Saturday's collection of the mismatch, the manipulated and the irrelevant is not only a turn off for the fans, its also a bit of a 'mare for the remainder of the industry sector.
With all the moral rectitude of Blackwater executives, the bookmaking industry slimes its coercive route through the programme of matches while the media attempts to convince us that Estonia represent a real test.
Selective viewing could reveal proper football. We pointed you in the direction of Scotland and Romania on Friday and their victories were merited. Scotland need only a point at home to Italy to qualify assuming the efforts of the Ukraine game do not prevent a victory in Georgia on Wednesday. Not before time, the Romanians are getting proper recognition for the quality of their football. A few years back the Germans were battered 5-1 in Romania and in the UEFA Cup, Romanian club teams have been major overperformers in recent years. Robbed of qualification for Euro 2004 and World Cup 2006 by outrageous refereeing, the Romanians should not be underrated - the two games against the Netherlands show that they are a team to be feared at next summer's event.
These two matches were positive on another level too. There have been times in the pre-Platini not-too-distant-past that these results would have been anathema to UEFA and machinations would have been afoot. Informationally and analytically, the Platini-UEFA is a fun market to trade. The incentive for positive change has to be incremental and incessant and Platini, to his credit, is making waves. There are, inevitably, still inappropriate power gradients at all levels of the UEFA hierarchy but, in his short period in charge, Platini has shown considerable skill in redrawing the lines of debate and focus putting football as opposed to strictly financial interests first.
On a trading level, international breaks are defined by two key factors. The negative is the chaotic kick off schedule which is incredibly irritating on a life hacking level. The positive is the markets themselves. All sorts of shenanigans went on at the weekend as various insiders generated preferential outcomes that were positively correlated with their market trading profile(s). Take Belarus losing at home to Luxembourg - this was Luxembourg's first competitive victory in 12 years and ended a run of 55 consecutive defeats in the European Championship qualifiers. The hosts simply made no effort to win. The Belarus team didn't even bother trying to disguise it - it was a training match. There were nuggets of money that revealed the outcome was a sale on the handicaps but we would not wish to share any other proprietary information about this particular event. Take it from us, the match was not legit. And neither was Slovenia's yawn against Albania which could have been predicted at market opening on the underground Asian markets. Nothing else happened throughout the entire market window that had the slightest impact on that initial professional money. Iceland/Latvia was a very British coup whereas Croatia/Israel had a broader continental trading distribution. The trade of the weekend was undoubtedly Spain who simply could not afford to lose in Denmark - some of the best in the industry were on the Spaniards big time.
Behind this charade, the reality of Kieran Fallon's court case regarding his alleged defrauding of Betfair clients continues in full public gaze. The British horseracing industry is rotten to the core. Whenever one of these occasional show-trials surfaces, we are merely seeing the usually hidden power politics of the horseracing world explode onto the radar. Lester Piggott being jailed for tax evasion being perhaps the most obvious example of blinkered reality! Picking out Fallon for criminality is an arbitrary selection if viewed logically but a politically-motivated one if viewed rationally.
And, anyway, what point is Betfair trying to make here? That Fallon is the usual one-bad-apple that always bobs to the surface when institutional criminality experiences a publicity glare? That Betfair clients are usually taking part in a betting exchange that isn't impacted upon by insider trading, corruptions, criminality and match-fixing? Betfair actively trade markets on a proprietary basis and, yet, we are expected to believe that the Betfair trading team do not treat privileged insider information as a major competitive advantage. It is not only external money that drives the prices of the betting exchanges.
At all levels, the spectacular society realities imposed on our horizons are fabrications - half-truths observed with restricted vision.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
