 Welcome everyone, it's really good to see you all here again back on campus, now it's finally possible again. My name is Hannah and I'm a program maker for Studium Generale and we organize all kinds of activities like this one and today of course as you know about match fixing it's also good to know that today's lecture is part of a lecture series that we organize called fixing the match and more information about the next lectures will be announced on our website as well. Today's lecture will be around 45 minutes and then we have 15 minutes Q&A so you can all ask all your questions that you may have. And also good to know that this lecture comes towards the Studium Generale Certificate for Students, more information about the certificate can be found on our website. And now back to the topic of match fixing of course, today we will zoom into match fixing and its connection to criminal infiltration in sports and I'm very pleased to welcome Professor Trans Papens who can tell us more about this. He is a professor of criminology here at Tilburg University and also head of the department of criminal law and his research includes organized crime containment and also international law enforcement cooperation. So please give a big applause to Professor Trans Papens. Thank you. Welcome everybody. I would also like to thank Studium Generale for inviting me to give you this talk about match fixing and the reason why I'm here is also because of my experience with organized crime but because we did a study in the Netherlands on match fixing a number of years ago and I wrote on the topic here as one of the few people in the Netherlands who have studied match fixing. So today I will present to you a number of things. What is match fixing? How is it defined? What types of match fixing do we have on a couple of cases? So our big is the problem and finally also what are the risk factors that explain match fixing and what is the Council of Europe actually planning to do on this problem? So of course match fixing has been around for centuries. Even the ancient Greeks are suspected of having fixed sports matches even during the Olympic Games in ancient history but of course current day match fixing became much more globalized as soon as online gambling started. So instead of rigging a local match, a boxing match or a baseball match like we have examples of in the United States is going back as far as the 1920s and 1930s. It now became possible to wager on games, the outcomes of sports matches all across the world basically. So the opportunity structure for match fixing is very widely increased with the introduction of online gambling and also because of the very different gambling products that these online operators offer. So it's not only possible to bet on the outcome of a game but also on all sorts of events during the match. So like who's getting the first yellow card in a football match or in tennis you can bet on the first set, the second set, the finals but also we have the betting product which is known as spread betting which means that you do not have to lose the game to actually lose in terms of betting. So if a very well performing team is meeting with an opponent who is far less effective than for example the betting operator may set the spread at three points goal difference whereas the team can actually win with one nil. So then it's a win in terms of the sportive outcome but it's a lose in terms of betting. So this is also risky because it allows people to actually not lose a game on purpose but still be able to bet on a losing outcome. So the increase of different betting products is quite important also in terms of online gambling. So match fixing definition. This is a definition drawn up by the Council of Europe in its Convention on the Manipulation of Sports Results which was opened for signing in 2014. And here it's defined as an intentional arrangement, act or mission aimed at an improper alteration of the result of the course of a sports competition in order to remove all or part of the unpredictable nature of the aforementioned sports competition with a view to obtaining an undue advantage for oneself or others. So you can see that this is actually a very broad definition, it's not just manipulating the end result of a game but also the events of which I was talking before. So you only need to partly manipulate the game to already qualify the act as match fixing. So usually match fixing is often associated with organized crime, with criminal groups who are involved but actually there are other types of match fixing as well. So here we have mentioned four. So sports related match fixing without any bribery or coercion. For example if you are in a tournament and you want to avoid a better opponent in the next round you can lose on purpose which is something that a sports team may decide on its own initiative and there's no bribery or any force involved. So secondly we can also have gambling related match fixing without any bribery or coercion. So for example when a tennis player decides on his own initiative to throw a game and bet on the outcome there's no coercion involved. So it's basically the own initiative of this player and this also happens quite often. Then we have sports related match fixing involving indeed that bribery or coercion. So when a club president actually orders a team to lose a game for some sort of sportive advantage or maybe to help a team with which the club president or which the club presidents are in contact and good friends perhaps. So that is one way of doing this. And finally we have the type of match fixing that is often in the minds of people the most important actually figures it is not and that's gambling related match fixing involving bribery and coercion and this is usually associated with so-called outsiders. So people from outside the club who