At the beginning of November Tracey Crouch, the Conservative Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Sport and Civil Society, is to produce a long-awaited review of the betting industry in Britain under the auspices of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).
It is thought that the primary focuses will be on Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (FOBTs), football-based advertising and shirt sponsorship by bookmakers with the Treasury unsurprisingly opposing any regulation of the latter two arenas due to their tax take and other revenue streams linked to the bookmaking fraternity.
Although FOBTs, advertising and shirt sponsorship are issues, they pale into insignificance in comparison with the fundamental control of British football by global mafiosi and rogue states.
A more enlightened governmental report might look at the following:
* FOBTs - the crack cocaine of gambling - target problem addicts in mainly working class areas with the option of betting thousands of pounds per hour. Betting shops in Glasgow Central, for example, generate an average profit of £150,000 per annum from these machines.
* Ground, shirt, club, league, cup and football association sponsorship by bookmakers is an issue. Of even greater concern are the numerous clubs owned (or partially owned) by bookmakers, professional gamblers and/or gambling consortia e,g. Stoke City, Brighton & Hove Albion, Glasgow Celtic, Leicester City and Brentford. There are also numerous clubs with hidden or opaque ownership or with owners who appear from nowhere with no apparent 'history' e.g. Bournemouth, Northampton Town, West Bromwich Albion, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Oxford United, Birmingham City, Cardiff City, Sheffield Wednesday and Reading. Former owners of questionable merit include Arcadi Gaydamek (an arms dealer at Portsmouth), Thaksin Shinawatra (a corrupt state politician at Manchester City) and Steve McManaman's corrupt former business partner Carson Yeung at Birmingham City.
* Football 'experts' and bookmaker 'ambassadors' provide disinformation on Sky Sports, BT Sport and BBC to drive leisure money in erroneous directions to the marked financial benefit of insiders trading the opposite way at an improved price generated by media lies.
* Referees and key players (particularly goalkeepers) who are either coerced or work voluntarily with bookmakers and mafia groups to enable matchfixing, insider trading and an utter destruction of the integrity of the game are at the coalface of corruption. One current England player was reported to police by his club over allegedly throwing matches to cover his £1.3 million gambling debt, for instance. He still performs for his club in the Premier League each week (albeit for a different club).
* Bookmakers promote their products by referring to your 'winnings'. But this advertising tactic is a complete misnomer - only a handful of betting companies allow winning accounts unless of course such winning accounts are linked to inside information and insider trading - that is a very different kettle of fishy event! But, for the average bettor, you are not allowed to win - betting is a voluntary taxation.
That is the game we now have, killed off by corruption, dark money, dark pools, global mafia and rogue Deep State operations with gambling machines stripping the remainder of any wealth a problem gambler might still possess at the end of this charade.
The aim of this Conservative government post-Brexit is to create a Singapore-style financialised economy linked to far-right economic edifices like The Atlantic Bridge (TAB) created by neoliberal ideologue Liam Fox and his chums at the Heritage Foundation. It somehow seems markedly apt that the most powerful bookmaker of the last quarter century (who hails from Singapore) is one of the key operators behind this financialisation of European football at both club and betting market level.
The game of football is being killed by the markets and there is no regulation other than self-regulation and voluntary codes. And the lack of any meaningful regulation in the public markets is nothing compared to the invisibility of the underground dark pool markets where institutional market operators determine match outcomes among themselves. These entities constantly revert to a strategy of "trust us to regulate ourselves" but you cannot trust greedy psychopaths in a regulation-free environment.
Clubs, agents, players, administrators and referees are able to earn considerably more with a move over to the dark side of corruption. Some individual matches have £10 billion global betting market volume while a global consortium of insiders, mafia and state operators generated an estimated £6 billion - £24 billion from the alleged fairy tale of the Leicester City title triumph.
Free market financial fascism is fixing football.
There is currently a long-awaited pseudo-war between the UK government and the bookmaking industry over the exploitation of gamblers and the promotion of gambling to children alongside the inevitable corruption of the beautiful game.
