A tale of two totalitarian corruptions involving the mafia and sports people...
Tim Donaghy has left the NBA basketball world in a state of considerable turbulence following his prosecution for influencing professional games in the US. Donaghy is a referee who has been found guilty of rigging large numbers of basketball matches over a two year period although he had officiated for thirteen years prior to being forced to resign. The case revealed that he had been working very closely with bookmakers to achieve the outcomes desired by the betting industry and charges against him also include suspected betting on games in which he officiated and an association with organised crime. FBI officials are examining video footage of games refereed by Donaghy, looking for curious foul calls and other such behaviour.
As Britain follows America with a time lapse of about five years, we can look forward to the eventual exposure of this exact same corrupt structure in the Premiership in 2012. The thought of Scotland Yard examining Graham Poll games is a situation one could only enjoy...
NBA journalist Chris Sheridan reckons: "the league needs to... worry about restoring its integrity with the fans who have stuck around, because if those folks start abandoning the sport, the hardcore customer base begins to shrink. And the hardcore fans are the lifeblood of any professional sports league". Once the trust link has been severed, it is very difficult to rebrand - as an example, look at the skewed incentives of the heavily corrupt British horseracing industry where racecourse attendance is generally meagre. The NBA is desperately going for the inevitable one bad apple fairy tale but comparison with the Premiership indicates that these mafia corruptions are much more likely to be systemic in structure. As for Donaghy himself, he hasn't exactly got an optimistic outlook. He will be sentenced once he has finished collaborating with prosecutors. This cooperation may well involve giving evidence at the trial(s) of mobsters with which he is alleged to have been associated. Tough one... to help the police or the mafia.
Former Belarus international goalkeeper Valery Shantolosov is a crook. His story is not typical of the numerous other mini-corruptions that repeatedly surface in the lower tier UEFA nations and is consequently worthy of exploration. Shantolosov wasn't even in the team for the two games he is accused of throwing! Shantolosov has been charged with trying to fix two of his country's Euro 2004 qualifying matches against the Czech Republic and Moldova but our Trading Team were on to Valery a decade ago (although not before we had lost money on a couple of Belarus events under his control). The police in Minsk allege that Shantolosov was/is part of an illegal Russian betting ring and that, once his whereabouts are discovered, an arrest will made. Shantolosov is currently biding his time as a goalkeeping coach at Sibir Novosibirsk in the Russian Second Division. We would think it unlikely that any arrest is on the cards here. International matches involving Russia and a whole range of other countries either under the direct control of Moscow or linked via history are controlled by the Russian mafia. The corruption is so accepted in Moscow that fans openly discuss the machinations underpinning the corruption in the game. The betting markets are totally under Moscow's control and any trading strategy has to take this into account. Highly tuned cloned trading is the only non-insider route to profit on these events. Such matches have become so common that a specific piece of modular structure had to be developed for our Unified Trading Model (UTM) just to address such events. The corrupt situation is replicated in Russian domestic games where insider trading and betting scams may result in prices plummeting from around Even money (2.00) to prohibitive odds on (in the vicinity of 1.01) over a period of hours. No competitive event is able to demonstrate such market volatility.
Today Donaghy and Shantolosov.
Tomorrow?
Exposure of sporting corruption - coming to a country near you soon...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