actually bribe or coerce or influence players to have to fix the match or manipulate the outcome. So actually match fixing is a little bit more complex than you might have thought. So how big is this problem? So that is actually not very much research being done on match fixing but there are some studies that have been conducted and I'm sure I'm not completely up to date on this because my own research was basically some five years ago when I stopped doing research on match fixing and I didn't actually keep track of all the new studies and literature that has been published since. But so first we have a study from 2011 which is a little bit broader which is also about corruption in sports and a lot of these cases actually refer to doping and only a very small percentage to match fixing. Then we have the fifth pro survey in Eastern Europe which revealed that about 12% of all players were indeed approached to manipulate the match and there was also survey in Belgium with amateur football clubs which revealed that about 15% were approached to manipulate the match. So for Belgium that's quite a high number and then a more general study revealed that about 300 to 700 cases are reported annually. So this might look like a very small number but it's increasing nevertheless. So since I started my work on illegal gambling and match fixing I was subscribed to an Interpol newsletter and I looked at some examples in the newsletter regarding January this year so the recent cases so you can see that it includes different sports. So match fixing in a second tire football match in Colombia, bookmakers who flagged possible game rigging in Scottish football, an Argentinian tennis player who was banned actually convicted for match fixing, a Peruvian tennis player also faced a ban but whether he actually fixed the matches could not be proven and then there are some signals from the European Handball Federation and from UEFA who based suspicions on irregular betting patterns which were noticed by so-called early warning systems. So bookmakers who organized sports betting have these systems in place, at least mostly in the European Union it's actually obligatory. But so they can see betting patterns that deviate from what would normally be expected. So if for example a low level sports match in an amateur competition suddenly attracts large bets, a large number of people and a lot of money is wasted on specific outcomes of this match then the early warning system will notify and then has such invitations to do further research or to look into these matches can be issued for instance by UEFA or other sports federations. So this does look like a system that is actually in terms of prevention well quite necessary but unfortunately it does produce a lot of false positives. So in practice there are very few matches in which indeed match fixing can be proven just based on these warning systems and that's also one of the very difficult things about match fixing as long as there's no financial trail or a specific paper trail it's very difficult to prove and in many cases indeed even if money flows can be proven the athlete or the football player may still say well okay yes I've been approached and I received money or I got the offer to receive money I even took the money but of course I never did anything to manipulate the outcome of the game I just more or less committed fraud towards the match fixer who approached me. So basically if there are no people who come forward and actually plead guilty it's very difficult to prove that match fixing actually happened. So as some of the signature cases that happened in Europe first the joint investigation veto in which Wilson Raj Piromal who was a Singaporean national was the main suspect or at least the representative of a criminal group that actually was based in Singapore but he did a lot of well fixing work in Europe so whether he was the big boss or just the person who took the biggest risks was still not clear but Piromal was indeed quite active so a number of countries Germany Finland Austria Slovenia Hungary he fixed matches in 13 different countries and in the end Europe all collected evidence on 425 suspects 380 suspicious football matches and Piromal was also linked to a case in Tilburg with our own first division football team William Trey or William 2 and indeed Carpo was suspected of rigging matches by our club but he came up with this defense like okay no no no I never I never did anything to manipulate the match yeah I took 25,000 euro but I just sent Mr. Piromal in the wrong direction and he also of course claimed that no results were ever fixed so and this may be true because Piromal apparently quite soon lost interest in Carpo because he didn't actually deliver any results so another signature case is the so-called Bogum case also a number of years ago and also partly linked to this Piromal network and here it's also concerned matchfixing in a number of European competitions including even the Champions League Dutch gambler and matchfixer Paul Roy played an important role in this case because in the end with regard to the German authorities the public prosecution or the court of Bogum he indeed admitted to have fixed four matches in the German competition and he used a football player René Schnitzel who later wrote the book about this and he was actually playing for a second tire team in the German competition so how did this actually work of course Roy played Schnitzel money to rig these matches as Schnitzel was actually quite vulnerable because he was a heavy gambling addict and had all sorts of financial problems at the time and this is probably also how we came into contact with people like Paul Roy who is well as such not a very hardened criminal but well someone who is indeed linked to the criminal underworld in the Netherlands so the bets themselves