The global consortium behind the entirely corrupted Leicester City title triumph in 2015/16 received implicit support at state and institutional level.
Due to the systemic nature of this matchfixing, some of these ill-gotten gains ended up in Deep State coffers (a point which our legal team raised forcefully last year with George Osborne when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer).
If the current template of corruption continues into the future, the game is over as fans won't attend and all but the most addicted of gamblers tend not to bet on sports that they know to be fixed.
The government is hence between a rock and a hard place having to choose between short-termism and massive illicit profits in the immediate window or a more regulated strategic approach that generates less revenue per annum but which creates such income over a longer period of time and which doesn't destroy the sport in the process.
If the latter were the option chosen and the aim was to ensure that the bookmaking sector was properly regulated and insider trading on football matches made illegal, the Deep State returns would be markedly lessened and any offset via an increased strategic tax take for the Treasury wouldn't dent this shortfall.
This explains why the Treasury is reluctant to target the bookmaking sector...
... as the Treasury benefits proximately but allegedly indirectly from matchfixing and corruption.
A structure exists where shirt sponsorship, league sponsorship, ludicrous amounts of advertising before, during and after the game, the provision of enhanced trading facilities for insider professional gamblers and matchfixers while, in parallel, the vast majority of bookmakers refuse to allow winning accounts from all other clients and disinformational advertising persuades mug punters to part with their wealth on match options that have virtually no chance of occurrence.
Bookmakers are rotten.
Inversion capitalism is creating a vast transfer of wealth from fans, supporters, viewers and bettors to government, bookmakers, advertisers, insider matchfixing networks and the media companies Sky Sports, BT Sport (and by association the BBC). This financialisation of football is destroying the sport (as witnessed by the falling television subscriptions and match attendances) - the sport of British football is being asset stripped with the complicity of areas of our Deep State.
With the government currently addressing the gambling industry, the deputy leader of the Labour Party Tom Watson (who is also Shadow Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport) wants to ban bookmakers from sponsoring football shirts believing that this will somehow undermine the hidden epidemic of gambling addiction in Britain. A future Labour government would encourage the FA to enforce a ban on such shirt sponsorship and would regulate if/when the governing body dragged their feet (the FA have already terminated a £4 million per year sponsorship deal with Ladbrokes but this bookmaker still sponsors just about the entire football sectors in Scotland and Eire).
Watson states: "There must be no stitch-up to help the gambling industry avoid tighter restrictions on advertising."
Of course, it was New Labour under Tony Blair who undertook to deregulate the betting industry in the first place resulting in this explosion of media advertising, the ensuing corruption in the game and the creation of online betting scams like PartyGaming (who were briefly a FTSE100 company based on their fleecing of mugs at rigged virtual poker tables). It was also New Labour that bowed to the advances of the Association of Major Levy Payers (AMLP) to continue the deregulation of licensed betting offices (LBOs) that had been enacted a year before Blair came to office. The AMLP was primarily constituted of Ladbrokes, William Hill and Coral. Although fiercely competitive, the British bookmaking sector operate as a fragmented cartel to protect mutually beneficial holistics when the need rises.
£1.4 billion has been spent by bookmakers over a five year period in advertising (primarily to the advantage of the coffers of BT Sport and Sky Sports). None of this advertising was allowed prior to Blair's government allowing the industry to regulate itself via a voluntary code of operation.
Currently nine Premier League teams have their shirts sponsored by bookmakers and there are 16 more teams in the Championship and League One - that is 37% of all clubs in the top three leagues. This brought in nearly £50 million to these clubs this season.
The full background to the current scenario exists in these four articles from The Guardian newspaper (although it should be noted that a matchfixing football agent has considerable clout over the output of the paper's football section!)
