Football corruption: the allegations keep on rolling along « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager

By Tony Attwood

Sometimes it all goes quiet for a few weeks.   Then we hear of new enquiries.  The manager of Juve is banned for a year.  Some Turkish clubs are being investigated.  There’s suggestions that a world cup match was fixed.  The bias of referees in this country is shown in our own in-depth investigation.

Then the idea that big clubs pay little clubs to win games.   That seems odd, pointless, silly, until we remember the fines that the league imposes sometimes on clubs not fielding their strongest teams.  Then suddenly we get it – big clubs paying little clubs to put out their strongest team and perhaps get a result, where they might not have done so with a weakened team.

Plus the evidence that certain players are targeted by others to cause injuries.  And the stories that arise from Southampton about betting on key moments being a central part of the culture of the club.

And so you get to the stage where you think you’ve heard it all.  And then along comes Matías Almeyda, an Argentine international who played at Parma and here we are again with a lot more about match fixing and even player doping.

The book, Almeyda: Life and Soul, which is now being serialised in Gazzettaa dello Sport,  says, “At Parma we were given an IV drip before games.  They said it was a mixture of vitamins but before entering the field I was able to jump up as high as the ceiling.”  (If you know your Arsenal history you will know that in Leslie Knighton’s last season as Arsenal manager, the club experimented with similar sounding drugs in relation to a cup match against West Ham.)

Also revealed is the fact that the players of Roma asked the Parma team to  fix a match between Roma and Parma in 2001.   Roma won, and so beat Juve to the title.

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Is it all true – was there drug taking at the time?  Once again of course we don’t know, but the sheer volume of data that we are gathering is, I believe the key point.

Football matches can be fixed for all sorts of reasons and in all sorts of ways.   Such as

Through the Italian style approach in which a ref gets a generalised reward (the villa for the summer is the example I normally quote) in return for helping a team to a win.

Through betting gangs fixing matches to win bets – we often hear of this with international games

Through players throwing matches.

Through big teams encouraging little teams not to put out a weakened side against big opposition in order to avoid injuries.

Targeting individual players so they are going to be out injured for quite a while.

And on and on.  Of course we can have the whole debate about proof all over again, and of course as always I say that we do not have the audio recording of the fixing being arranged.  But the fact that there are so many allegations, and the refusal of PGMOL to take even the simplest steps to prove that our allegations have no foundation, means that the issues build up and up and up.