SOCCER CORRUPTIONS SCANDALS AROUND THE WORLD
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Football corruption getting worse, Asian chief says
01-09-2006, 05h37
Corruption in football is getting worse and FIFA must insist on the full democratisation and transparency of all its members, according to the head of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC).
Over the past weeks, Vietnamese football has slowly been sinking under the weight of far-reaching match-fixing and corruption allegations and, sadly for Asia, it is not a new phenomenon.
The issue has been part of the game for years, with high-profile cases previously reported in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and more recently China.
But the scourge is not specific to the region. Its tentacles spread far and wide with Europe, South America and Africa all caught in the net last year.
"It is worsening. Especially when we hear about incidents in other confederations and national associations such as Germany and Brazil," AFC president Mohammed Bin Hammam told AFP.
"I expect that what we don't know is much more than we know.
"As far as the AFC competitions are concerned, we have never suspected any incidents. However, corruption in other organisations does exist on a large scale.
"I am aware of the intensive illegal betting which takes place in some Asian countries, targeting primarily the foreign football leagues. How much this is specifically affecting local football is not yet known."
English Premier League manager Harry Redknapp famously put the cat among the pigeons in 2003 when he said that every manager had been offered a bung at one time or another.
While that was never proven there is plenty of evidence that betting syndicates remain strong and money changes hands to fix matches around the world.
In a major scandal last year, Brazilian referee Edilson Pereira de Carvalho was banned for life after admitting match fixing. It culminated in the results of 11 league matches he had refereed being cancelled.
Also last year Genoa were demoted from the Serie A to the third division (C1) for match-fixing, while Belgium, Portugal, the Czech Republic and Germany were all rocked by corruption or match-fixing probes.
In the highest profile case, Berlin referee Robert Hoyzer admitted to manipulating four games in Germany for cash from a Croatian betting syndicate.
While countries like Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia have cleaned up their acts since scandals in the 1980s and 1990s, Vietnam and China still have a long way to go.
In its maiden season in 2004, China's Super League was left reeling from loud accusations over gambling as well as crooked referees, players and officials on almost a weekly basis.
It got so bad that China's cabinet stepped in and ordered a crackdown on match-fixing and hooliganism.
In Vietnam, football has been under intense scrutiny for months, with police investigating fraud allegations implicating some 90 players, referees and coaches in the V-League.
The saga took on greater dimensions after several members of the national under-23 squad were suspected of having fixed games at the request of betting syndicates during last month's Southeast Asian Games.
Bin Hammam said the solution lay with everyone involved -- FIFA, confederations and national associations.
"But I believe we also need to be sure that none of these organisations are implicated," he said.
"In my frank opinion, I do not suspect that the governing bodies are implicated, but this is of course from a distant perspective.
"I do think that FIFA should insist on the democratisation and transparency of all of its members. It is tough and hard work, but I believe this must happen or we will lose our beloved game."
FIFA has said it was actively working to address the problems and had set up a task force, "For the Good of the Game", in November.
Concrete proposals on how to deal with corruption, illegal betting and a range of other issues are expected to be tabled at its next meeting in Zurich in February.
"We are working on it. We are aware of the situation but it is not easy," FIFA president Sepp Blatter told AFP last month. "It can only be done if everyone is helping us."
CZECH REPUBLIC
"There are only two clubs without clear evidence of corruption," Police Presidium spokeswoman Blanka Kosinova said after investigators scrutinised each game report from the Gambrinus liga season and club documents about player transactions.
Praguepost.com reports that Police have brought corruption charges against five referees and against the FC Synot soccer club's sports director, Jaroslav Hastik.
Police said they obtained evidence in those cases after bugging phones and videotaping referees accepting bribes.
Hastik allegedly attempted to pay referee Stanislav Hruska 175,000 Kc ($6,480) for helping fix a game on March 27 between Synot and Sparta that Synot won 2-0.
Hastik paid another referee, Vaclav Zejda, 120,000 Kc for assisting in Synot's 3-1 win over Blsany earlier in the spring, Police said.
CMFS Chairman Jan Obst said the current scandal has shed light on corrupt practices in Czech soccer.
"It was a public secret that bribes in soccer occur from time to time, but we had no evidence until the police got involved," Obst said.
