The Collapse Of The Berlin Wall And The Building Of A Hoff Haus

The pre-Christmas round of matches have been ripe for matchfixing for two decades - rogue referees, linked teams, agreed seasonal points distribution and teams with minimal motivation make for corruption in our non-regulated football family.

Yesterday's match in the German Bundesliga between Hertha BSC and Hoffenheim was economic with integrity.

In the three hours leading up to kick off there was a huge (and seemingly co-ordinated) global gamble on the Bavarians. The epicentre of this market landslide was South East Asia.

Hoffenheim won 5-0 after receiving two penalties and a crazy own goal in the opening 39 minutes.
John Anthony Brooks both gave away the first penalty and scored the opening own goal in a performance Kicker magazine termed "vorweihnachtlicher Albtraum" (a pre-Christmas nightmare).
While the same website suggests that referee Peter Sippel "machte eine unglückliche Figur" (made an unhappy figure).

And some teams are worthy of a Timeform squiggle in any case...

If the DFB and Europol do not investigate this 'match' then the English Disease is going to spread further into the German game as it will be seen that the historical checks and balances against matchfixing (post-Hoyzer) are no longer robust.

Ooh La La! Sacre Bleu!!

French football has been rocked by two scandals...
... the same scandals occur in England but the mainstream media ensure that such realities never reach the public eye.

Six senior figures have been charged with matchfixing including Caen chief executive Jean-Francois Cortin, the Nimes president Jean-Marc Conrad (who has resigned over the affair), the managing director of Nimes as well as Nimes' main shareholder Serge Kasparian.

The club officials have been accused of fixing a series of matches, notably a 1-1 draw between Caen and Nimes on 13 May, which led to Caen being promoted to Ligue 1 and Nimes avoiding relegation to French football’s third division.

Magistrates have been trying to establish if pressure was exerted by Nimes on other Ligue 2 teams as the club battled against relegation. Recordings of telephone conversations between leading figures of several clubs form a key part of the evidence.

All six men have been released on bail on condition that they have no contact with one another.

French national newspapers have released transcripts of the telephone conversations between Jean-Francois Fortin and Jean-Marc Conrad relating to the investigated football match between Caen and Nimes.

When Fulham retained their Premier League place following a fixed match between themselves and Portsmouth in 2008, the media was silent although the fix was known within the game.
Fulham's manager at the time, Mr Roy Hodgson, is now manager of England.

To compound matters in France, these charges occurred in the same week as Marseille president Vincent Labrune (together with leading club figures) were detained on suspicion of committing transfer fraud.

One British agent (with links to the Fulham match mentioned above) once informed me that he was offered a suitcase containing £40,000 by another agent as a persuader to drop his third party interest in a Spanish defender Liverpool were interested in signing.

This information was provided to me in order to show that corruption acts as an illicit currency within the game.

During the French Revolution of 1789, it was decided that people need equality in relation to the market...
... 225 years later, football has yet to understand this.

Beware Of Greeks Bearing Pipe-Bombs And Wooden Clubs

Greek professional football has been suspended indefinitely after referee Christoforos Zografos was hospitalised after being beaten by two men armed with wooden clubs in the western Kolonos area of Athens.
Zografos is the assistant director of Central Referee Committee (CRC), which appoints match officials.

Rumours of high level matchfixing and biases in the appointment of officials have been rife in recent years, so much so that a decision was made pre-season to bring in a non-Greek to head the CRC.
Unfortunately, the selection was Hugh Dallas who has done more than any other match official in Britain to bring the game into disrepute.

Meanwhile, the situation is even worse in Cyprus where the offices of the Cyprus referees' association were targeted in a pipe-bomb attack after a fire bomb had previously been thrown at the home of an assistant referee in Limassol. Earlier in the year, bombs damaged the car of a prominent referee and the head of the refereeing association.