were allegedly mainly placed in Asia so with Asian online gambling operators and to hide that all these bets were actually coming from one person Roy used a software program that automatically created accounts so this case happened a number of years ago so at that time know your customer regulations with online gambling operators strict so it was easier to actually automatically generate a large number of accounts to spread your bets and attract less attention for example from these early warning systems well the case against Roy was of course indicted in Germany ended with a bit of a disappointment he did confess that he rigged these matches but in the end the court decided to throw out the case because he had actually bribed Schnitzel during visits in the Netherlands so the court ruled that the criminal acts that actually happened on Dutch territory and therefore the Dutch authorities should take up the case which they never did so as I explained we did a study on match fixing in the Netherlands I hope you can show me if I'm a bit on track in terms of time if you okay excellent so we did a study in 2013 and this was partly because there was a lot of discussion and debate in the Dutch Parliament so a lot of parliamentary questions were asked about potential match fixing in the Netherlands because police officers had actually talked about Paul Roy and his involvement in the Bogen case so they received information from Germany which seemed to point at the fact that football matches had also been rigged in the Netherlands so we got a commission from the Dutch Ministry of Sports and the Dutch Ministry of Justice to do a study on match fixing and well we did a large survey we interviewed a lot of people from sports and we also did extensive research in police databases to actually see if you could link people to to the criminal underworld for example or see whether players actually had a criminal history of some importance and also for example referees and board members of clubs so we did a quite extensive research and we received information on 25 matches which had been reported to the Dutch Football Association on the assumption or the suspicion that they had that these might have been manipulated so well our survey revealed well match fixing is indeed happening but it's actually well quite rare so of all the players in different sports competitions who answered to our survey 4% said well I have indeed been approached well another 27% of our respondents assumed at least that match fixing had taken place in their competition and 8% stated well I know someone who has been approached so the fact was indeed that most of these cases actually concerned sports related match fixing so it was not including bribery or it was only in a very few cases that a board member of the club came into the dressing room and ordered his team to lose the match that day for reasons unknown and of course we do not exactly know how many of these cases are the same cases so for example there were there was quite a high percentage in basketball but apparently within the Dutch basketball competition there had been a case that had been talked about a lot also amongst players in which indeed a board member ordered a team to lose so how many actual cases this refers to remains unclear there were also some observable risks so many players turned out to be heavy gamblers themselves which in interviews they for example explained by the fact well okay as an athlete you cannot drink you cannot use drugs so gambling is basically the only thing left to to unwind apart from other obvious things that I will not mention here but you still see that indeed had a number of athletes that actually gamble is is high and has even increased since we did our study and of course another point of concern especially from a gambling perspective is that the difference between gaming and gambling is more or less becoming more diffuse so that's also considered a risk so have athletes also game a lot and this might also have a link with gambling at least that's one of the theories of people who do research on gambling addiction so another thing that was revealed by the study was the fact that a lot of almost players actually said well had the risks potentially particularly high when you go abroad so we interviewed a boxer who said well if I go to Eastern Europe and in a and I have to do a boxing match if I don't win by knockout you can be certain that I will always lose on points so had there is particularly in Eastern Europe where there were quite a lot of cases or at least case examples that were mentioned so the risk is for us as players is a lot higher for example also in tennis well as I explained we did quite we gave quite a bit of effort to check for example players who were playing in these suspicious matches whether they were connected somehow to the criminal underworld but in all of this study so we looked at police files we looked at police records for example but we couldn't find pretty much apart from one player who had been involved in a match whose father turned out to be a a big drug criminal but that was only one case so what are the the actual risk factors already mentioned the couple so financial problems so not only for individual players but also for clubs or even competitions which may increase the incentive to commit sports related or gambling related match fixing yeah already mentioned the connections between gamblers and members of the criminal underworld but also connections with professional gamblers and have players who suffer from gambling addiction and especially if they don't have play with regular gambling operators so if they also go to poker games in the back rooms of a shady restaurant or bar where usually people from the criminal underworld also playing poker this is indeed a increased risk criminal infiltration