Football For Rent

Chilean journalist Juan Cristóbal Guarello: "Interpol has arrested them [FIFA executives] for doing what they always did without reproach: behaving as a bigwig in the world of professional football. All the allegations that they face (fraud and money laundering) are everyday elements of their activity. That is to say they are an essential part of football for rent."

Global football 'elites' act as a fragmented cartel to solicit proprietary gains alongside the rape of the game.
Football is prostituted under the supervision of the institutional, bookmaking, media, agent and regulatory captures that dominate the systemic structure of the corruption. 

Over the last few weeks, we have witnessed the evolving scandal regarding Girona's promotion-securing 3-0 win at already-promoted Real Betis on the last day of Spain's Segunda Liga season, and Serie B's latest matchfixing scandal involving Catania (who allegedly avoided relegation by fixing a number of games) and Messina. These series of fraudulent events involved half of the players and both club presidents. In total 7 people have been arrested and police say further raids will be carried out in Roma, Catania, Chieti and Campobasso.
These outrages are layered on the surface of the continuing crises involving matchfixing in each country with 41 people still under investigation over the corrupting of a La Liga relegation battle and the latest lower league matchfixing scandal in Italy (explained in our post http://footballisfixed.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/in-italy-and-england-matchfixing-is.html).

Fortunately, Spain has Javier Tebas and Italy has a functioning judiciary (and associated arms of the state)...
... and FIFA has the Swiss and US authorities.
England has nothing.

Richard Scudamore - the well-remunerated Premier League overseer of the renting out of his product and overlooker of murk.

Bookmakers owning and sponsoring teams while accepting insider trading on fixed events and treating such market knowledge as competitive advantage.

Underground bookmakers creating hugely destabilised and unbalanced markets where referees earning less than two grand per week officiate on matches with global betting volumes of £5-10 billion.

The FA was a joke prior to the arrival of asset-stripper Dyke. Now it is beyond parody.
Skybet sponsors the Championship while the Football League's chief executive is, hilariously, Shaun Harvey.

Agents are the lubrication of the corruptions as they box far above their weight in the fragmented cartel due to their omnipresent nature.
Players are with agents for life while playing for numerous clubs.
Where do loyalties lie?
The one English matchfixing scandal that the police have acted upon involved a football agent and former player Delroy Facey.
And as FIFA have altered the regulations, it is now going to be increasingly difficult to even determine who represents a player. This opens the door to rapacious matchfixing and third (and higher orders) party ownership (http://footballisfixed.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/dirty-dozen-role-of-agents-in.html).

And it is this self-regulation and lack of regulation that allows this underworld to continue renting out football on the streets.

With a non-functioning 4th estate media under output capture, stories of corruption and matchfixing in England are simply opaqued away in the Omertà.
Facey's case was almost entirely ignored originally and where was the mainstream media coverage of the sacking of pgMOB administrator Keren Barratt and the disciplining of pgMOB referee Jon Moss? Or the matchfixing of numerous EPL games? We have been reliably informed that individuals at BT Sport gained financially from a fixed match covered by the channel (incidentally refereed by Mr Moss).
And the television companies target the gullible with their corrupted product whilst furnishing viewers with the output of individuals who featured heavily on the pages of early Football is Fixed blog posts (during their playing careers).

Referees need to have their power removed as they are at the root of most matchfixing crises.
English football must implement video technology (although there are structural reasons why they won't as these two articles demonstrate - http://footballisfixed.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/how-to-solve-match-fixing-once-and-for.html and http://footballisfixed.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/the-ifab-four.html).

And then there are the kickback racketeering territories of the marketing companies and their 'first world' neo-capitalist monstrosities attaching their beefburger or their credit card or their state-owned gas company to the prostituted event on the field of play.

This holistic structure demonstrates the systemic abuse of football for rent in a private universe of Omertà.

http://footballisfixed.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/fractal-football-and-gizan-geysers.html

Enjoy your product...
... the game is paying for it.

© Football is Fixed 2006-2015

Follow us on Twitter @FootballisFixed

The Issues With Mark Clattenburg

"Was it a battle between betting markets that saw Jon Moss selected for FA Cup Final ahead of Mark Clattenburg?"

As readers of Football is Fixed blog will understand, Jon Moss should never have been given the 2015 FA Cup Final considering his historical bias towards Arsenal and the disciplinary action taken against him during the 2014/15 season.
Other top flight and junior referees were almost unanimous in their suggestion that not only was the Moss selection a disgrace but also that the best referee for the FA flagship event would have been Mark Clattenburg (http://footballisfixed.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/what-other-referees-think-of.html).
So why wasn't he selected?

We have already given details in the above mentioned post regarding the selection of Moss, his in-match decision-making, Moss officiating 10/10 Arsenal wins (only 4 at home), the shenanigans in the Gunners v WBA game that gave Theo Walcott his FA Cup Final place concurrently with his negotiations via Key Sports Management over a new contract and the fact that the outcome was in the betting markets pre-match (i.e. there was insider trading on the match).

The 13 men and women who make up the FA's Referees' Committee select the FA Cup Final referee as opposed to just one individual selecting referees for Premier League games (Howard Webb).
Clattenburg has officiated at top level UEFA and FIFA events whereas Moss has never even officiated a Top Four match in the EPL. And then there is MOBGATE http://footballisfixed.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/mobgate-6.html

In 2005 and 2007, Clattenburg was one of the two pgMOB referees selected to officiate at the Premier League Asia Trophy (in Thailand and Hong Kong respectively). The latter tournament took place between 24th and 27th of July just one month after the convicted fraudster from Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra, had purchased Manchester City. At the time of the purchase Shinawatra was in exile from his Thai homeland so he easily passed Richard Scudamore's Fit And Proper Person's Test (FPPT). Scudamore even sat next to Shinawatra at the first Manchester City home match under the Shinawatra regime.

                                     Scudamore And Shinawatra - Psychopathic Money Lust

Under Shinawatra, Mark Clattenburg showed an obviously unconscious bias towards Manchester City, a bias which bizarrely totally inversed after Shinawatra sold the club in September 2008. It was also Clattenburg who was selected to model the new AirAsia pgMOB referee kit alongside Shinawatra at the start of the 07/08 EPL season (http://footballisfixed.blogspot.co.uk/2008/02/eight-days-in-life-of-fascist.html).

Fast forward to the season just ended and we find Mr Clattenburg having an interesting role in the affairs of Leicester City (owned by Thai company King Power). On the first two occasions Clattenburg officiated the Foxes, the club won 2 of their only 5 EPL victories achieved by April 4th - the first match versus Manchester United saw the visitors lose 5-3 via two penalties (one of which was entirely fake), a red card and a goal scored after the ball had gone out of play. All professional traders and bookies understood that the pre-match market  on this game was indicative of a fixed match with very key insider money surfacing against Manchester United in the hour leading up to kick off.

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So Moss or Clattenburg...
... an overweight rock or a bewigged hard place.

Or perhaps it still hangs over Clattenburg that he was banned from refereeing for 8 months in 08/09 due to business debts, his personal life and alleged threats made to the family of a former business partner by making the following statement in an email "... taking me to court might cause your family some pain."
At the time, a former business associate of Clattenburg claimed the referee owed more than £170,000 including non-payment of PAYE, HMRC and VAT.

But of course, in ScudamoreWorld, the theme park of systemic corruption, the FA Cup is merely seen as just another competition on which to hang football out to dry.

© Football is Fixed 2006-2015

Follow us on Twitter @FootballisFixed