The shadow of illegal betting continues to grow in world football

The shadow of illegal betting falls once again on sport and, more specifically, on Colombian soccer. The atmosphere is tense and today any dubious action in a match arouses suspicion.

The complaint by the president of Patriotas, César Guzmán, which involves players and games from his own team, is just one more link in a chain of events that is not new. The topic is still under investigation.

“Fixed matches are not something new. They have existed since the Olympic Games of antiquity. What is new is how this practice, combined with betting, has created a global corruption market that is likely to affect 60,000 events that can be bet on every day,” said Declan Hill, a Canadian journalist and researcher who has followed this topic for years, in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Periódico.

“A decade ago it was useless to intervene in a chess or table tennis tournament, but now a lot of money is moved in small events,” added Hill, who even wrote a book on the subject: The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime, published in 2010.

The figures that drive illegal bets

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime presented a report on illegal betting in sports at the end of 2021, showing that Around 1.7 trillion dollars are moved annually in that market, a figure that has grown exponentially in the last two decades.

“The illegal sports betting market is at least as large as the legal market in terms of profit margin (the part of the bets that the bookmaker keeps, that is, the customers' losses),” he said in a statement. Asian Racing Federation report. “It is estimated that up to 80 percent of sports and racing betting worldwide is done illegally,” he added.

The president of Boyacá Chicó, Nicolás Pimentel, denounced at the time the emergence of illegal betting in Colombian soccer. “In 2020, a person gave us information that there are Mexican and Russian groups placing bets on the FPC through intermediaries,” he told ESPN.

Even his father and the club's largest shareholder, Eduardo Pimentel, offered at that time a 50 million pesos reward to anyone who gave him information about the matter.

In March 2020, Pimentel published a photograph in which he is seen handing a wad of bills to one of the alleged informants. However, no further progress was made on this issue.

The United Nations report showed that the Latin American market is small compared to other places in the world: “The largest global market was Asia, where bets worth $19.6 billion were placed, followed by Europe with $15.2 billion, North America with $2.3 billion, Oceania with $1.7 billion, Africa with $751 million and Latin America with $335.9 million.”

In many cases, illegal betting and match-fixing are a formula for money laundering. “In 2015, police in Italy took action against an organized crime group that used a network of 1,500 betting shops, 82 internet sites and eleven gambling companies in Austria, Malta, Romania and Spain as a front for money laundering. ”, revealed the report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Research with few results

Despite many suspicions and complaints, the results of investigations into clandestine betting in football have not been very effective.

The most recent case involved two Italian national team players, Sandro Tonali of Newcastle and Nicolo Fagioli of Juventus, at the end of last year. The two players were at the 'azzurra' concentration when they were summoned by the Turin Prosecutor's Office to be questioned for having made illicit sports bets.

The two were found guilty: it was proven that they were betting through clandestine pages, in which there would be no trace of their participation. Tonali was suspended for 10 months and had to undergo treatment for gambling addiction. The penalty for Fagioli, who confessed that his partner was the one who induced him to do this, was a little less: seven months of suspension and the same treatment.

There was also a notorious case of match-fixing in Spanish football, revealed in 2020 but related to matches played in 2015. Ángel Vizcay, former manager of Osasuna, exposed three entities and five players. He acknowledged that his team offered money to several clubs to fix the results.

In the end, 11 people, including two Osasuna players, received sentences. Vizcay only appeared in prison on July 27 of last year, to serve a sentence of five years and seven months.

Hill assured that as long as the penalties are lenient, corruption due to illegal betting will remain the same. “Football players who have been convicted of sports-fixing should be banned from the playing fields for at least five years. The arrangements cause a theater in the sport that makes it less attractive,” he said. The problem is still latent.

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