in clubs I will talk about this in a little bit more detail in the next slide positions of dependency so large financial commitments for example players coming from Africa who have to support their entire family back home so these financial burdens can be quite high and can be a risk factor in terms of match fixing so have when we look at the the gambling operators there are also some risks so if there's no game on offer to bet on of course you cannot commit match fixing at least not online so the number of sports games and the level of competition is is quite important and at the time in 2013 there were actually not many opportunities to bet on Dutch sports competitions but of course you all know that or perhaps you don't but the legislation for online gambling was was expanded in the Netherlands very recently which already led to a bombardment with advertisements by online gambling companies that now have a license and we do expect that these gambling operators will indeed also start to offer for example betting on amateur football matches in the Netherlands which would indeed quite increase the risk and also talked about gambling products which are inherently risky like who gets the first yellow card or who kicks the ball out of the football pitch for the first time although in practice there are not a lot of gambling operators who offer this kind of betting on events but spread betting is indeed quite a quite also a risky gambling product in terms of the fact that you don't have to lose to actually bet on a losing game so criminal infiltration I said I would get back to that so we looked at criminal infiltration in a more general study which we published in 2018 which was actually about criminals involved in philanthropical activities so sponsoring good causes charities and also for example activities in healthcare or addiction care so we did a survey amongst the Dutch municipalities and one in three actually mentioned that they knew an example of at least one philanthropical criminal in their municipality and when we looked at case studies about 58 case studies in total we discovered that most of these 52% were actually related to the sponsoring of sports clubs and social events so criminal sponsoring became quite a big issue especially in the in football so after our report was published there was a sort of follow-up well not really a study but a small survey by RTL News and this revealed that about 20% of amateur football clubs indeed reported signals of criminal infiltration so that well revealed a quite significant problem and further more we did a study in 2020 which was a broad research on all sorts of amateur sports so not only football but also other sports and this came up with 13% of all people who answered a survey that they reported one or more signals of criminal infiltration signals like people hanging around the pitch making recordings or had the so-called calling Chinese who are for example on the watching the game but constantly on the phone and talking to betting operators in asia to actually tell them what is what is happening on the pitch as long as it's not televised for example so but you know football is again the most important risk but amateur handball base and softball also appear more vulnerable from this particular study and of course criminal infiltration is important in terms of matchfixing as well because if you own the club or are a very important sponsor then it becomes much easier to engage in matchfixing sports related or otherwise so I'm fine and slowly coming to an end of my presentation so what can be done about this well a lot of a lot of things but as I understand in the upcoming weeks Vida Stavens who did this study on criminal infiltration together with Monique Braynzweil and myself will talk about this in more detail so I'll just mention the most important instrument currently available in well for countries who are members of the Council of Europe which is a little bit broader than European Union and this convention actually points out a lot of actions that governments and authorities can take as well as betting operators and the sports clubs and well it's nice to see that the Netherlands actually had quite a bit of influence on this convention and most of these recommend most of these elements now included in the convention but actually recommendations in our report in 2013 so actually sometimes researchers or research reports do have impact so sports associations disciplinary codes preventing conflicts of interest for example not allowing that in one competition a single owner owns more than one club for example which of course also is a risk whistleblowers obviously betting operators so the risky gambling products I mentioned the suspicious transactions should be reported apart from these early warning systems there's also obligation regarding reporting transactions that seems to be out of the ordinary which is part of anti-money laundering measures as well for detection systems so actually the recommendation to establish and develop these further and of course law enforcement obviously also should take action and importantly here is also the fact that it's considered to be a responsibility of different operators so there should be a multi-agency approach in which different public authorities but preferably also the sports associations should be involved which is actually quite common in the Netherlands to have this kind of multi-agency approaches when it comes to certain types of serious or organized crime but in a lot of other countries this was quite a novel approach so the convention was drawn up already in 2014 but unfortunately it became stalled for quite a bit of time because one of the recommendations or one of the obligations in the conventions convention was the fact that countries should also take action against illegal