Cypriot football  has issues with integrity due to the amount of dirty Russian money sloshing around the island.
UEFA are aware of this and yet allowed Cypriot teams to be drawn against Russian ones in the Qualifying Phases of both the Champions League (AEL v Zenit) and the Europa League this season (Apollon v Lokomotiv Moscow and Omonia Nicosia v Dinamo Moscow).
The first leg of AEL v Zenit was a highly suspicious matchfixing event while Omonia had also met Budocnost Podgorica and Metalurg Skopje in previous rounds (teams from Montenegro and FYR Macedonia frequently surface in the underground Russian betting markets).

The statistical likelihood of so many Russian/Cypriot events randomly being drawn are truly astronomical.
So why?

When one governing body ignores dubious structures and energises corruption while another appoints a tainted official to oversee affairs, stuff will eventually happen that will further destroy the integrity of the game.

Omertà

The two women who acted as whistleblowers over the multiple corruptions within FIFA have been publicly traduced by Judge Hans-Joachim Eckert.
Bonita Mersiades and Phaedra Almajid both now live in fear for their families and themselves.
These FIFA corruptions have effectively been whitewashed in a secret report at the expense of the lives of two women (Almajid now has FBI protection).

This will no doubt discourage any future moral and ethical stances over the utter lack of integrity in global football just as the treatments of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange would tend to make any political whistleblower think twice.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the FIFA Affair (Qatargate) is that it is a clear indication of how the locus of football criminality has shifted towards the blackest of markets in recent years. In the current scenario, Michael Garcia is being painted as a white knight riding to the rescue against the smoke-filled backroom deals and payments of bribes and other enhancing consumerisms of FIFA.

We discussed this in a previous article when Garcia was appointed to this role: "A parallel example of murkiness is at FIFA where the Secretary General of Interpol, Ronald Noble, supported the appointment of Michael Garcia as FIFA chief investigator of corruption when Garcia's review of the FIFA/ISL scandal is seen as a cover up by Reform consultant Michael Pieth and FIFA judge Hans-Joachim Eckert."

Manus manum lavat.

So we have a standard Italian structure being the cover up of choice - football needs a mani pulite (clean hands) approach to dealing with corruption.

But the cover ups spread further.
There are four primary bodies addressing matchfixing in world football - Interpol, Europol, Early Warning and Federbet.
None are fit for purpose and all have private hidden agendas.
If an individual chooses to whistleblow a corrupted match to any of these bodies, the most likely action is inaction.

And the national associations and leagues are no better.
We would not dream of disclosing our evidences of matchfixing in the Premier League to Richard Scudamore or the FA.
And, higher up the feeding chain Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, understands that presenting evidence of matchfixing in Spain results in absolutely no reaction.

And over the last two days in London, the FA has launched the Sports Betting Integrity Forum with inputs from all the main British/Gibraltan bodies who are only concerned about matchfixing when they are outside the loop of insider trading.
All five bookmakers involved either accept insider money and/or actively orchestrate criminalities.

On the bases established by these whitewashes, the foundations of future corruptions are built.

Yesterday, Narayanaswami Srinivasan was laughably cleared of orchestrating matchfixing and spotfixing in IPL cricket matches in 2013 despite the evidence of taped conversations and his close alliances with the underground bookmaking world.
Earlier this year, he had remarkably been appointed as chairman of the International Cricket Council despite the scandals swirling around him.
What message does this send to the participants in the new IPL football expansion (and, by the way, it is surely not totally surprising that the three main English participants in this competition are Michael Chopra, Peter Reid and that undischarged bankrupt of dubious integrity, David James)?

These sporting corruptions parallel clearly with the world of mainstream capitalism and offshore financial centres.
For example, Grace Perez-Navarro of the OECD thinks that money laundering will be a historical anomaly by 2018.
It won't.
Lack of staff, lack of backing, lack of expertise, lack of regulation, lack of political will and yet to be created distortions of integrity will see to that.

Similarly amusing is the hyperreality that the UK police are to utilise the expertise of the Royal Bank of Scotland to address financial fraud in markets...
... that would be the same Royal Bank of Scotland that has just been found guilty of currency benchmark manipulations!

