Brussels, 03/06/2014 (Agence Europe) - Nearly 460 European football matches may have been rigged in the 2013-2014 season and 110 certainly were rigged, “without a shadow of a doubt” said Belgian S&D MEP Marc Tarabella (S&D) in Brussels on Tuesday 3 June, who is heading an awareness-raising campaign about corruption in European sport. He said in a press release that FIFA was sensitive to the question and would be monitoring betting for each match in the World Cup in Brazil.
From 2008 to 2011, Europol detected 680 rigged matches. Tarabella says that rigged matches in the 2013-14 season have doubled to 460. Betting on sports matches has a global annual turnover of more than half a trillion dollars and the European authorities say that 10% of this comes from criminal sources (money-laundering and corruption, according to Tarabella.
All professional championships see rigged matches, particularly at the lower levels and women's matches, added the MEP, because there are fewer controls on such matches. The main countries involved are France, such as a Ligue 2 match between Bastia and Clermont, and the United Kingdom, where 13 amateur matches were rigged, Italy, where 9 matches have been rigged since 1 January 2014, and Greece, where 5 Division 1 matches have been rigged. Some preliminary matches in the July 2013 Champions' League were also rigged.
Rigging has also been found in tennis matches, such as a match involving Belgian player Olivier Rochus in April, and Tarabella says all the relevant authorities must take speedy action, especially because the World Cup in Brazil is about to start and new corruption allegations have been made about organisation of the World Cup in Qatar in 2022.
The MEP said that the European Parliament has voted through a number of items of legislation to tackle money-laundering, corruption and rigged matches and has managed to have betting on youth league matches banned. The problem is that few cases are taken to court and most national federations are afraid to make accusations or encourage teams to do so for fear of giving sport a bad name, despite the fact that the legislators want to remove corruption. He said UEFA clearly had a role to play here.
Another problem, said Tarabella, is that fines are not big enough and are not necessarily international, thus allowing guilty parties to get away with it. (SP)