FIFA Doesn't Care About Match Fixing

On May 21, 2011, Real Zaragoza went into its last game of the La Liga season needing to win at Levante to escape relegation and cling to life in Spain's first division for another year. Zaragoza had been lousy on the road that year, to the tune of 12 points in 18 games, but they rode two spectacular goals from then-captain Gabi Fernandez to dry land and a famous 2-1 win over the Valencians. Debt-riddled Zaragoza's survival was a financial necessity, but it proved to be a temporary fix. The club was relegated to the less lucrative Segunda Division following the 2012-13 season and is now facing liquidation.

The stakes of relegation are high across soccer, and in this particular case, Zaragoza was motivated enough by the threat of relegation that their president, Agapito Iglesias, allegedly arranged for the 2011 match with Levante to be fixed.

According to documents obtained by the Spanish state, which is running the case, 12 Levante players were paid a total of €120,000 by Iglesias to throw the match. It's unclear what role Zaragoza players had in carrying out the fix, but the court found that eight Zaragoza players received bonus money a few days before the game, to the tune of €727,120. Every one of the eight players under investigation, including the since transferred Ander Herrera, has claimed that they returned the bonus money to Iglesias and didn't know what it was for. Gabi, then the team's star defensive midfielder, signed for all the money going to himself and his teammates, and while there isn't hard evidence that he or any Zaragozans were in on the fix, the timing of the deposits— especially in light of the club's looming bankruptcy—remains suspicious.

Gabi is now the captain of Atletico Madrid and Herrera plays for Manchester United. If either is found guilty, they face jail time and a lifetime ban from La Liga. Their defense hinges on whether or not they knew what the money was for, so complicity is going to be hard to prove. But beyond the guilt or innocence of a few stars, the Levante-Zaragoza fix is illustrative for how casual the whole affair was.

The La Liga fix didn't take the intimidation or resources of a transnational crime syndicate. The current investigation is taking place three-and-a-half years after the fact and some accused conspirators are exempt from all proceedings simply because they're out of the country. FIFA and UEFA have yet to look up over their piles of cash and notice that the highest ranked league in the world is being investigated by its own government.

If a fixed La Liga match involving a pair of stars doesn't get anyone's attention, will anything? How big of a tree has to fall for the sound to be deemed worth hearing? For all of FIFA's posturing about snuffing out match fixing, the Zaragoza case is being ignored. When global soccer is run under the predatory logic of capitalism, symptoms like match fixing and deregulation are borderline inevitable. Cheating of this particular nature isn't an isolated scourge, it's a systemic leveraging of an opportunity. Every aspect of soccer is simultaneously hyper-monetized yet under-regulated and match fixers are simply taking advantage of a niche that FIFA and its associates created. The nature of the sport only makes the circumstances worse.

Soccer is an easy target for match fixing because there is always so much of it going on. It's the biggest sport in most every country and the sheer volume of games provides ample cover for fixers. Beyond that, a single goal dictates most outcomes, so if a fixer, be it a bureaucrat or a gambler, wants to manufacture an outcome, they don't need to infiltrate a team en masse.

Player or referee payouts for colluding with a fixer are often much higher than contractual salaries. International matches are particularly susceptible, since federations have a history of not paying their players. FIFA has estimated that gambling syndicates make up to $140 billion per year betting in the unregulated Asian gambling market on fixed games. FIFA itself made only (only!) $4 billion in the 2014 World Cup cycle. The parasite is bigger than the host. Since the sport's coordinate system is written in the language of capital and expansion, whoever has the biggest checkbook will run soccer. No well-compensated player on an elite team would likely compromise their status by colluding with an opposing president, but a fringe Levante defender heading into a meaningless game? A slice of €120,000 makes for a plenty sweet enough pot. La Liga is far from the only example.

I spoke with Declan Hill, author of The Fix and The Insider's Guide to Match Fixing in Football, about the Zaragoza-Levante fix and where it fit into the ecosystem of global match fixing. Hill stressed that while he did not want to speak about specific games that he had not investigated, late-season favor banking is an underreported practice across all soccer leagues. "Corruption is a system of business now," he told me. "There's been 'traditional fixing' in international sports since the ancient Olympics," Hill added. "What we're looking at now is something we've never seen before, and that's the globalization of the fixing market."

In 2012, 98 Zimbabwean players were banned in the Asiagate scandal carried out be by Wilson Raj Perumal—a runner working for Dan Tan, perhaps the most infamous match fixer of all time. Their Singaporean-Indonesian syndicate has fixed games across the globe for over 20 years, and is still healthy today despite the arrests of both men. They've worked across leagues as big as Serie A and as tiny as the Laotian league.

Serie A took a huge blow after they were rooted out, but smaller associations, like the Zimbabwean league and several small Asian leagues, have lost all credibility after they were bored out and strip-mined by gamblers. Hill pointed to the Malaysian league, the Indian league, and a few others whose attendance fell off a cliff after they became more theater than sport.

For all the reach that Tan's gang has, however, theirs is not the only organization involved in fixing soccer. According to a 2010 CIA cable obtained by Wikileaks, the Bulgarian league is essentially run by organized crime rings. Transparency International officials have noted that Italian and Russian mafiosos control soccer games for business purposes, but match fixing isn't confined to international crime organizations. The Zaragoza-Levante fix was a matter of one team's president getting to another team's players and bribing them. Fenerbahce's President, Aziz Yildirim, took a similar tack in 2011, when he allegedly promised opposing players spots on his team or threatened to use his influence to prevent them from moving to better teams. Of the 93 people who were tried in association with Yildirim, only 14 were players. If, as Hill suggested, corruption is a system of business now, it is an extremely successful one that operate at a variety of scales.

After Finnish police arrested Perumal in 2011, they turned in a report to FIFA, with which Hill says "[FIFA] did largely little." Perumal himself noted, "If FIFA really wanted to do something, they could." So, uh, why aren't they? "What's stopping FIFA from doing a serious cleanup," according to Hill, is "a number of corrupted soccer officials who are working with these international crime networks."

FIFA allows this asynchronicity to persist because whatever corruption they uncover is going to be widespread and ugly. Baseball and cycling lost a lot of money and credibility when they went on their own witch hunts and FIFA looks like it wants to avoid stirring up a mess that it's not prepared to deal with. They are a huge business enterprise and they are prepared to further compromise the integrity of their sport rather than confront the problem before it gets worse.

So FIFA won't do anything about the Zaragoza game, nor will they press La Liga to do anything, and everyone expects it all to work itself out of the news cycle before too long. But what happens when the new hotbeds of fixing run dry and even more leagues are forced to grapple with it? Match fixing remains easy for those with the cash to make it happen, and the threat to soccer as a global megalith is existential. If FIFA and other regulatory agencies don't change course, there is a nasty meltdown awaiting the highest levels of the world's sport. Hill warned me "It's inevitable [the match fixers will] come, they just will. Like locusts once they've destroyed every other farmers field."