Manus manum lavat.

Global corruption requires global action and global regulation, not internalised double-teaming.

The Brand Is Everything; Pay Homage To The Brand

Football, like financial capitalism, is systemically corrupt.

If the populace cease to accept the validity of these corrupt mechanisms, then each will collapse under the weight of their own absurdity.

Hence the critical importance of protecting the brand - that fake measure of value.

1) La Liga president Javier Tebas detected matchfixing at a 3rd Division match in Spain on the weekend prior to the international break.

Tebas: "We detected the problem and communicated it to the responsible authority, but they chose to hide it... because they don't want to recognise that this problem exists, even in the lower division."

So matchfixing took place, was profited upon by the insiders and few are any the wiser.

2) One of my colleagues reported two Premier League matches to a body that allegedly looks into matchfixing. 
Fulsome evidence including recordings, betting patterns linked to private accounts, incriminatory emails and a variety of other evidence exists on these two matches (both involving Fulham when Roy Hodgson was their manager).
Reading were relegated as a direct result of one of these events.
My colleague was told to approach local police which was hardly feasible when one particular policeman refereed both of the fixed matches!
So we went elsewhere.

3) The Swedish Central Bank has just presented the 2014 Nobel Prize for Economics to Jean Tirole, a man whose gross stupidity could only be overwhelmed by the value of this stupidity to the financial system that he attempts to support.

One should read William K Black's evisceration of this backing of the capitalist brand http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/10/hold-wallet-swedish-central-bank-prize-rewards-clever.html#more-8725

Black: "So the obvious question is how Tirole, in authoring his book on corporate finance theory and as the exemplar of “clever” approaches to financial regulation missed the [2008] crisis, missed the causes of the crisis, missed the causes of past crises, and advanced ideas on financial regulation that would not have prevented our banking crises?"

Ah! Branding again...

4) It has been exposed today that Arsenal charge their fans 10 times more than Barcelona and FC Bayern Munchen for season tickets.
Barcelona have won 6 La Liga titles and 3 Champions Leagues in last decade.
FC Bayern have won 6 Bundesliga and 1 Champions League in last ten years.
Arsenal have won the FA Cup. 
Once.

Surely it is the Catalans and Bavarians who should be charging 10 times more?

In a desperate attempt to protect the brand, media releases were rushed out informing all fans of the Gunners that Theo Walcott will return for Arsenal U21's and may even play at the weekend versus Hull City.

Well, that's alright then - we've had to remortgage the house to fund the season tickets but at least Theo's back (with his £100,000 per week wages)...

The primary irony here is that John Colquhoun, Theo Walcott's agent, also had a very close affiliation with the two fixed matches involving Fulham that we mention above.

In Germany, corrupt referee Hoyzer was imprisoned; Italy targeted criminalities with calciopoli producing 3 prison sentences, numerous life bans and the relegation of Juve; Tebas is taking on matchfixing in La Liga including Levante versus Real Zaragoza which saw Deportivo La Coruna demoted in same criminalised fashion as Reading...
... but in Britain, people are just laughing all the way to the bank. 

                                                       

Football Goes Peaky Blinders

Peaky Blinders is the only decent drama that the BBC has produced in decades.

Combining the war criminalities and state terrorism of Winston Churchill and the Irish Office, police brutality, communist takeovers of the Unions, the fixing of horseracing (both on-course and off), the schisms of the IRA in the Irish Civil War and the role of gypsies on the peripheries of society, the show is pure theatre...
... just like top flight football.

Much of football is no longer sport but theatre and there are many in the game who are happy that this triumph of spectacle over integrity has been achieved.
And there are arguments from the moneyheads that this theatre is greater than integrity if it enhances the brand.

But spectacle has darker sides - the linking of agreed match outcomes to multi-billion pound betting markets and the winning of titles.

Take two recent games...

Leicester City's 5-3 win over Manchester United was pure spectacle. But the result was in the market pre-match via insider trading by an individual on the field of play. This match was fixed despite the drama.

