Brussels, 02/06/2015 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday 2 June, the European Parliament held its third conference on the explosion of rigged sports matches in Europe, where the speakers painted an alarming picture, providing facts and figures and proposing a series of measures to tackle corruption in sport.
In 2012 alone, the turnover of betting on sports matches at global level reached €500 billion, 10% of it generated by organised crime. Rigged matches are particularly common on countries badly hit by the economic crisis and slashed public spending, such as Greece and Portugal, where some players haven't been paid for months, explained Francesco Baranca of Federbet, an international organisation that combats rigged matches.
All areas of sports are affected by rigged matches, but a speaker pointed out that football is the main culprit. Marc Tarabella (S&D, Belgium), the MEP behind the conference, said that Europol detected 680 rigged matches between 2008 and 2011 and the 2013-14 season added a further 460 to this figure. He said that very strong suspicions hung over more than 50 European football matches in the 2014-2015 seasons, explaining that corruption had now migrated from high-level matches to secondary matches and lower divisions and women's football was not immune to it.
Championships involving teams from the first, second and third divisions are regularly the victim of corruption and rigged matches, particularly in Cyprus (50% of matches in 2013) and Malta, along with Italy, Germany, Belgium, Croatia, France, Greece, Latvia, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Ukraine and even Sweden, despite it being the fourth least corrupt country in the world. According to a 2014 report by Federbet, Europa League had the highest number of rigged matches that year. UEFA, the European Football Association Union, did not detect any rigged matches that year.
Marc Tarabella went on to list a raft of measures to be taken to deal with this scourge, namely deciding on a definition of fraud in sport and adding the crime to national legal systems; introducing a systematic cooperation system between sports betting and leagues once a rigging or anomaly has been detected; including operators in the financing of mechanisms to detect rigged matches. The MEP said that from his point of view, betting should be banned once matches have started, along with betting on the number of yellow or red cards.
After the conference, several complaints will be lodged with inspection agencies. Tarabella said he wanted to organise a debate at the upcoming plenary session following the re-election of Sepp Blatter as the head of FIFA, despite the raft of corruption cases that rocked the organisation during his time in the chair. In this connection, a meeting of the Intergroup on Sport will be held on 29 September in order to draw up selection criteria for big sports events. (Pascal Hansens)