Celtic Schisms

Introduction

Celtic FC has a history and a network like no other.

The Irish Republican politics, the ground-breaking Lisbon Lions, the intense support (ask Messi or Maldini), the global fanbase, the web of talented individuals who have given and still freely give their time, money and expertise to advance the club strategically...
... or, in the case of John Keane, to save the club from financial oblivion.

All of the great global football teams have this linkage with history and political purpose and a sense of community.

But the impact of the current fallout between the Celtic financial hierarchy and the real owners of the club, the fans, is a major dysfunction that must be solved immediately before it creates yet more harm for the club.

                        Unfortunately, in postmodern football, history and politics are problems

For five days in September, I had the very best job in the world - a high level consultancy with Celtic to enable passage to the 2nd Phase of the Champions League this season.

Unfortunately Peter Lawwell, in his own heroic way, pulled on the deal.

The holistic of the consultancy was to protect Celtic against corruptions that occur to undermine the strategies of the club in the Champions League.
The irony of the failure to conclude the agreement is obvious.
We are a cellular grouping of forensic analysts revealing corruptions and Celtic are a football team owned by a bookmaker, Dermot Desmond (Betdaq supremo).

We have been informed that it was deemed too risky to proceed with the consultancy in case we came across internal issues in our monitoring of the external.

As a result, the club strategy for this year's Champions League Group Stage was diabolical in the early stages (http://footballisfixed.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/one-love-art-of-war.html).

And it did not improve thereafter.
The same strategic errors were repeated as last season with some new ones thrown in for good measure. No lessons have been learnt and the structure is simply one of the blind paying one another to lead one another blindly.

Nobody within the club hierarchy nor any of the agents leeching onto the club have any perception of UEFA hidden agendas and internal power-plays and linkages etc etc.
The club do not possess the template to even start planning any strategy for Champions League and future European Super League success.

As we are no longer willing to work with the club under the current regime, we are limited as to the solutions that we are able to offer in this place.
But we have found four areas worthy of discussion without impinging on any of our isolationist thresholds.

1. Club Interests Versus Private Agendas

We originally approached Celtic when we were informed via a contact within UEFA that the European governing body were going to be taking a very close look at the Champions League Qualifier between Cliftonville and Celtic in case any politics were seen in the UEFA sphere.

The UEFA Champions League, by and large, is a marketing process.
It is not feasible for Celtic to celebrate their past as this does not fit in with the UEFA brand - pony-tailed ball skills with a pirouette are preferred to anything approaching political reality.

Part of my discussions with Lawwell centred on this very point - he understands totally that the fans are the biggest asset of the club but wishes to cleanse them of their history to optimise European performance and cashflow.

One could call this a strategy (even if one views it as an inappropriate one)...
... but the club then sell short of achieving that 'optimisation' by focus on their own private agendas and connections.
When it comes to push versus shove, club versus self, enlightened self-interest wins the day.

If the club hierarchy are going to sell out on the fans, the history, the raison d'etre and grasp a share of this UEFA nirvana for the Celtic Brand, then surely they need to focus on the success of this brand absolutely rather than allowing their own private considerations to come into play.

At the moment, this is not happening.
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2. Politics

Bobby Sands MP, representing the Anti H-Block party, was elected as a member of the British parliament in 1981.

30,493 people voted for him in the Fermanagh and South Tyrone constituency.
There was an 86.9% turnout.
Sands had a public mandate to fight against inappropriate state power and terror...
... exactly the same as Nelson Mandela who was eulogised by UEFA after his death.

When the club were being punished by UEFA for displaying political imagery, why didn't the hierarchy point out the equivalence between the politics and strategies of Sands/IRA when compared with Mandela/ANC?

After all, Cameron wanted Mandela to hang, Thatcher thought him a terrorist and the US agreed by keeping him on their list of global terrorists until 2008 before he was whitewashed into someone else.

Instead the club have allowed their club brand to be demoted in the UEFA marketing pyramid without offering a stout defence.
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3. Club Ownership

As we have pointed out before (http://footballisfixed.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/how-to-solve-match-fixing-once-and-for.html) there are potentially issues of integrity when bookmakers own football clubs.

We have NO evidence of inappropriate fixing of Celtic matches due to Desmond/Betdaq link but this is a structure that should generally be regarded as one being primed for shenanigans.

And we are always wary of bookmakers that, like Betdaq, do not allow winning accounts as, after all, if you are not allowed to win off a bookmaker then the business interaction is something else entirely!

