Football players in the Eredivisie and Eerste Divisie will receive an app with which they can report signals about match fixing. That’s what players unions VVCS and FIFPro say to NRC. Evgeniy Levchenko, former football player and the current chairman of the Dutch players’ union, will visit professional football clubs to introduce the so-called ‘red button’ app. Players receive a personal code, which ensures that they can safely report signals about the sale of matches.
Match fixing has been in the spotlight lately. This is partly due to the NOSpodcast Fixed, revealing that Sparta player Tom Beugelsdijk is suspected of having taken a yellow card on purpose. On his yellow card, hefty amounts had been bet on the gambling market. Beugelsdijk denies involvement. In the podcast, a self-proclaimed match fixer also tells that he has “sold” several matches in the U23 league, a story supported by suspicious betting patterns.
Legal online gambling
At the same time, the online gambling market in the Netherlands was ‘opened’ on 1 October. That means online gambling has become legal. “Players, umpires and players are becoming even more vulnerable to fixers. It is becoming even more important to be able to monitor all suspicious gambling signals as well as possible and to identify them in good time,” the KNVB football association recently wrote to the House of Representatives. One problem is that the football association does not have enough money to “properly inform” players and referees about the dangers of match fixing. Partly because of this, signals about match fixing are rarely reported to the association or the authorities.
In 2019, the Centrum Veilige Sport Nederland received four reports about match fixing, from all sports. Last year it was just one signal. It has never been possible in the Netherlands to convict an athlete or gambler for manipulating a match. Once a footballer was suspended – Ibrahim Kargbo of Willem II. This happened after an investigation by the world football association FIFA, not by a Dutch investigation. Eight years ago, professor of sports and law Marjan Olfers concluded that match fixing should be a regular occurrence in the Netherlands; more than a quarter of the athletes she consulted said they had seen manipulation “in the environment”.
Also read: why the chance of being caught in match fixing in the Netherlands is so small
VVCS chairman Levchenko believes that football players themselves should take more responsibility for reporting signals about match fixing. The ‘red button’ app should help players with that. “If a player in the locker room hears about manipulating a match or is approached by a match fixer, they should report it. But it is now completely unclear where they can go. There is an e-mail address and the KNVB has a telephone number, but nobody knows it,” says Levchenko.
The app was already conceived in 2013 by the Finnish players’ union, after a match-fixing scandal. At the time, Singaporean match fixer Wilson Raj Perumal was sentenced to two years in prison for the influencing football matches at the professional club Rovaniemi. Perumal later became a protected witness to the police – he helped investigative agency Europol uncover a criminal network engaged in manipulating sports matches. According to Europol, attempts had been made to influence 380 professional football matches, allegedly involving at least 425 players, officials and administrators.
Fifty countries
According to director Markus Juhola, the Finnish players’ union has had “good experiences” with the app, which has since been introduced in other countries and in more sports. from a research from the University of Liverpool – which consulted nearly five thousand athletes – about half of them download the app after receiving an explanation from a sports union.
It is unclear how many athletes have reported match fixing in the app, for example from a teammate or when they were approached by match fixing. The international football union FIFPro does have figures about the number of reports via the app in various countries, but according to Frederique Winia, the director of member service, cannot make them public due to privacy rules. “In New Zealand, Cyprus, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland, the app has been used by footballers for a few years now. The experience is that most players download the app. Reports are made about all those countries several times a week. In that case, there is not always match fixing, which will be investigated after a report.”
Reports are anonymous and will not be shared with sports federations or players’ unions. They go directly to investigative authorities – it is decided per country which authority will receive the reports. According to Winia, it is “too early” to say whether a report in the app has already led to a concrete (criminal) case. In total, the app will be introduced in at least fifty countries. The international football associations FIFA and UEFA recently officially approved the app as a platform to report match fixing.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad on 6 November 2021
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of November 6, 2021
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