The timing of intuitions are markedly more accurate if one is dealing with a range of scenario evaluations utilising an atmospheric analysis of a core competency.
Or...
... you can time things better if you know your stuff.
Welcome to the Football is Fixed Guide to Creative Strategy and Grassing.
First things first.
Across the world, corruption and match fixing in football is being paraded through the courts.
Plus.
FIFA is endemically corrupt.
Plus.
A significant percentage of match officials in Europe are linked directly or indirectly, with their knowledge or without, to the global betting markets where over $2.5 billion a game is the common market on major European matches.
Plus.
Italy has already reached the stage of the sequel - the Return of Calciopoli - the one where 18 high level players are arrested (making 37 in total) last December around the date that Silvio Steps Aside - Silvio Stepping Aside Day as it will be celebrated across Europe for centuries to come.
Ah! But in England, isn't it all so hunky dory, so it is.
But not for long.
We all got around and had this little chat in December and in our collective esteemed estimations, there is a 30% chance that a seriously brand-damaging scandal will erupt around the English Premier League in the next 30 active rounds.
We have called it the Thirty Thirty Theory (30/30Th).
And, unlike those End-Of-The-World-Merchants, by not confining ourselves to a certainty, we will, as usual, be correct either way - yup, we predicted the arrest of a **************** so we did/ we were 70% certain that the game would remain clean for the period so we were.
Takes you pick...
Suddenly everyone is on about the Art of Whistle-blowing - that peripheral Art where you reveal that your government are actually crooks in suits and end up spending 400+ days in solitary confinement for your troubles/ in Sweden awaiting extradition so that you too might also be introduced to the wonders of self ad nauseum in the HyperImperium.
Takes your pick...
But Obama encouraged whistle-blowing...
Or how about the whistle-blower who exposed the insider trading by the wife of the [ex] president of the Swiss National Bank, Philipp Hildebrand - The Economist: "A straw poll this week suggested that a majority of the Swiss public views whistle-blowing as no excuse to breach bank secrecy, and regrets the departure of Mr Hildebrand."
At Football is Fixed, we learned very early on not to do the whistle-blowing thing - a few chats with government figures, regulators, administrators, officials, managers, players, criminals, police, lawyers, media, woodlice and last (but least) agents, made it quite clear that we are dealing with a fragmented cartel here.
It was like when cuddly bumpkin Gordon Strachan was being paid to utter inanities during a recent televised betting occasion. He was referring to racism but he could have been banging on about any part of the game. He suggested that racism wasn't a problem in football because it wasn't a problem amongst his insider peer group - that would be the expert analysts, the ex-players, the commentators, presenters, or, further back, the board of directors, the financiers, the legal team, the strategists and Desmond.
Strangely enough racism isn't an issue in any of these circles because there isn't a non-white face available to be racist towards.
There are more people with red hair in the Celtic FC hierarchy than there are Black referees, Black administrators, Black managers, Black owners, Black chief executives combined in the entire British game.
The complacency behind such bumpkinness is one reason why, at some point very soon, someone is going to push their luck too far in the rigged match world.
As Quantum Mechanics should tell us: In a loop + Out of touch = Danger.
Confidence leads to Sloppiness.
And when the game is sitting on an administrative and insider mass malfeasance of neohyperreal proportions, there are just too many weak spots for an unpleasant major truth to erupt.
Someone being threatened or coerced, someone seeking police protection, a Mario Balotelli Tweet, someone feeling desperate, someone seeking political gain, someone telephoning the Interpol whistle-blower line soon to be set up, someone seeking a power shift, someone wishing for creative destruction, an Anarchist, someone with a penchant for mockery, a do-gooder, Mike Newell, a jealous colleague not in on the scam, forensic analysis of sloppy administration, an investigative journalist, a betting 'accident' live on tv, a suicide note, a mafia killing, some overseer or politician actually doing their job, that sort of thing...
That's an awful lot of bases for a fragmented cartel to keep covered.
And the EPL is hardly Goldman Sachs.
Careless corruption always breaks.
The EPL is a slow motion accident waiting to happen.
Sun Tzu, when translated into corporate psycho-babble, offers the following advice in windows of turmoil.
Develop a Complex Layered Strategy able to respond at speed to Black Swan Uproars (both threatening and rewarding) and undertake repeated probabilistic assessments of various Scenario Analyses as the Simulacra Unfolds.
Share knowledge only in the General and never the Specific and adjust lines of Security and Isolationism.
Observe and Take Advantage.
Twice recently sports betting market anomalies/criminalities have featured on the Financial Times homepage.
There is more serious interest being taken in betting corruption but we will deal on that one in the next post in this series.
But, in the meantime, let us hope that the English game has a Javi Poves out there.
Poves is the Sporting Gijon central defender who retired last year at the age of 23 due to the amount of corruption in the Spanish game.
"Football is cash and corruption. It's capitalism. And capitalism is death."
So it is.
