Inside Asian Gaming

MArch 2016 inside asian gaming 31 says Mario Cizmek, an aging ex-midfielder sentenced to 10 months’ imprisonment and banned from world football for life for organizing rigged games in 2010 while with FC Croatia Sesvete. As in sports, so in the corrupting of it, there are rules, as Mr Cizmek explained in a February interview with The Associated Press: The goalie gets the most money because it’s his statistics on the line. Defenders get the next biggest share, then the midfielders. Forwards are of least value and often are left out of the conspiracy altogether. Croatia Sesvete was having a terrible season in 2010 and was going to be relegated anyway, making it a target for fixers who zero in on clubs that have nothing to lose. Bad teams that fail raise fewer red flags than good teams losing when they’re not supposed to. Other clubs are desperate to win, perhaps to ascend to a higher division and the immensely greater revenues that accrue from TV contracts, sponsorships and other sources. The successful fix is the one that defies detection—the team expected to win wins, the one expected to lose loses; or if it’s an unusual outcome it’s in a “friendly” that doesn’t count in the standings. The more players in on the fix the better, and the bad guys are equally careful in deciding which. Younger ones like Yoon Ki-won are cheaper and more malleable. Then there are the older ones nearing the end of their careers, like Mario Cizmek, 36 at the time of his fall with a wife and two young children to support and back taxes to pay. Any player in financial trouble is a mark. More than a few on Croatia Sesvete in Blast from the Past 2010 were. Despite past successes, the club was on the skids. Mr Cizmek and his teammates hadn’t been paid a regular salary in months. It’s a grim reality for professional players in some countries, more than most fans know. It was the transgressing of the rules that drove Wilson Raj Perumal, a dean among fixers, to break faith with his confederates and blow the cover off a global conspiracy financed and led from Singapore that makes untold millions every year betting on scores of football contests its operatives have rigged—this is “arrogantly happening daily,” in the words of one expert—in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, North and South America, The problem prosecutors face is that Internet betting is simply too big, too vast in its global reach, the technological opportunities for subverting it too tempting to resist and extremely difficult to track. March 2013