If "you are a criminal looking for a moneymaking scheme, an easy option today is sports gambling," according to Simon Kuper of the FINANCIAL TIMES. The betting market is "vast, global, liquid and pretty anonymous." You "simply pay off a few athletes or referees, perhaps threaten them with blackmail or violence, and then put your money on the agreed result." Whereas "smuggling drugs or people can get you shot or jailed, match-fixing almost never does." It is also a "handy way to launder money." Claims of "rampant match-fixing in tennis are therefore unsurprising." Tennis is "especially easy to corrupt because a fixer only needs to bribe one player." The issue "transcends tennis, however." Match-fixing "has quietly grown into probably the biggest threat facing sport." The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime author Declan Hill said that "criminals have been fixing sports since ancient Greece." Match-fixing "took off" with the Internet, which "made it easier for punters to bet on any match anywhere." The "relatively small and regulated" pre-Internet world of sports gambling has become "a jungle with no borders, populated by tens of thousands of operators," according to Christian Kalb and Pim Verschuuren of the Iris think-tank in Paris. In fact, sports gambling is "now a bigger business than sports itself." Sportradar Integrity Dir Darren Small said that the industry's estimated value -- counting both legal and illegal gambling -- is "anywhere between" $700B and $1T a year. For comparison, UEFA said that "the combined revenues of Europe's top-division football clubs in 2014 were below" €16B. All other sports "turn over less than football." In short, "gamblers can afford to fix athletes." The fixers "include Chinese, Italian and eastern European crime syndicates." There are "also small mom-and-pop operations and even football clubs who fix their own results so as to balance their budgets through gambling." Most sporting authorities "have been passive too." Transparency International's Sylvia Schenk said that "they tend to worry more about scandals than about problems, and because match-fixing is rarely uncovered it rarely produces scandals." Few sports bodies "employ enough staff to combat match-fixing." The Tennis Integrity Unit, for instance, has "just five or six investigators to cover 120,000 matches played worldwide each year." Moreover, sporting authorities are "rarely models of competence and rigour," as shown by the scandals that have engulfed FIFA, professional cycling and int'l athletics. Tennis’s authorities "responded to the match-fixing allegations by playing them down at a press conference that they terminated within ten minutes." More "than doping or hooliganisim, match-fixing has the potential to destroy sport." British author Nick Hornby warned in the Financial Times in '94 after a bribery scandal in English Football saying, "Once we begin to doubt that what we are seeing is real, then we will cease to care and, without the caring, it is all over" (FT, 1/22).