There must be occasions when Desmond's personal financial focus is different to that of the club...
... and this must be a concern.

When board members and club agents are known to bet on Celtic matches, is it invalid to express concern that people higher up the hierarchy might conceivably share a similar inclination?

And, as a background, there is something vaguely distasteful about Desmond being £2 million in pocket, Lawwell annually heating his driveway with £700K while the club refuses to pay a Living Wage at the bottom of the pyramid.
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4. A Way Forward

The atmosphere at the recent Hearts match was truly depressing.
Things need to change.
And fast.

From our position, we might suggest a discussion based around very basic foundational areas:

Who owns the club? The financial hierarchy or the fans? How might co-ownership be achieved?  What happens when the needs of the club differ from those paid to manage it?

Decisions made in the imminent future will determine the future of Celtic for decades to come.

Time to get strategic. 
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For Celtic to be self-harming in this window of massive monopolistic competitive opportunity in Scotland is a crying shame.
To waste all this energy turning inwards rather than planning for a brighter future in the European Super League is only helping one team, Sevconians.

And Lawwell was wrong on this too...
... Sevconians are not an imitation of a reality in the sense of Rory Bremner doing Tony Blair, because the real Tony Blair (unfortunately) still exists while the comedian performs his parallel.

Sevconians are actually a posthumous tribute act - just like a Michael Jackson one or an Elvis one...
... only with weaker songs.

Rangers no longer exist and Sevconians merely allow a little nostalgia and reminiscence for those who still care.

Rangers are the past. Not the future. 
Just mock them.

Hail Hail Hogmanay!


© Football is Fixed 2006-2013 

How To Solve Match Fixing Once And For All

Yesterday, Liberal Democrat MP Sir Bob Russell said that English professional football is "rotten to the core" and that a Royal Commission is required to clean up football with "parasitic agents" being the major problem.

If any such Royal Commission is to work then it will need to thoroughly address the six points outlined below.
Otherwise the game is up.
 
Also yesterday, UEFA announced that they are drafting an 11-point plan aimed to eradicate match-fixing, labelling it their 'top priority'.

Unfortunately, skimming over the pitch put forward by the aptly named UEFA general secretary Gianni Infantino, we can only expect peripheral tinkering akin to that achieved by the British government's select committee who reported last summer.
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On Tuesday night, there was a highly suspicious match between FC Bayern and Manchester City in the UEFA Champions League (http://footballisfixed.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/was-fc-bayern-versus-manchester-city-fix.html) (http://footballisfixed.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/the-fixing-of-champions-league-games.html).

We may be polemical but there is evidently a case to be answered here.
This is a suspicious event between the Champions League holders and the richest club in the world!
And media silence.

Instead UEFA claim only 0.7% of matches are fixed and the mainstream media in Britain focuses on Whitehawk FC and DJ Campbell.

Infantino also indicated that UEFA want to strengthen the links between sports authorities and state bodies but this is a structure that can backfire dependent on who represents the state - there are many countries where state interference would only serve to increase the corruption.

We are employed by clubs as leech consultants.
We protect clubs against systemic and particular corruptions against their interests.
We analyse the zeitgeist of corruption.

To us, the most astonishing aspect of the match fixing 'crisis' is that when we have seen that government, the mainstream media, investment banking, the police, retail banks, the utilities, many other sports are all corrupted, there is this religious belief that, somehow, top level football is not tainted.
Football has taken over from religion - everybody is 'Something FC 'til I Die'.
And we don't want our New Deity to be killed off just yet.

But if football really wants to save itself from the neohyperrealities of the present systemic corruptions, it needs to implement every single one of the points below in their entirety.

No pseudo-11 point plan but an overhaul of an entirely corrupt mechanism from top to bottom.
But starting at the top.

DJ Campbell Is Innocent!
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1. The Betting Markets and Insider Trading

The primary concern are the global betting markets.
There are three levels of market activity - the public markets, the Dark Pools and the illegal underground markets based largely but not exclusively in South East Asia.

With a global network of this type, there has to be global regulation with jail sentences and life bans for miscreants.
The global betting market turnover on football is thought to have reached £1 trillion.
£1 trillion is over 50% of the Britain's annual GDP!!