gambling and well Malta which is a country in the EU that hosts a lot of betting operators with a very strange system because they receive a license to operate online gambling but this license is not valid for the territory of Malta itself so it's only valid for other countries which is technically impossible because well of course you cannot give out licenses for jurisdictions which you have nothing to say about so there was a bit of a debate whether this had these gambling companies which are registered in Malta are indeed actually illegal gambling operators so Malta asked questions about this with the European Court of Justice and this took a very long time and in the end if I'm not mistaken they withdrew the complaint or their questions for clarification but unfortunately I'm not sure what the current status of the convention is so how many countries actually signed it or how effectively it's used but probably in the next weeks Vida Stavins will be able to inform you a little bit more in more detail about this okay some conclusions I forgot so some conclusions match fixing do we see only the tip of the iceberg or is actually the problem that I guess we supposed it was a couple of years ago it's a it's difficult to answer we do see some movements in terms of the fact that some five six years ago for example asian match fixes were targeting Europe quite a bit whereas if you look at the Interpol news bulletins it appears to be shifting towards South and Central America for example had a lot more cases from South America than there were a couple of years ago so one thing did become clear in the Netherlands we could not establish widespread match fixing and well we still think that this is a valid conclusion because after our report was published we were immediately approached by a lot of media who's well we're going to have journalists investigative journalists working on this and be sure that we will find a lot of match fixing cases which actually didn't produce a large number only a couple of cases were actually found notwithstanding a lot of journalistic effort nevertheless the risk must be taken seriously you don't need a lot of match fixes to to do a lot of harm even if only a couple of matches are actually rigged this can have be very high it can have a very high impact on the integrity of complete sports competitions or even sports and we already have we see we saw examples of this in for example China where certain competitions became so suspect that actually nobody wanted to watch the games anymore or also not unimportant the bet on these games and as I already explained most cases involve sports related match fixing so that's actually far more important and it's usually insiders who are involved in this so boards referees players who fix matches on their own initiative but had the big bad outsiders organized crime groups who coerce people to actually manipulate matches and bring them in a sort of situation of dependency doesn't happen a lot in by comparison okay then I'm finished now thank you so do you have any questions a hand raised yeah that's for the for the people who are watching online so other than insiders and sport or criminal outsiders is there like reason to believe that there is kind of systemic game or match fixing as well like if we're looking at the World Cup for example because it's media related that they might try to have very popular teams play against each other stuff like that yeah there have been some allegations about this there's one a very notorious example when the I don't know which tournament it was but an important football tournament was well they they draw the draw these balls with the teams that are actually playing against each other and there was a there was mentioned in the media that apparently had been a rehearsal which produced the exact same outcome as the actual drawing of the teams against each other for the tournament and yeah there have been lots of stories for example during the World Cup that when I think it was the World Cup in Italy where Sophia Loren the famous actress was actually drawing the balls for the the lineup of the tournament and there was an allegation that these balls had been warmed at least some of them so that she could feel okay now I have to take a warmer ball and put them against a club or team that came out comes out from a colder ball so indeed there have been all sorts of accusations that especially during these big sports tournaments that the the FIFA which doesn't have a very good reputation in in some respects is actually doing this to keep the tournament as attractive as possible thank you I do have two questions does a draft system for example in US sports allow for more possibilities to have match fixing there since a lower classification or ranking would give you better players in the future that's a good question I wouldn't know but yeah it could be a risk factor so if you know that you're not going to win at the competition then it may be more attractive to actually end up in a lower position to actually benefit from this during the next year and well of course this this would be a type of sports related match fixing but I don't have any concrete examples so I've never read that this is actually happening but yeah you could consider it a risk factor okay because I read on ESPN that Brian Flores the former head coach of the Miami Dolphins was paid to actually lose games in American football by its owner so that was something that intrigued me to ask this question and then the other question that I wanted to ask was what would a criminal at the moment gain by infiltrating in amateur sports in the Netherlands as there is no betting possibility yeah well our main conclusion from the study that we did was well very simple sports and especially being a large sponsor which means that probably the team the