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/06/ban-betting-firms-football-shirts-labour-gambling
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/17/betting-firms-broadcasters-fund-addiction-awareness-gambling
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/26/labour-betting-firms-levy-gambling-addiction
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/sep/29/ladbrokes-investigation-payday-loans-fobt
The business strategy is hardly new. In the old days LBOs were always located in close proximity to public houses promoting mug betting under the influence of alcohol in much the same way that undertakers gravitate to the locale of hospitals. Nowadays, many people watch live matches in these pubs but don't even have to leave their seat to register their voluntary taxation to the layers via phone apps that are often promoted by the club they support - Celtic, for example, signed a five year deal with Dafabet in 2015 to promote the products of this company, a company that has been regarded as problematical in the ethical department by Sportsbook Review (who monitor betting sites).
In Australia, gambling advertisements are banned during sporting events pre-watershed and action is taken against betting professionals undertaking pitchsiding at events (where bettors utilise time delays in market response globally due to Australia's location on the planet). These are small steps in the right direction but by no means enough to end the scourge of bookmaking wrecking sports.
Children should not be wandering round with clothing extolling the virtues of underground South East Asian bookmakers. The exposure of gambling products to young people is even greater on the BBC than on the dedicated sports channels. The percentage of Match of the Day where gambling logos are on screen is particularly high and the talking head experts are spouting the messages of their bookmaking and football agent backers in any intervening period.
Let's look at the betting exchanges for a working example of the bookmaker mindset. At companies like Betfair, Betdaq and Matchbook, you place your bets and they are matched, allegedly, with punters thinking the opposite way. The winner pays commission on their winnings (up to 5%) but this commission is regressive. Professionals and insider traders betting with these companies receive a much lower commission rate for loyalty as the exchanges don't want to lose access to this privileged information as they form their markets around such knowledge. Once the outcome is in the market pre-match, the betting exchanges do not want winning bets as they would rather match themselves internally against the wrong positions traded with the company. In some cases, these manipulations go further. At one betting exchange linked to a British club, the club 'representative' would place erroneous trades at his own betting company to move the price globally so that he could trade elsewhere at much higher volumes at a markedly improved price - "if ############## is betting against ############## then we had better mimic his position" is the fallacious cry in the trading room".
Take the massive 'Cash Out' campaign undertaken by the British bookmaking industry over the last two seasons. This was to persuade leisure punters to close out winning positions early to the significant benefit of the bookmakers and betting exchanges who simply 'took on' the trade on the punters behalf but to the benefit of their own bottom line. The linked article below shows what happened to one punter who stood to win £100,000 on the Leicester City title victory but was persuaded by advertising to hand over 70% of his winnings to a bookmaker who knew that Leicester City were nailed on title winners https://synomic.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/snitching-cincuenta-y-dos_7.html.
And, incidentally, the Leicester City title win was based on doping (the club moving from the least fit in the season prior to the title win to second fittest in their fairy tale season) and referee bias (in the last three seasons Leicester City have been the most favoured team by Premier League referees by some distance).
Perhaps this is a case of 'King Power Corrupts, Absolute King Power Corrupts Absolutely' and remember that this is the same King Power who are under investigation back in Thailand over massive fraud to the tune of billions of pounds. Yet another fit and proper owner in the Premier League.
A couple of weeks ago, the main match on Sky Super Sunday was Chelsea versus Arsenal...
... the match outcome was known in the dark pool markets pre-match.
Of equivalent interest, a couple of the talking heads who share their wisdom with viewers pre-match were betting against Chelsea even though their analyses on behalf of television subscribers were questioning how there was any possible outcome other than a Chelsea victory.
Similarly, members of the BT Sports crew provided disinformation opposite to their market positions prior to last Saturday's game between Chelsea and Manchester City.
These individuals are multi-millionaires who owe their wealth to the sport but have elected post-career to sell out to murky matchfixing groups and to complicit media companies to take even more money from fans via disinformation and an exploitation of the pseudo-religious belief fans have in their teams - "if ############# tells us Arsenal have no chance of avoiding defeat then he must be right as he is one of our all-time heroes".