Well that gets the Czech Football authorities out of it then. Eh?
GERMANY
At least German footy cannot be tarred with the same brush of corruption as that of the Italian game.
Oops, wrong again.
Only 16 months before the World Cup tournament kicks off in Germany, this soccer-crazy nation has been hit by one of the biggest scandal in German sports history. ... German soccer roiled by match-fixing charges. Referees allegedly bought off; scandal hurts ahead of World Cup ... international competition, is now immediately associated with corruption ...
Witness the scandal that broke in 2005 in Germany. Referee Robert Hoyzer has admitted his involvement with match fixing to his lawyer, according to TV News channel N24, Suddeutsche Zeitung and the tabloid newspaper Bild have reported the suggestion of involvement of Croatian criminal gangs in the scandal. Hoyzer has been suspended by the German FA, the Deutscher Fußball Bund (DFB), and he may spend ten years in gaol. More suspensions and arrests seem likely as investigations continue. Not too pretty an image for a country less than 18 months away from hosting the 2006 World Cup.
In 2000 there was the Christoph Daum affair, in which the former manager of Bayer Leverkusen, in line for promotion to national team supreme, at first denied taking cocaine, but then he consented to having a hair tested for the drug. The positive result meant he was on the next plane to Florida rather than the national team HQ.
Prior to that, in the 1970s, corruption was up and attendances down for Deutscher Fußball Bund (DFB) Bundesliga matches. As for the 60s, Hesse-Lichtenberger states that in the Bundesliga ‘.. there were probably more hidden accounts and suitcases filled with cash than in all the world's dubious offshore tax havens put together.'
The book from which the above quote was taken - Tor! The Story of German Football - is a fascinating account of the game in Germany: its roots in the athletic clubs of the eighteenth century; the World Wars; the first international successes; the subsequent formation of the DFB in West Germany; the game in East Germany; and up to the present state of the game.
Written by Dortmund fan Hesse-Lichtenberger, who doesn't shirk passing judgment on those with whom he disagrees, the book also goes into the geo-political reasons for the health or otherwise of German football.
PORTUGAL
Portuguese football champions shaken by corruption charges
Eduardo Goncalves in Lisbon and Denis Campbell
Sunday December 26, 2004
The Observer
The Portuguese football club that Chelsea coach José Mourinho turned into European champions is at the centre of a huge corruption scandal involving claims that referees were bribed to fix matches.
Jorge Nuno Pinto da Costa, the president of Porto, is one of 22 senior figures in Portuguese soccer who have been charged with influencing referees to help his team by disallowing goals and penalising their opponents.
The 'golden whistle' affair has tarnished the image of a country which just six months ago won widespread praise for hosting football's 2004 European Championships, in which the hosts reached the final.
Pinto da Costa is the most prominent of an array of officials, referees and businessmen who have been charged with five counts of influencing referees, corrupting the game and falsifying documents.
He has been the president of Porto since 1981. They have won the Portuguese league seven times in the past decade, including twice under Mourinho, in 2003 and 2004. Mourinho quit Porto in June, after leading them to victory in the Champions League, to join Chelsea.
The arrests follow persistent claims of match-rigging in Portugal's SuperLiga. Dias da Cunha, the president of rival club Sporting Lisbon, claimed last week that 'dirty money is ending up with corrupt referees' and that individuals who make the 'the system' are controlling the officials.
He is furious that Sporting were denied a key victory in the league title race two weeks ago when the referee controversially disallowed a goal by their midfielder Hugo Viana, who is on loan from Newcastle United. The decision sparked uproar and helped Porto take a one-point lead at the top of the SuperLiga going into the Christmas break.
He also claimed last season that 'the only reason why Sporting is not top of the league is because it was robbed of nine points' in games notable for hotly disputed refereeing decisions.
Francisco Costinha, the Porto captain, has defended his club's boss as 'a great president [who is] very ethical.' But Vitor Reis, the head of Portugal's Association of Football Referees, has welcomed the police's action. 'It is time to once and for all establish who in football and refereeing has ethics and who does not,' said Reis.
Valentim Loureiro, the president of the Portuguese Professional Football League, has been charged with 18 offences arising from the police's 'golden whistle' inquiry, while Pinto da Sousa, who is in charge of refereeing at the Portuguese Football Association, is accused of 21 crimes. Antonia Henriques, vice-president of the national referees centre, is also charged with encouraging referees to make match-turning biased decisions.