All markets must be public.
All trading by insiders must be registered with a Commitment of Traders body to prevent inside knowledge being exploited.
All players, referees, agents, managers should be banned from betting entirely.
All suspicious betting must be reported to forensic analysts to detect fraudulent behaviour - the current level of expertise exhibited by Early Warning, Interpol/ Europol etc is not professional enough (we are able to detect insider betting and match fixing in many more games than 0.7%!!).
All spot-markets should be banned.
All Dark Pool activity must be regulated and made public, the same with the Asian underground and the developing undergrounds in Dubai, the Caribbean, numerous British offshore territories, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Tbilisi, Nigeria, Australia, the US and Canada, Brazil, Mumbai etc.

2. Agents and the Markets

Every single football agent that I have ever met has been criminalised!

Agents are a lubricant in the game and, in addition to leeching money from the sport, they facilitate corruptions relating to both the betting markets and the transfer markets.

Ownership of goalkeepers, linkage with referees (see below), multiple ownership of players in a game, even more extensive multiple ownership via linkage with other agents in a fragmented cartel of illicit match fixing and betting market activity.
Accordingly agents not only distort, corrupt and profit from the betting markets that they exploit, they degenerate the sport and impact upon trophies being won and relegations/ promotions etc.
The careers of players are also affected by these corruptions and the fan is forced to watch events where the outcome is clearly visible in underground betting markets pre-match!

Agents corrupt Champions League games at the highest level and yet UEFA do nothing.

Agents also, as is their wont, exploit the transfer market via 3rd party ownership.

There is no regulation for agents.
And no regulation or self-regulation is pointless.
Agents distort every single aspect of the sport and often utilise business practices that border on the slave trade when it comes to footballers from Africa and certain South and Central American countries.
Coercion of players relating to the betting markets is a major issue.
Additionally, under the table payments are the norm and ownership networks are structured similarly to the Tor proxy server concept!

Agents must be regulated.

3. Club Owners

Surely it is asking for trouble if club owners double as bookmakers.

There will inevitably be occasions when the financial self-interest of Mr Bet 365 The Bookmaker will trump the interests of Mr Bet 365 The Football Club (Stoke City) - the only issue is whether such self-interest is implemented.
Additionally, this incentive to fix can result in club owners stopping their own teams from winning to the absolute detriment of the fans who are paying the wages and the integrity of the game.

All club ownership should be open rather than underground and opaque.
Fit and proper persons rulings should be robust and thoroughly implemented - the Championship in England is a veritable Hotch Potch of Inappropriates when it comes to club ownership...
... and the Premier League is only marginally better.

4. Referees

Referees are an issue.
Relatively underpaid in a millionaire's paradise, they are ripe for corruption.

Referees are chosen from too small a pool (only 18 for the Premier League - the most liquid betting market on the planet, for example) and have very long careers.
Market ownership of a referee is a big earner for both parties.
Referees are additionally 'owned' by other participants in the game - clubs, mafia, even UEFA chooses referees relating to its own annual marketing plan AND the importance of allegiance to the G14(18) power base of clubs.

If referees were selected meritocratically then corruption from this source would be harder to implement.
To this end, the ratings of referees need to be made public and the implementation of video technology (see next point) will enable 'under-achievers' to be rooted out and discarded.

5. Video Technology

It is more critical for football to have video technology than cricket, tennis or rugby yet the authorities refuse to introduce anything more than goalline technology. Why?

An incorrect wicket in cricket, line call in tennis or try in rugby is rarely match changing yet those sports guard against such occurrences by using technology ...
... in football a goal or a penalty or a sending off very frequently is a match changing event and yet we have virtually nothing.

Up to 40 wickets in a Test Match, 240 points in a tennis match, half a dozen tries in a game of rugby...
... and one goal.

Furthermore, because professional footballers are well aware of the corruptions taking place, once a referee signals his intent, there is a psychological deflation in the victim team.

The most striking aspect of watching cricket or rugby is how fan conversation always relates to the game itself due to the utilisation of video technology for virtually all contentious decisions.
This serves to produce the correct result, massively reduce corruption and act as a measurement of performance of referees and umpires.

The argument that it would slow down the game is fatuous.

It would add excitement if marketed correctly.
UEFA and the Premier League would be able to bombard us with messages from their media partners while we waited to see if it is a penalty or not!

6. Whistleblowing Hotline

When we have meetings with administrative bodies, chief executives, football managers, club owners, analysts, bookmakers, many fans, there is acceptance that football is corrupt but that nobody is going to do anything about it due to both financial self-interest and fear.