Currently, the British game is besmirched with turf wars - BT Sport, BBC and the Deep State versus Sky Sports and the Murdochracy, a fragmented cartel of British football agents versus Gestifute, Ladbrokes Coral versus William Hill versus Betfair Paddy Power versus South East Asian layers. Additionally, the mafia groups who are corrupting football understand that this last window before the onset of Video Assistant Referees (VAR) is their final opportunity to clean up without obstruction. The widespread media campaign in Britain against VAR is an example of this strategy with fallacious concepts like 'the final decision must be in the hands of the referee' a guarantee of future matchfixing ad finitum. In the Bundesliga and Serie A where VAR has been introduced this season there are far far fewer games determined by referee 'error'. But even these versions of VAR don't go far enough - why aren't managers able to request a review of a decision as in tennis and cricket? And, meanwhile, Sportradar a company that is supposed to highlight instances of matchfixing but has a conflict of interest in that it is funded by the bookmakers who often undertake and always benefit from matchfixing is regarded as something of substance, of proper oversight. As a former head of investigations at FIFA pointed out to us, it is surprising that he and Football is Fixed know of fixed games that somehow slip below the radar of Sportradar - publicly at least.
Magistrate Nino di Matteo on collusion between Sicilian mafia and the Italian state: "We live in a mafia state - a state that, in order to preserve the status quo, has to remove whistleblowers who want justice. We want to know the reason for the silence of the mainstream media - why are they frightened to the degree they become accomplices in (and beneficiaries of) the corruption? We must rebel against this system and this mafia method."
In particular, the primary loci of corruption and matchfixing in British football resides with bookmakers and football agents. Both are heavily linked with mafia-style entities in Europe and Asia and with Deep State operatives within government.
The situation in football is remarkably similar to the arms trade where illicit state sponsored deals like Al Yamamah result in state terrorism, the destabilisation of whole regions of the world and result in the deaths and mutilations of huge numbers of innocent victims (often children). Replace guns with footballs and the scam is the same.
Consequently, any peripheral tinkering with FOBTs and shirt sponsorship is not going to seriously impact upon these systemic corruption infrastructures. Removing betting companies logos from football shirts is a fiddle while Rome burns.
The betting industry alongside the advertising companies and the media companies who bring the sport to screen are offering a paltry £8 million to fund a gambling awareness campaign to educate punters about the perils of trading in corrupt markets. £8 million is a small percentage of the amounts bet by bookmakers on just one game in the dark pool poker tables of corruption where match outcomes are determined. It is small change and should not be allowed to undermine a thorough review of the criminalities that are destroying football.
If Labour really want to confront this systemic corruption (and, as an aside, save the people's game), they should be focusing on the role of Deep State operatives in the fixing of British football. Once in government Labour should implement onerous regulation regarding betting markets, insider trading, matchfixing, doping, referee selection, football agents and the transfer markets. UK Anti-Doping should be disbanded and replaced by an entity that is not captured by the industry and, moreover, Labour should establish UK Anti-Matchfixing to address a situation where the majority of Premier League games are matchfixed in each round of games. Fans need to be made fully aware of what has happened to their favourite sport.
It is only a matter of time before this house of cards of football corruption comes tumbling down.
If Labour were behind this campaign to save the people's game, a period of government would be guaranteed despite the manipulative gerrymandering that attempts to keep these charlatans in power in perpetuity.
This DCMS review might be the last chance to save football. Labour should wise up and hit this government where it hurts - in their acquiescence in the corruption of our national sport.
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'Football is Fixed' is a global network established in the mid-nineties to save football from the mafia.
Our network consists of whistleblowers from within the football and betting sectors. We receive threats and our existences are based on sousveillance and enhanced security. Several of our network exist entirely underground for safety reasons. There are many other people in the sport who know about certain aspects of the corruptions at play but who are too scared to confront the mafia groups that orchestrate these outrages.
We will soon be releasing a book exposing the corrupt matrices that underpin corruption in football.
You can register your interest in this limited edition book at meawhistleblower.com.
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© Football is Fixed 2006-2017
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