Eight referees and two assistant referees are also among those charged. No players have yet been linked to the scandal, although inquiries by Portugal's Judicial Police are continuing. More arrests are expected.
Portuguese football has long been beset by claims of widespread corruption in the transfer of players. João Vale e Azevedo, the former president of Lisbon club Benfica, was released from jail in July after serving four years for fraud involving the transfer of a goalkeeper to Porto.
TANZANIA
Tanzania's Ndolanga in court
By Emmanuel Muga
BBC Sport, Dar es Salaam
A court case against the president of the Tanzania Football Federation (TFF) Muhidin Ndolanga has begun in Dar es Salaam.
Ndolanga has been accused, along with the TFF accountant Yonaza Seleki, former secretary general Ismail Aden Rage and businesswoman Speciyoza Rugazia.of stealing US $52,000 from the federation.
It has taken four years for the case to get to court, as Ndolanga had challenged the right of the prosecutors to lay charges against him.
However, police superintendent Willy Mlulu convinced the court that Ndolanga and the other accused had a case to answer, after finding 20 witnesses to provide evidence in support of the corruption charges.
Ndolanga and his co-defendants are currently free on conditional bail but will not allowed to leave Dar es Salaam without the court's permission.
The accused persons made their first appearance in court on Friday in Dar es Salaam and return to court on 20 September.
World football governing body Fifa had ordered the sacking of Ndolanga in February after receiving a report from envoy Joseph Mifsud, who had investigated a crisis that had erupted in September 2003.
But Ndolanga returned to power in the elections that took place following the Fifa directive.
PORTUGAL again.
LISBON - A court in northern Portugal has placed the president of European champions FC Porto under judicial investigation for alleged football corruption, the first step to formal charges.
Jorge Nuno Pinto da Costa was summoned to appear before a magistrate investigating alleged attempts to influence referees in
a case which has already led to 21 arrests after police searched his home, and the club's headquarters, in the northern city of
Oporto on Thursday.
He voluntarily arrived at a courthouse in Gondomar, an industrial town just east of Oporto, surrounded by Porto fans and
left three and a half hours later.
Pinto da Costa was told to return for questioning on Tuesday, the same day that Porto will host Chelsea in the Champions League.
A conviction of sports corruption by the head of a club carries a maximum jail sentence of four years according to Portuguese law.
Pinto da Costa received a standing ovation from Porto fans, who chanted his name, when he arrived at Porto's Stadium of the Dragon for the second half of his club's 1-0 loss to Beira-Mar Aveiro later Friday.
Despite the defeat, Porto still lead the Portuguese premier league.
He has headed the northern club for more than two decades and is one of the most influential figures in Portuguese football.
The investigation into Pinto da Costa has pushed a political crisis, sparked by President Jorge Sampaio's decision on Tuesday to dissolve parliament and call an early vote, from the front pages of newspapers and the top of newscasts.
Police also detained four leading referees, as well as a player agent, on Thursday in Oporto, the northern city of Braga and the
southern city of Evora.
One was questioned and released, while the other four were held in prison overnight and questioned on Friday.
Among those detained was referee Augusto Duarte, 38, who was scheduled to rule over Sunday's first league match between
Academica and Sporting Lisbon, and agent Antonio Araujo, 43, who was involved in Porto's signing of several players, including Brazilian playmaker Diego.
Diego signed a five-year contract with Porto in July worth seven million euros (9.3 million dollars).
The five men face charges of several sports corruption which carry a penalty of up to three years, a court spokeswoman told
reporters.
All four referees meanwhile have been suspended, while the court also barred Duarte from speaking or otherwise contacting the Porto president.
The detention of the five men was part of a follow-up to the so-called "Operation Golden Whistle" launched in April in which
police arrested 16 people, including president of the Portuguese Professional Football League, Valentim Loureiro, and the head of the country's referees' council, Antonio Pinto de Sousa.
Both men have had their mandates suspended.
Police also arrested nine lower-ranking referees as part of their sweep carried out in April. All 16 men are awaiting trial.
The detentions were made after a 15-month investigation, involving wiretaps of telephone calls, which police said had
uncovered strong indications of sports corruption and influence trafficking involving referees.