Remember Mike Newell? He soon disappeared from the game!

A global whistleblowing hotline needs to be set up to allow knowledge of match fixing to be made available to the various bodies that will need to be established for Points 1-5 to be achieved.
This must be anonymous and rewarded.
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People like ourselves who receive threats and menaces due to their efforts to expose football that is "riddled with corruption" need to be protected.

The sport is flooded with mafiosi interests - at the moment, I am enjoying extensive conversations with a contact over the role of Serbian mafia in Italian and Serbian football and the role of Albanian mafia in the Austrian game.

But such groups are only able to exploit the integrity of football due to an entire lack of regulation in many areas and loopholes elsewhere.
If FIFA and UEFA eliminated these distortions, we could have betting markets on a level playing field and football would not be fixed. 


We are taking serious existential risks to disclose these neohyperrealities of modern football.

THIS IS NOT HOW IT SHOULD BE.

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NB: Please note that myself or other members of our cellular body are available for media in this window. 
You can reach us via a Direct Message at Twitter (@footballisfixed) or via email (footballisfixed02@googlemail.com).


© Football is Fixed 2006-2013

Give The Man A Gong For Being Wrong

Eugene Fama was selected as one of the three Nobel Prize for Economics recipients this week.

His hypothesis regarding the efficiency of financial markets is indeed elegant (which sometimes is enough for an award to be made) but it is also utterly and completely wrong.
Not particularly impressed with his Fama-French Three-Factor Model either (but more on that later).

If there were no government interferences, no psychopathies, no behavioural irrationalities, no corruptions nor criminalities and if market sectors didn't always evolve towards maturity, he would be right.
But as these inputs drive all markets, the laureate is surely wrong.

Fama's Efficient Markets Hypothesis was put forward in 1970 and formed an intellectual basis for the shock doctrine disaster neo-capitalism that the world has experienced since.
By being a part of the "intellectual" framework gathered as an neo-con edifice at the University of Chicago, Fama bears some responsibility for this sociopathic system.

So, what is Gene's hypothesis and why is it incorrect?

The Efficient Markets Hypothesis is split into three levels - strong-form, semi-strong-form and weak-form efficiency.
Strong-form suggests that market prices reflect all information, public and private, and it is not possible for anyone to earn excess returns.
In semi-stong-form, prices adjust to new information rapidly and rationally.
While weak-form structures, prices simply follow a random walk.

Before we go any further we need to look at the architecture of markets.
The public markets are just the top of an iceberg of submerged Dark Pool markets - there are hundreds of unregulated Dark Pools where insiders trade against insiders in markets that the public only sees when an excess of over-enthusiasm occurs. It is in these markets that the big market plays are made not the public ones.

For all assessments of Fama's Hypothesis, therefore, it will need to be addressed on two levels - the public markets and the Dark Pools.

1) The most dominant input to the wrongness of Fama's Hypothesis is behaviouralism.
Work in the sixties by Daniel Kahnemann, Amos Tversky, Paul Slovic and Richard Thaler had already introduced psychology to the market and, in 1979, Kahnemann and Tversky developed Prospect Theory which represented the final psychological nail in the coffin of Efficient Markets. Investors do not behave in a rational manner in the marketplace for a whole continuum of different reasons that both exist within themselves and also interact in complex ways between themselves to produce the behaviours that we project. Market prices represent mass human psychology far more than they do unproved economic fundamentals.
So by 1979, Fama's Hypothesis should have been put to bed...
... unfortunately, it took the blinkered Chicago School until 2007 to acknowledge the impact of behaviouralism in markets, attempting to convince us in the meantime that an efficient pricing infrastructure underpinned the alleged validity of Friedmanian late capitalism..

Slavoj Žižek: "The problem is today when you have chaos or disorder, people lose their cognitive mapping."

2) All of the information is not in the market. Even if behaviouralism did not exist and we were all perfectly rational in all of our decision-making, efficient markets would be compromised on all three levels of Fama's efficiency hierarchy.
Public markets are largely inefficient being too far from the core Dark Pools to be benefiting instantaneously to the flow of real information. The public markets offer a distilled filtered form of this driving underground Dark Pool marketplace. Dark Pool trading strategies become converted into a holistic market strategy as Dark Pool liabilities are hedged in the public sphere.

What about the Dark Pools?
Are they a proof of Fama efficiencies?

