured team lost the match. The System did not let it lie, stirring up their friendly reporters with claims he had denied that team three certain penalties. “Already by the time I left the dressing room there was a media frenzy against me,” recalled Konstantineas. “All the TV stations, the radio and the press, everyone wanted to know about things.

“I know very well if my refereeing was good or bad and the safest criterion is always the judgement of the fans. And when [that team got back to their home town] after the match there were 50 of their fans who went along to protest about the team’s performance. When I pointed this out no TV station even mentioned it. No one reported it. So that’s evidence of how they’re controlled.

“After the end of the match when I went to the hotel I was threatened by [that team’s] officials, ‘You’re finished, you’re this, you’re that… that’s the end of you.'”

He was duly taken off the refereeing lists for an indefinite period. Konstantineas came under yet more media pressure to resign as a referee altogether. With a storm brewing in the press, a rock was thrown through the window of the bakery he owned in his hometown. But he wanted to fulfil the chance to referee internationally and refused to yield.

Upon his return from a FIFA-referees seminar in Turkey, a media huddle gathered around him. “The reporters kept asking me, ‘Are you going to resign?’ In front of the cameras I said right then, ‘Whoever harms me I’ll chop his legs off.’ I didn’t mean to be aggressive, I just wanted to make clear that I would protect myself.

“Straight after I made that statement a bomb was placed in my bakery and exploded in the middle of the night. My business was destroyed instantly – 10 cars were damaged outside. It was nightmarish. This had never happened in my town before. Even the police inspector was shocked. The bomb exploded at 1.20am, and I had planned to go to work at 3am, which is typical for a baker. It was only sheer luck that no one was injured.”

From beatings to bombs. It was clear that things had got completely out of hand. Ordinary, honest people, sickened by this sinister System, swung behind Konstantineas and what he stood for. He never did referee at international level but what he lost in football he gained in public life. Konstantineas developed a huge following in his home town as an icon for the struggle against the corruption of the establishment. Incredibly, even without his campaigning for it, this groundswell of support for Konstantineas saw him elected as a Syriza MP at the last election.

“I believe that [bombing] was my enemies making a very big PR mistake,” he said. “Because from then on I became a headline in every paper and TV station. It spilled over from the sports section into the front pages. That was a big PR mistake from my enemies.”

From darkness to light?

It may very well have been an act of fatal hubris. Ask the victims of the attacks who they believe these enemies are and they prefer not to say; though they know, of course. Not that these courageous men have suddenly lost their bottle. Far from it: they consider the harassment merely an occupational hazard. As Papatheodorou added pragmatically: “Football is a dark place and darkness is afraid of light. If you shed light on it, sometimes it reacts.”

They can put up with that. But the brave men who have stood up to The System at last have something to cling to. As the wheels of justice turn, it seems the time when The System could pull the strings from the shadows might soon, mercifully, come to an