Juventus 3 Roma 2 was a hell of a watch but Juve won via two penalties that simply were not penalties as neither occurred in the area and the second one wasn't even a foul.

Rudi Garcia (the Roma manager who was sent to the stands for mimicking the playing of a violin after the first fake penalty): "It's a shame that the penalty boxes are 19 yards here. Perhaps it's time to help the referees work out when it's a goal or a penalty. This is the 21st Century, a foul is outside or it's inside [the area], simple. You can have replays at pitchside."

Francesco Totti: "For years the same old incidents keep happening. I don't know if we were beaten by referees, but we certainly were not beaten by Juventus tonight... Juventus should have their own league as by hook or by crook they always win."

But video technology will create integrity and, for different reasons, the criminal on the field of play at Leicester and the Old Lady of Turin do not want integrity...
... they want matchfixing.

Doing A Little Deal Down The Moss

The English Premier League, as well as only using 13 referees for the vast majority of games and allowing the maximum possible period for underground betting activities, also selects these same referees as 4th Official meaning the primary level of PGMOL Select Group (sic) operators get two matches per weekend.

Take that tubby trickster of tutelage, Jon Moss.

This referee is not deemed good enough to officiate at FIFA and UEFA matches and yet has been referee at 4 televised EPL games this season and 4th Official at a further two televised events.
His officiating, at the very least, can be regarded as bizarre - failure to send off Tim Howard on three separate occasions in Everton v Chelsea, aiding and abetting Mark Clattenburg giving Arsenal two goals preceded by fouls and denying Man City a penalty at the Emirates, an early sending off in Swansea v Southampton and a match-changing sending off in Arsenal v Palace, plus gifting Stoke a fake equaliser versus Hull...

And in a strange selection, Moss is 4th Official tomorrow at Liverpool v West Brom just 6 days after he refereed West Brom v Burnley (he is also 4th Official for Chelsea v Arsenal, his third Gunners' appointment of the season).

Every single Moss event has been accompanied by suspicious betting patterns that positively correlated with decisions made in the match.

And being a close accomplice of professional gambler and insider trader John Colquhoun, you would think that these structures might have been acted upon by the EPL

Good job that these hyperrealities don't equate with matchfixing.

Oh, hang on...

A Whole Week Of Betting On The Underground

In order to limit corruption and to make it easier to monitor any suspicious betting patterns on games, the German Bundesliga only announces match officials on the day of the game.
Serie A announces weekend officials on the Friday.
UEFA releases Champions League officials two days prior to the rounds of matches.

The English Premier League disguised as the PGMOL appoints referees on the Monday at 16:00 hours making detection of any global betting fraud a much harder task (I'm employed as a consultant by a betting detection agency and I can assure you that this is the case).

But surely EPL referees aren't involved in matchfixing and corruption.

Oh, hang on...

13 - Unlucky For Some

English Premier League referees should be selected from a wide group of individuals.
They are not.

There are only 17 currently active PGMOL Select Group (sic) referees officiating at EPL games.
And, of these, 4 refs have only had one game apiece this season.
So 13 referees have covered 94% of EPL games whereas in the German Bundesliga, 23 referees are used in an 18 team league.

13 referees is too small a group and is far more prone to corruption.

Additionally, one individual selects every single appointment.
Just imagine what would happen if a bookmaker or an insider trader were to gain control of this one man in the most liquid betting market on the planet.

Oh, hang on...

The Press Sin Game

George Orwell — 'Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.'

Channel 4 News exposed the blog 'The Pressing Game' on Friday's programme.

This blog was established to promote the authenticity of Qatar's 2022 World Cup and targets all individuals who dare stand up to the emirate eg Greg Dyke and Gary Lineker.

The men behind the blog are depressive reformed alcoholic war criminal Alastair Campbell and his son Rory together with the PR firm Portland Communications (where Campbell is a senior adviser).
Portland's biggest client are the Qatari government!
And Portland is a member of the Public Relations Consultants Association, which has a professional charter that seems to forbid such practices.