ENGLAND
Transfer corruption 'rife'
Exclusive by Tom Fordyce
Illegal transfer dealings are rife within English football, according to a high-profile agent.
The agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told BBC Sport that both clubs and agents routinely break both Fifa and Football Association rules - and get away scot-free.
The agent claims that:
players are frequently tapped up illegally by other clubs
unlicensed agents operate throughout the game
certain agents illegally attempt to steal other agents' players.
And Graham Bean, former head of the FA's compliance unit, admitted the problems are almost impossible for the FA to deal with.
"Every time you think you've tied the loose ends up, you always find another loophole," he told BBC Sport.
Under Fifa rules, it is illegal for a club or agent to approach another club's player unless the two clubs have already agreed to a transfer and price.
But the agent claims existing regulations are regularly flouted by many within the game.
"The reality is that players have often already been tapped up before a transfer bid," he said.
"That means the buying club already have a pretty good idea of whether the player will go or not before they make their offer. That goes on at all levels - all throughout the Nationwide divisions as well.
Unauthorised contact
"As licensed agents, we are not supposed to enter into any discussions with or on behalf of players contracted to us unless we are specifically authorised to do it by the club that has him at the moment.
"But it goes on all the time. It's been going on since time began."
To operate as an agent you must be licensed by Fifa, passing an exam set by the FA and taking out professional indemnity insurance to ensure good practice.
"Lots of the people involved are not licensed. There are lots of ways you can be active and not get found out," says the agent.
"The FA has a scheme whereby, if you look after a player, you have to have them under contract and send that to the FA. The FA then has a register of who looks after whom.
"But what happens is that players won't sign a formal commitment to an agent. They will say to agents, well, I'll sign with the guy who can get me a move.
"So you can have a number of different agents touting the same player around to try to get a bite. Then they will go back to the player and say, right, I've got you a deal with Club X, now you've got to sign with me. That's his way into the player."
The FA has defended its record in attacking corruption in the game, telling BBC Sport that much of its work was covert and so unlikely to come to the public's attention.
Impossible fight
But Bean believes the FA is fighting a losing battle.
"Irrespective of how you want to window-dress it, you cannot get away from the fact that the world of agents is a very murky one," he said.
"That will always be the case, even if the authorities put in watertight restrictions on agents' conduct. Football is a cash business, and money ebbs and flows. You will never ever take away that.
"You have agents manipulating moves. And when it comes to sitting down and discussing personal terms, the agent might stop the move from going ahead, even if the player is happy with it, because the agent won't be happy with it.
"Agents have a stranglehold on the game that has taken all common sense out of it."
Air of suspicion
Bean is also concerned about the amount of money certain agents make from transfer deals in which - on the surface at least - they have played no part.
An agent may pass on a significant cut of his fee to another agent who has helped him make a particular deal - but the size and destination of payments are not always made public.
"These secondary payments further down the line have an air of suspicion around them," said Bean.
"Someone further down the line will have better contacts at the buying or selling club than the main agent doing the deal.
"So for his part in the deal he has to receive a payment, which is usually arranged between him and the agent - like a businessman sub-contracting work out in any other industry.
"And while there is nothing necessarily wrong with that, I just think in the football industry - when it has to be accountable to the public - that will be viewed with an air of suspicion.
"They have to look at plugging that gap."
'Murderously difficult'
The agent also told BBC Sport that players are often approached illegally by other agents, even if they are registered with an agent at the FA.
"They will phone the player, the player's mother and girlfriend and try to seduce them with talk of how they can make them more money. 'You shouldn't be signing for them, I can get you a better move,'" he said.
"Agents can always get access to your player, even if you have them under contract. Someone will know one of his team-mates, who will pass on his mobile number, and then they're in. It's murderously difficult for the player."
In response to the claims by the agent and Bean, an FA spokesman said, "A significant amount of work completed by the compliance unit is done so in a covert manner.
"Therefore the comments you have supplied to us from an unnamed top agent are likely to have been provided without the full knowledge of the extensive work which is ongoing in this area."
BRAZIL
Brazil's not Taylor made.
BBC Sport Online's Tim Vickery believes comparisons between Brazil's investigation into corruption in football and England's Taylor Report ill-founded.