local team will start to perform a lot better than they did is a very important way of increasing status so well we dubbed this a little bit like criminals want to be liked too and this is indeed true so it's more like a status thing yeah feeling creating a feeling of being liked by the social community which they are part of and of course most criminals are quite embedded in their neighborhoods or in especially in villages also everybody knows that someone is quite successful and things also happened the other way around so it was not the criminal who wanted to who presented themselves to the local football club with the offer to start sponsoring but especially in smaller villages there's nothing much besides the local football club so a lot of these people who come from these villages actually had played before played for these clubs once when they were younger or maybe their children were now playing with the club and as soon as you appear at the club in a very expensive car you wear expensive clothes and you spend a lot of a lot of money on rounds of drinks in the in the canteen then immediately the club board will approach this person with the well the question well you're apparently doing quite well so would you not be interested in sponsoring our football club and of course in these communities it's very difficult to say no so it's not just intentional to have to increase your reputation or your status or being liked but it's also that clubs especially football clubs amateur clubs are always in financial problems and they always seek out people who may be willing to sponsor yeah that would answer my question I do have one last question if I'm allowed to ask how do you know that someone is deliberately losing a game because for example at the World Cup as someone before me mentioned if you would become a second in your group to play a weaker opponent that finished first in their group on purpose by listing not your best 11 but your say your reserves that are that you're technically allowed to list because they are well part of your team so if they lose from say a better opponent that would list their full 11 but they are only there because they wanted to lose then how can you prove that yeah yeah proof is always is always the the main problem with with match fixing and of course sending the the substitutes into the into the game when you no longer need to win to go to the next round can also produce quite unexpected results because the substitutes may even perform better than the first team in some cases but yeah the most notorious examples were like the the draws at the World Cup for example so that both teams know if there's no score or everything says equal we are both true to the next round and then we have some examples of matches in which basically neither team actually crossed to the half of the the opponent so they just in in the last 24 20 30 minutes they just passed the ball on their own half and the opponent did not do anything to have to intercept the the ball for example so in those cases yeah it's pretty obvious but yeah also to some it's also accepted so these that there were no to my knowledge never any consequences imposed by FIFA for example but yeah indeed as I explained if you don't have a an athlete who actually comes forward and said well I am guilty of match fixing I did manipulate the game I confess then it's almost impossible to prove and even okay you can have an element of of doubt when you actually receive large sums of money but if this is only once you can still come up with these excuses like yeah okay I took the money but I didn't do anything so in the end if it's for example a pattern so if you receive 25 000 euros every week and there are very strange results happening in in in the in the game then of course it becomes more plausible that actually something was wrong but as for now in in in most cases people need to come forward before it can actually be proven I have a question actually um so um I heard I don't know if this is true but uh that's Gagbo was the only one that is actually being prosecuted right Gagbo yeah yeah uh is that true uh no he was not not prosecuted okay but um the Dutch football association uh concluded that they that he had indeed manipulated at least one match yeah but that was only the football association and the case of course broke a number of years after he uh well he had already left the Netherlands so I from no mistake in the case was from 2008 and it had the media started reporting about it several years later um when he was I think still playing in some far away country uh but he had left the Netherlands long before that so there was no real uh and and proof was difficult because there were emails but actually um the the the Dutch police did an investigation but they weren't able to find any financial records because the case had happened too long ago uh so there was really no proof that he actually received the money it just said in an email well uh indeed I think he um he was in contact with Piro Mal so these emails came up in in the in that case um and uh he first demanded 200 000 euros and then Piro Mal said something in the email like uh man you're nuts uh I think 25 000 is more than enough and so that's the information on which the uh the football association actually um based its uh its uh its conclusions on and of course on looking at what happened during the match but yeah football players make mistakes all the time and it's of course quite difficult to see what is done on purpose and what is not yeah yeah it's really difficult to prove uh any more questions no then I think um we leave it that this um thank you very much for joking us today and of course also give a big applause again to Transpahpens and uh hopefully see you next time during one of our other events for Studium Generale have a nice evening