This isn't journalism. It is biased PR.

Talking of which, the Guardian football people don't mention this farcical story despite it gaining mainstream television news status.
This is to be expected as the football agent orchestrating Guardian output, John Colquhoun, is joined at the pelvis to Campbell.

These people are sailing very close to the wind.

http://www.channel4.com/news/fa-chief-condemns-online-dirty-tricks-by-qatar-s-pr-firm

Third Party Poopers

For The Guardian newspaper (sic) to be making flaccid claims over their stance on 3rd Party Player Ownership when their football output is directly linked to a football agent who is actively involved in 3rd Party Player Ownership is a dereliction of journalism beyond the norm.

David Conn is either a con...
... or he is being conned.

Pitiful PR and absolutely not journalism.

Spanish Matchfixing English Corruption

Unlike the Premier League, the Spanish authorities are beginning to take action against matchfixing in La Liga.

On the last day of season 2010/11, Levante played Real Zaragoza in a game that was of no consequence for the hosts but that the visitors had to win in order to secure their safety in the top flight.

Zaragoza won 2-1 with 20 shots to 3 and 11 corners to 1 advantage and Deportivo La Coruna were relegated instead.

The president of the Spanish league, Javier Tebas, flagged up this match amongst others in June last year and now players involved in the matchfixing event have been summoned by a Spanish state prosecutor.

Compare with the Premier League where Fulham beat Portsmouth on the last day of season 2007/08 in match known to have been fixed with Danny Murphy scoring the goal immediately after it became necessary for Fulham to win rather than draw to stay in the EPL keeping Fulham manager Roy Hodgson in his job.
Reading were relegated instead.

And corruption pays as Hodgson is now manager of England on £3.5m per annum while Murphy is paid odious amounts by BBC for spouting rubbish and has declared an interest in becoming the new Fulham manager!

Was Arsenal Versus Manchester City Fixed?

Arsenal have suffered repeatedly from a refereeing bias against their interests in the Premier League over the last decade. Year after year the Londoners are at the bottom of the hierarchy when the tilt in match decisions is assessed.
These biases don't even out over a season or over time.
Wenger is aware of these machinations.

But Saturday's match between Arsenal and Manchester City perfectly demonstrated the critical need for the implementation of video technology and the option of managers challenging refereeing decisions.

This match saw some very very suspicious betting patterns in the 90 minutes leading up to kick off.
For the people behind this trading, the gamble was landed as the match was drawn.

But, in reality, the match should have been a victory for the Mancunians - there were evident fouls leading up to both of Arsenal's goals and City should have been given a penalty for Jack Wilshere's handball.
2-2 becomes 0-3.

The inability of Mark Clattenburg, his assistants and 4th Official Jonathan Moss to correctly call these incidents made the game a spectacular farce - great to watch but nothing to do with the integrity of the game and with insiders making considerable money into the bargain.

Hearing that poisoned dwarf Danny Murphy defending the officials on Match of the Day would have had more resonance if Murphy wasn't linked with Moss via professional gambling football agent John Colquhoun.

Arsenal have been denied titles in recent years due to the actions of the PGMOL refereeing body and nothing in this post suggests any wrongdoing on their behalf.

But it is disturbing to be in agreement (for the very first time) with Sepp Blatter, managers must be able to challenge erroneous and not-so-erroneous decisions.
Otherwise football is just greyhound racing with coloured boots.

End Of Term For Headmaster Jon Moss

Jonathan Moss has refereed three televised Premier League matches this season.

In the first, he couldn't get his vanishing spray to work, dropped his pencil while attempting to make a booking and sent off Jason Puncheon (a match changing decision as it turned out).

In the second, he sent off James Chester in 14th minute which was always going to be a game-changer in that Hull City had played a Europa League match 3 days earlier. 10 man Hull took the lead and would have won if Moss hadn't incorrectly given a throw in to Stoke leading to Hull players being out of position for the equalising goal.

