Match-Fixing: The Football Problem That Only Matters When It’s Your Problem

By Will Tidey
at Internationaled.org

Published: February 9, 2013

To care or not to care, that is the match-fixing question. The media, as ever, wants to invoke our righteous rage, but the truth is most of football won't do any more than shrug its shoulders until match-fixing is found to have affected the outcome of a game that really matters—to them.

America had a genuine flicker on Friday, but only when a friendly between the U.S. national team and El Salvador was brought into question. ESPN's Outside the Lines identified the February 2010 clash and alleged that El Salvador players had been paid to influence their 2-1 defeat.

Said host Bob Ley on air, as per a report by the Philadelphia Inquirer's Jonathan Tannenwald: "A Salvadoran player told ESPN he and some teammates received a check drawn on a Singapore bank. They were given specific, designed plays that had to unfold to satisfy the syndicate fixing the match."

I listened to the podcast version of the Outside the Lines show on Saturday. What struck me was how the U.S. media focused on that U.S. friendly in Florida, which was won in added time, when the accusation by convicted match-fixer Wilson Raj Perumal that competitive World Cup games had been targeted appears to have been ignored.

"The game between North Korea and Portugal in 2010 was dubious," said Perumal. "In 2006 a group from Malaysia tried to fix some games for the national team of Ghana."

Most American soccer fans will not have heard that allegation unless they listened to the show. But nearly all of them will wake up this morning reading about the El Salvador friendly because it stands as an attack on their team, on their shores and to the game they consume.

Match-fixing? Involving the U.S.? Now we're interested.

This is how Brian Shactman of NBC Sports met Europol's press release on Wednesday, which updated its progress on a global investigation into match-fixing and put the number of games under suspicion a...

Article Source: Bleacher Report - International Football

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