Even Homer could rig a football match more professionally than the British criminal classes.
It is little wonder that our sport, this game of football, is TOTALLY controlled by Asian underground bookmakers whose expertise on both the sport and the behaviouralisms of another culture show the crims up as the psychopathic antisocials they are.
One of the reasons that the Stoke v West Brom match was fixed at the weekend was the presence of Chinese New Year yesterday.
The tip-top Asian market makers all take an elongated break over the holiday either closing down their operations or allowing juniors to co-ordinate trading at much reduced volume.
The impact is both less professional money entering the world betting markets from Asia and, consequently, a greater ease for other consortia to attempt to corner a market.
With the police closing in on Harry Redknapp and Rosie 47 and tax evasion and the tip of the iceberg that is RedknappWorld, both UEFA and the English Premier League taking stances against the criminalised networks corrupting the sport (those below them in the feeding frenzy at least) and the new Interpol Whistle-blowing Telephone Line soon to be active, these are risky times for murkiness.
Saturday's match was just a shit gig, a casual criminality from antisocials who believe that they are so sophisticated that their crookery will not be spotted...
... or acted upon.
There are some key questions arising from the current state of play.
The EPL, some bookmakers, top trading organisations and, particularly, the Asian underground knew all about the Stoke v West Brom match prior to kick off.
The betting patterns are highly suspicious on the match.
Highly...
There are organisations and bodies like Early Warning GmbH and Interpol who are supposed to spot suspicious betting patterns and act on them. These people are supposed to be forensic in their examination.
Wouldn't one think that an obvious place to start looking are visually suspicious events where one team is linked to bookmakers that are, obviously unknowingly, profiting from the rogue match in question?
D'oh.
In any other area of criminal investigation, aside from the obvious one of racist murders, investigators use such links to build the picture.
Why not in the rampant corruption of football?
D'oh.
Some underground Asian firms were seeing million pound bets on the Stoke v WBA game.
Even Betfair saw some late £25K positions against Stoke.
And take Betfair, or any bookmaker for that matter.
They accept bets that they know are insider trading (John Colquhoun bet with Betfair when we were evaluating him and they didn't close his account or refer his positions to any external body. No they did not. They presumably utilised this knowledge as inside information and adjusted their market profile accordingly).
Every bet by an insider should be reported.
Why is this not the case?
D'oh.
Or take mainstream journalists.
Some of them talk with us and the scene created is one of insider information serving as an alternative currency in the newsrooms, as exposure in media and positive representation in media are associated with insider betting information.
Is it little wonder that no mainstream journalist is allowed to publish details of this endemic and systemic corruption?
D'oh.
Slick trading organisations are very particular about isolationism and leakage of information.
For the purposes of longevity of competitive advantage, trades are secreted away.
And these trades, at least in the case of our bunch, are based on careful analysis of all aspects of the game - we do cybernetics and pattern recognition at speed and we don't want anyone other than our broker knowing what we are doing, thank you very much.
We hedge at Betfair and elsewhere and trade on the peripheral markets or micro-adjust positions at best price in Europe...
... but this is just noise.
That people think that they are able to get away with Stoke v WBA-type scams shows either extreme stupidity (which we doubt) or a culture of anything goes cowboy poker on our beloved sport.
That would be very rich people, many of whom owe their huge wealth to football, who, not content with uber-wealth, wish to gain more opium for their offshore bank accounts by ripping off everybody else involved in the event.
What gives these criminals, for that is exactly what they are, the right to abuse the poor and the not-so-poor in this manner?
D'oh.
Interestingly, in the US, the super-super rich are reinventing themselves.
For instance, many sympathise with the Occupy movement according to the Economist and feel that capitalism has become too corrupt.
They revisit history to marginalise their own activities in criminal bodies to distance themselves from this altogether shoddier form of psychopathy.
It is even happening in Britain between the EPL and rogue consortiums over particular football matches.
From our perspective, strictly as traders and analysts, rogue consortiums are a pain in the neck.
Not only are they destroying the game, they are also undermining professional analysts from improving the efficiency of the markets - our one public good (aside from whistle-blowing, that would be).
Hyperreal Man-Made Black Swan events in football markets are a complete destruction of the integrity of the market.
Now why doesn't an operator who loses on a rigged match take legal action against the match-fixers?
D'oh.
It doesn't take a five sigma evaluation or an understanding of the fourth level of the multiverse to jigsaw together what we are dealing with here.
D'oh...
And.
Anyway.
Who Guards the Feckin' Guardians?
D'oh.
No-one.
That is exactly who.
Football is Fucked...
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