Towards the end of last season we published five posts detailing data-driven journalistic analysis of systemic corruption in the Premier League, particularly in reference to the Liverpool cartel of teams, the business practices of Brighton & Hove Albion and the Starlizard Betting Syndicate, the targeting of Manchester City and Gestifute, the malicious takeover of integrity-lite outfits Leicester City and Manchester United and the nefarious influence of BT Sport.
These posts may be found here:
Lizards Lacertae & Liverpool
https://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2019/05/exclusive-lizards-lacertae-liverpool_30.html
Gekkos, Gators & Gangsters
https://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2019/05/exclusive-gekkos-gators-gangsters.html
Terrorists, Taoism & Tricksters
https://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2019/05/exclusive-terrorists-tao-tricksters.html
Fairy Tales, Fixes & Foxes
https://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2019/05/exclusive-fairy-tales-fixes-foxes.html
Mafia, Matchfixing & Media
https://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2019/05/exclusive-mafia-matchfixing-media.html
We now release the sixth post in this series - 'Kickbacks, Fuckwits & Corruption' where we extend the analysis above to the arena of the 2019/20 pre-season friendlies.
And guess what?
Pre-season friendlies are fixed too!
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When Friendlies Become Too Friendly
While the UK mainstream football media has been focused on using as many media tactics as possible to increase the value of Unique Sport Management's Wilfried Zaha to stratospheric levels in return for a slice of the action when the vastly inflated transfer is eventually landed, more systemic and particular matchfixing has been occurring in the pre-season friendlies.
In brief, here are the issues that we have found:
1) Near-Coincident or Consecutive Day (NC/CD) Friendlies - There has been an exponential growth in teams who select to play two matches on the same day (even at the same time) or on successive days. We have found extensive matchfixing taking control of markets based on the use of disinformation in this bloc of events.
Only insiders know the team selections for many of these near-coincident events until teams are made public.
Oh, and bookmakers...
Last season only one Premier League team (AFC Bournemouth) and five League One teams (AFC Wimbledon, Blackpool, Burton Albion, Gillingham and Oxford United) used this NC/CD pre-season template. At the time, we regarded all but one of these outfits as dodgy.
For 2019/20, this grouping had extended to AFC Bournemouth, Brighton & Hove Albion, Burnley, Leicester City & Liverpool (from the EPL), Charlton Athletic, Leeds United, Preston North End, Reading & Sheffield Wednesday (from the Championship), AFC Wimbledon, Accrington Stanley, Blackpool, Burton Albion, Gillingham, Oxford United & Peterborough United (League One) and Cheltenham, Crawley, Crewe, Leyton Orient, Newport & Stevenage (League 2).
Of the 23 teams involved in these NC/CD events, we know of █████ to be rogue outfits.
We find a whole array of revealing patterns in this data.
2) The Liverpool Cartel of Clubs - Musical Chairs! The extensive array of market access strategies utilised to undertake insider trading are reliant on a cosmic web of market access points. This network of routings of criminalised trading has been shuffled for the pre-season.
For our Private Network only, we reveal below the latest flux of this web of trading for Liverpool, AFC Bournemouth, Brighton & Hove Albion, Southampton, Rangers, Leicester City & Manchester United.
3) Very Friendly Friendlies - The links between some people who hover around Brighton & Hove Albion and Austrian 2 Liga team Liefering are robust, while Leicester City and Belgian First Division B side Oud-Heverlee Leuven are both owned by King Power, yet these four teams played very fixed pre-season friendlies that were internally controlled alongside the same market access points.
4) Web Of Bookmakers, Brokers & Dark Pools - Historically, pre-season friendlies didn't interest the deeper levels of the global betting architecture - the repeated local friendly structure required massive manpower to infiltrate and the markets were left for the smaller fry.
In very recent seasons, we have noticed an ever-increasing presence of bigger fish involving themselves with pre-season friendlies as a more concrete template of corruption has been established.
All of the corruptions outlined in this series of 6 articles are orchestrated around the same market access points cleverly shuffled from instance to instance to try and confuse analysts! The bookmakers are providing an illicit revenue stream for matchfixers.
If you remove the Big Six from the Premier League, 27 out of 38 teams (71%) in the top two English leagues have the name of a bookmaker plastered across their shirts. Some of these bookmakers are, shall we say, problematical to integrity.
Football is no longer a sport...
... it is a betting medium.
5) Steamer Fixes - In our sample database we discovered a grouping of Steamer Fixes - one way markets where teams (and associates) bet heavily on a one-way market. The bookmakers are largely out of the loop initially and are left with the choice of offering no odds and closing the book (or not opening at all if you have your ear to the ground) or entertaining trading positions without being privy to the full extent of the insider operation at play.
There were 15 Steamer Fixes in our database and all but one were landed. On three occasions teams moved more than 40% in odds e.g. 1.55 to 4.20 (40.7%). Crime pays.
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Using Known Knowns & Unknown Knowns To Rig The Markets - Seeking Unknown Unknowns & Known Unknowns To Expose This Corruption
The pre-season has become far more structured in matchfixing terms.
The complete absence of any meaningful regulation relating to insider trading and matchfixing leads to a grab-all-you-can culture of wealth creation out of asset-stripping the value from football.
Once the fix is entirely systemic (not long now!), the sport will be entirely dead.
Over the last two seasons doping has become systemic in the Big 4 European leagues. Where we used to focus on the few sides who doped, we now take equivalent interest in the very few top level teams that don't.
Teams have become like cyclists, attending known venues where pre-season doping regimens can be rolled out - there was one such festival of fake in Austria this summer featuring half a dozen known rogue teams from the top of the English game.
Although some of this pre-season fix-fest is very specific e.g. Steamer Fixes, some is very organised indeed e.g. events involving the Liverpool Cartel are set to the same template as the systemic corruption in the Premier League while NC/CD events are semi-systemic, existing as a private bubble in the markets.
The holistic presented in this article is made up of all of the pre-season friendlies played by the 23 NC/CD teams this pre-season (whether NC/CD events or not) - the non-NC/CD events are used as a control group in some analyses. The price dynamics are taken from Betfair. All pre-season games for the 23 sides are included in the databases up to July 29th 2019.
A clear indication that bookmakers were involved in the NC/CD grouping of events is that only 8% of these matches were not priced up compared with 18% of the control group. The only way to correctly price these NC/CD pre-season friendlies is to be in on the scam.
The room for match day manipulation on coincident matches is colossal. Until one hour to kick off, only insiders know which teams are to be put out in the matches. All trading prior to this announcement is guesstimate without this inside info. Private money makes the markets efficient but this can hardly be held to be anything like a level playing field - only insiders can trade early.
Oxford United have been in the rogue bucket since all the nonsense with Celtic in 2016 and their collection of pre-season friendlies is only rivalled by AFC Wimbledon in the "are you just taking the piss every game" grouping of clubs. The Liverpool Cartel of teams, particularly Tony Bloom's Brighton, continue to systemically substitute markets for sport, insider trading for integrity.
Many teams feature across our databases and deserve honourable mention for being creative in their shenanigans. All of these core teams are known to have problematic structures.
If the Premier League was a functioning entity, the systemic matchfixing that underpinned last season and is being repeated (in slightly altered format) this pre-season would not be possible.
Richard Scudamore jumped off a pirate ship and nobody is willing to replace him.
Why on earth should it be so hard to find one single human being who is capable and willing to become CEO of the Premier League?
But, then again, why would any sane human being want to oversee what is, in effect, a collection of mafia controlled markets running a sport?
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