Wednesday 24 June 2015

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.

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