Today In World Cup Conspiracy Theories: “Betting Mafias” And Match Fixing
Dave Levy | 2:31 pm, June 18th, 2010
Just over an hour after a controversial end to the United States-Slovenia match, rumblings of match fixing have already started on Twitter. During the second half, Sports Illustrated published a piece in which FIFA’s legal squad asserted its attention is firmly placed on heading off this threat.
FIFA legal director Marco Villiger thinks that the final group-stage games “present the highest risk of being fixed, especially those that involve teams that already qualified for the second round or have been knocked out.”
“We use our means to keep our focus on these matches,” he went on. “Anything else would be naive.”
The object of FIFA’s scrutiny? Gambling mafias, whose presence on the world soccer stage has increased considerably since the last World Cup in Germany.
FIFA’s monitoring of the Cup has so far revealed no foul play, and that “no suspicious wagering patterns identified.” However, Villiger admitted that they “do not see everything.”
Soccer-hating Americans will happily file “crooked refereeing” away for their litany of hatred – it fits quite nicely among arguments about the lack of scoring, the annoyance of ties, and those damn horns. Will we ever get an answer as to whether or not Maurice Edu actually committed a foul? Probably not. And that doesn’t mean that ref Koman Coulibaly had the fix in, either. But the last thing the World Cup needs is a controversy around reffing.
[via The Big Lead]
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