On Saturday, the man and his assistants surpassed themselves with an array of decisions that beggared belief - a complete randomising of the match.
It might have been exciting but it is supposed to be so with the correct implementation of the rules. Offside goals, the non-sending off of Tim Howard for three separate red card offences, inability to collate his reliance on 4th Official, assistants and EPL Match Centre and his repeated failure to keep up with the play made the match into fake theatre.

Why does this man keep getting these high betting turnover tv matches?
Surely it is time for a demotion.

Oh...
... there's some other shit too.

http://footballisfixed.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/john-colquhoun-and-jonathan-moss.html

Stellar Evolution

There were a number of considerably below par match-changing underperformances on Saturday in the Premier League.

Below we list the lowest rated players from WhoScored.com in these matches together with an assessment of performance and details of the players' agents.

• Phil Jagielka (Everton/England) 4.8 - responsible for first two Chelsea goals (Stellar)
• Tim Howard (Everton/USA) 5.4 - should have been sent off three times (for handling outside his area as last man, grabbing Diego Costa by the throat and head-butting César Azpilicueta). His attempts at saving the 6 goals were highly questionable (Wasserman Media Group)
• Joe Hart (Man City/England) 5.2 - made dreadful error to gift Stoke victory and behaved bizarrely in the aftermath of goal (Stellar)
• Chris Brunt (WBA/N Ireland) 5.3 - made error leading to key Swansea goal  and substituted (Key Sports)
• Jonas Olsson (WBA/Sweden) 5.4 - made error leading to goal (MD Management)
• Graham Dorrans (WBA/Scotland) 5.4 - error prone, booked and substituted (Stellar)    
 

http://footballisfixed.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/happy-anniversary-to-roy-hodgson.html

In that Hart, Jagielka, Johnson (Stellar), Baines, Cahill (Base) and Gerrard (Wasserman) were the primary underperformers during the World Cup, we ask how these players have been repeatedly chosen for Hodgson's squads?

We suggest that you keep an eye on this array of agents.

Rewriting History

If Legia Warszawa can be thrown out of the UEFA Champions League for fielding an ineligible player for the last four minutes of a tie in which they were leading 6-1, how come Rangers (RIP) can keep hold of Scottish Premier League titles won via corruptions, illegal payments, tax avoidance and the utilisation of illegitimate mercenaries over the period of a decade?

With proportional punishment, one might have thought that liquidation should have been the very least of their worries.

#TitlesBack :)

A Baudrillardean Hyperreality

A plane is flying from Qatar to Manchester.

A passenger, we'll call him A, hands a note to steward claiming there is a bomb on board.

The steward takes the note to the cockpit.

The pilots decide not to inform the passengers.

The pilots send code to Air Traffic Control and RAF jets are scrambled.

Passenger A (and all other passengers and staff) hear about unfolding drama on Twitter...
... because there has been a media leak between Air Traffic Control and RAF.

So, there's an RAF jet performing aerial acrobatics outside my window, the bomb on board my flight is trending on Twitter, there is no disclosure by Qatar Airways who are kindly providing me with details about the ground temperature and wind direction in Manchester and asking me to put my seat back upright for landing.

The plane lands safely.

Passenger A is detained under the Mental Health Act for thinking that he had brought a bomb on board when, in reality, he hadn't.

Commonwealth Games Medals By Head Of Population

1. Nauru
2. Grenada
3. Samoa
4. Isle of Man
5. Kiribati
6. Wales
7. New Zealand
8. Scotland
9. Cyprus
10. Jamaica
11. Bahamas
12. Australia
13. Barbados
14. Trinidad & Tobago
15. The Six Counties
16. England
17. Canada
18. Mauritius
19. Namibia
20. Singapore
21. Fiji
22. Botswana
23. South Africa
24. Malaysia
25. Kenya
26. Cameroon
27. Papua New Guinea
28. Nigeria
29. Zambia
30. Uganda
31. Mozambique
32. Ghana
33. Sri Lanka
34. India
35. Pakistan
36. Bangladesh