BEIJING — Soccer is probably the world’s most popular sport, commanding billions-strong audiences from slums to palaces. It may also be the world’s most corrupt sport, with the epicenter of the global corruption in Asia, investigators said this week.
The problem is illegal gambling that is tied to corruption and match fixing, said Chris Eaton, a former head of security at FIFA, the world soccer organization based in Switzerland, and now the director of the International Center for Sport Security in Qatar. Asia was attractive to criminals in this area for its lax regulation, he said, and the biggest gambling houses each transacted $2 billion a week. “It’s all done with algorithms and machines, almost like any commodity house in the U.S. or London,” he said.
Soccer gambling “is bigger than Coca-Cola, which is a trillion a year. This is a global economy, a growing global economy, and it needs to be regulated and supervised, and governments aren’t doing this,” Mr. Eaton said in one of a series of Reuters reports this week documenting the scandal.
On Monday, European police said hundreds of matches, including some involving the World Cup, the European Championships and the Champions League, may have been fixed in a global betting scam largely run from Singapore, the Southeast Asian nation with a normally squeaky-clean image.
This colorful account on the investigative Web site Invisible Dog offers apparent details of a trail that it said began with a goalkeeper in an Italian third division team and led to gambling masterminds in Singapore.
If the brains are in Singapore, the three largest gambling houses in Asia, IBCBET, SBOBET and 188BET, are in Manila in the Philippines, Reuters reported. Their operations were “very opaque” and what was known of them came from talking to people familiar with their workings, as there was no government record, Mr. Eaton, the soccer security expert, told Reuters.
“You have under-regulated, gray-area gambling where the regulators are not really serious, transparency rules are not to best practice and government oversight is almost nonexistent,” he said.
Exactly how it works was explained by Laszlo Angeli, a Hungarian prosecutor cited by the news agency, who drew on an example of a member of a gambling syndicate in Hungary.
“The Hungarian member, who was immediately below the Singapore head, was in touch with Hungarian referees who could then attempt to swing matches at which they officiated around the world,” he said. Accomplices would place bets on the Internet or by phone with bookmakers in Asia.
So far, the German police have concrete proof of 8 million euros ($11 million) in gambling profits from the match fixing, but this is probably the tip of the iceberg, experts say.
In response, FIFA has set up an online reporting site that guarantees anonymity to whistleblowers.
But Asian nations must work together to counter the gangs that run operations, said an analyst quoted by Reuters.
“There has to be collective effort from law enforcement agencies in Asia and beyond to address this issue,” said B.C. Tan, head of organized crime research at World-Check, a risk analysis firm.
In January, 41 South Korean players involved in match fixing were banned for life from the game by FIFA, extending earlier sanctions against them (though 21 were offered a reprieve, according to reports.) Three South Koreans involved in the scandal have committed suicide, this report said.
