Sports betting and corruption: How to preserve the - SportAccord

Sports betting and corruption: How to preserve the integrity of sport
The Russian football championship is now one of the most corrupt in the world, to the extent that
betting operators now refuse to accept bets on matches in the Russian Second Division, as well as a
significant number in the Premier Division. Two Russian clubs are currently in the news in Western
countries: the first is the club Terek Grozny, headed up by the President of the Republic of Chechnya,
Ramzan Kadyrov. He wants to make Grozny an international shop window for his republic and has
injected very substantial funds into developing the team and infrastructure. The human rights
violations and other crimes of which Kadyrov is accused fuel rumours about his ability to rig matches.
Club Anzhi Makhachkala also became famous in 2011 for recruiting footballer Samuel Eto o for three
years at an annual salary of 20 million. At the beginning of the year, the club was bought by
millionaire Suleyman Kerimov, who has close links with Magomedsalam Magomedov, President of
the Republic of Dagestan, a neighbour of Chechnya. The enlistment of football clubs by political
dignitaries of authoritarian regimes suspected of entertaining links with criminal organisations
therefore represents an additional potential risk of corruption in sport.
Corruption in sport ex nihilo: How to rig a match from the outside
Without developing institutional links with sporting structures, criminal organisations are able to bribe
one or more athletes to alter the course of a match. They can thus take advantage of the vulnerabilities
in the world of sport that we identified earlier, and in some cases, as we have also seen, can avail
themselves of exceedingly extensive financial resources to achieve their ends. It should be noted that
in the large majority of cases, match-rigging at the instigation of criminals outside sport has the aim of
enrichment on the sports betting markets.
The direct approach: a knife to the throat or banknotes before the eyes
To convince sportspeople to fix a match, some criminals may use a classic method: threats. This
method involves using verbal methods to apply pressure, or blackmail or physical violence. In the
scandal that shook Italian football in 2011, a goalkeeper who was aproached to allow Inter to win 3-0
against Lecce received physical threats following the failure of the plan. As mentioned earlier, the
countries in which Mafia practices are most common are more likely to see this type of physical and
psychological pressure on players.
The other form of direct approach is that of financial corruption, i.e. offering a sum of money in
exchange for a poor performance. At the last European Basketball Championship in Lithuania in
September 2011, a member of the Greek delegation, Stavros Ellianidis, contacted three different
referees by telephone to convince them to favour Greece in first round matches. Specifically, he
contacted the German referee for the match against Montenegro, offering him 20,000 to favour
Greece 58 .
These direct contacts are very seldom reported. For example in tennis, the media attention given to the
Kafelnikov and Davydenko affairs encouraged some players to break their silence and admit having
been approached in the past. In Le Monde on 31 October 2007, Moroccan tennis player Younes El
Ayanaoui confided:
58 http://basket.blog.lemonde.fr/2011/09/09/un-officiel-grec-exclu-de-la-competition-pour-tentative-de-corruption/
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