Fourteen months ago, a Senate comission began an inquiry into corruption in Brazilian football.
At the time, the consensus of opinion was the whole thing would be nothing more than a whitewash.
But last week its damning report was issued recommending that charges be brought against 17 prominent figures.
The author of the report, Senator Althoff, admitted that the investigation had done nothing more than find the tip of the iceberg of corruption in the Brazilian game.
Even so, it was a bad week for the old order.
But it is one thing to expose wrong doing, and another thing to punish the guilty and build for the future.
Brazil is known as a land without consequences, where the rich don't go to jail and the feudal barons are never overthrown.
The question now becomes where does Brazilian football go from here?
The hugely respected journalist Juca Kfouri has long campaigned for a clean up.
Last week he compared the Commission of Inquiry with the Taylor Report, the post-Hillsborough investigation credited with launching the boom in English football.
It is not a comparison to be taken too literally. The crux of the Taylor Report was the demand to increase the quality of stadia.
The process was inevitably accompanied by a huge rise in ticket prices - something unthinkable in contemporary Brazil, where the pressure on prices is downward.
The building block of the English boom has been the supporter/consumer, with plenty of money in his pocket.
Such a species is much harder to find in contemporary South America.
The English clubs make fortunes from merchandising. But in Brazil, where copyright protection in extremely weak, millions of supporters buy pirate shirts at a fraction of the cost of official products.
Pipe dream
There is little chance of this changing. The informal economy is massively important in Brazil.
It supplies millions of much-needed jobs, and moving against it is politically dangerous.
England's clubs have also raised money by going to the stock market to sell shares.
There was talk of the same thing happening in Brazil, but at the moment that is nothing more than a pipe dream. The local stock market is small and stagnant.
If solid companies with good track records are unable to raise funds, there seems little hope for the chaotic football clubs.
The fact is that English and Brazilian societies are very different, going through different stages of development.
The post-Taylor model is unlikely to have much success in Brazil, which does not mean that nothing can be done. Brazilian football needs to find its own model.
Intelligent planning
Credible competitons are obviously essential - the national championship has changed its rules every year since its introduction in 1971, which obviously makes it harder to create a solid tradition.
What is clearly not viable is the practice of paying European-level wages.
Many clubs have tried and are drowning in debt.
They have now been shown up by São Caetano, a tiny team from the industrial outskirts of São Paulo who celebrated their 12th birthday earlier this month.
Their payroll is less than 20% of that of some of the big clubs, but on Sunday they made it through to the final of the Brazilian championship for the second successive year.
Hard work, competence and intelligent planning can be a successful formula anywhere in the world.
ENGLAND
from BBC
Sven alleges corruption in football
England manager Sven Goran Eriksson has made a series of allegations about corruption in football, it was reported.
In secretly-taped conversations with an undercover News of the World reporter, Eriksson spoke of his suspicions about transfer dealings.
The Swede had been discussing running Aston Villa after the World Cup with the journalist who was posing as a rich Arab prepared to buy the club.
But he said: "If I come there I don't want anything to do with money, money to transfer, because in England it is always this [sways from side to side]."
Asked if managers always became involved in transfers he said: "Yeah, and of course they put money in their pocket."
Eriksson named three clubs in the discussion, which have not been identified by the newspaper.
One was described as having a "stereotypical dodgy manager" while the boss of another was said to have thrown a "smoke screen" over an attempted bung.
A third was said to have paid "far too much for certain players because of illegal deals with agents and managers".
Football Association spokesman Adrian Bevington said they would assess the claims.
They come after Luton manager Mike Newell alleged that he had been offered money during transfer deals.
FRANCE
May 20 - In France, start the "Affair OM-VA" corruption scandal by Olympique de Marseille and Valenciennes FC. One week later, on May 26, Marseille's squad win the UEFA Champions League defeating AC Milan 1-0 at the Olympiastadion in Munich. On May 29, Marseille win the French league, but are stripped of the title by the French Football Federation on September 22, with no winner assigned. In October/November the French national football team fail to qualify for the 1994 World Cup after losses to Israel and Bulgaria.
I could go on and on, just do a search on the net and you'll realize that bad people are not just in Italy, but in every single country of the world where there is money to be made.
The best mafia is where you can't see it.
Football Scandals Around The World
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