No.
Behaviouralism is a "plug in" in any market, public or Dark Pool.
Additionally, the information flow in Dark Pools is, by its very nature, opaque.
Proxy trading, algorithmic distortions, hidden players away from the table, consortia strategies, disinformational trading, cornered markets etc etc.
At any given time, the market tends to inefficiency.
As mature markets might evolve into anything the primary operators desire, the price can be anything too.

Mature markets (and these are the ones most traded in the Dark Pools) are largely under the absolute control of a small grouping of operations, think OPEC. Individual members of OPEC have their own hidden agendas over and above the shared agenda with fellow members. Even when the structure is held in place with extra robustness due to government scaffolding around the market, the major player(s) is/are still able to make the market whatever they desire whenever they desire.
In effect monopolistic corruption distorts any semblance of efficiency in the market while duopolistic or cartel behaviour offers a slightly diluted version of the same.

3) Disaster capitalism undermines any efficiency in any financial market.
The Friedmanian disaster capitalism complex thrives on chaos. When a disaster strikes or, as in the case of Chile, is created, the Chicago school Hayekians move in with their shock tactics to further destabilise an already destabilised people. As US security entities move into the vacuum, the markets are utterly chaotic. Although some efficiency and robustness is added to the marketplace ironically by the strategies of these security operations (the same template being micro-adjusted from territory to territory) the holistic performance of the markets are driven by irrationalities and the efficiencies fall off the bottom of Fama's ratings chart. Andrew Haldane, who should have been made Governor of the Bank of England, refers to this inability to judge risk as "disaster myopia".

Disaster myopia in a disaster capitalism complex!

4) Private information is introduced to the market in a variety of strategies that, by their very nature, imply market inefficiencies being created for the advantage of Dark Pool operations.
Knowledge within a company, governmental or central bank policies, trading disinformation for future profits, competitive market poker play all are based around the possession of the ultimate power play for the marketplace. Just think of the variety of ways in which, say, Ben Bernanke could have utilised his absolute knowledge of the variables related to quantitative easing. An individual, with evolving strategies, could make money without the full reality hitting the market by placing trades laterally and peripherally.

Noam Chomsky would call this "cogntive regulatory capture" and it is a structure typical of late capitalism.

5) The most obvious way in which financial markets are inefficient is by their refusal to accept the cost of externalities in the price of an asset.
How on earth can a price be efficient in the holistic sense if externalities are not included in the calculation? The price can only be considered in any way efficient in short time frames as, when the true costs are included, the asset value is very different indeed. The timing of this market implosion can be an unknown variable.

Friedmanism underprices risk and ignores externalities.
The eventual impact of these externalities is infrastructurally significant.

Although Dark Pools are displaced up the efficiency hierarchy due to lack of time lag and the primary element in the insider trading, the markets increase in efficiency is only marginal and only due to corrupting inputs being introduced to the market price.
If all corrupt inputs in a mature market could be known and assessed both singly and in association with one another, only then might a corrupt market approach strong-form efficiency and in a non-regulated marketplace this is simply not going to occur.

Which brings us to the conclusion of yet another aspect of the fake of Friedmanism.
Fama's only other claim to fame is the already mentioned Fama-French Three-Factor Model.
This attempts to replace the old Capital Asset Pricing Model (which, by the way, is also inadequate).
Needless to say the Three-Factor model doesn't work as it ignores corruption and behaviouralism.

Entertainingly, Foye, Mramor and Pahor (2013) have shown an improvement in the performance of the Fama-French model if one of the terms is replaced by a term that acts as a proxy for accounting manipulation!

These papers are amongst the first tentative steps of economics crawling towards holistically analysing the hyperreality.

Benoît Mandelbrot: "Financial economics, as a discipline, is where Chemistry was in the 16th century: a messy compendium of proven know-how, misty folk wisdom, and unexamined assumptions and grandiose speculation."

As a former pupil of Mandelbrot, Fama should know better...
... grandiose models, unexamined inputs, misty economic wisdom mixed with the status quo.

And, anyway, as economics in rather dubious fashion claims to be a science, let's address it as such...

Michel Foucault: "If one recognises in science only the linear accumulation of truths or the orthogenesis of reason, and fails to recognise in it the discursive practice that has its own levels, its own thresholds, its own various ruptures, one can describe only a single historical division, which one adopts as a model to be applied at all times for all forms of knowledge."

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© Football is Fixed 2006-2013