And You May Tell Yourself, "This Is Not My Beautiful House"
Tom Burgis: "In Washington, in London, in Paris, the spirit of national security has given way to the profit principle. Sometimes intelligence officers don't even wait for their early retirement before taking on private clients... If there is an antidote to kleptocracy, it is honesty... [an] indomitable resistance to lies, obfuscation and bullshit... It is a struggle without end: the struggle for who gets to tell the stories by which we live"
Thomas Shelby: "Everyone's a whore, Grace. We just sell different parts of ourselves."
In the Preface when we stated that football was being demolished by three factors - corruption, covid-19 and climate catastrophe - we were wrong.
For it is also being destroyed by the long-term impacts of repeated concussion and the slow progression to dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Throughout the last couple of years there has been a steady flow of headlines of former players who have died due to the pandemic or succumbed due to dementia, two facts which the captured mainstream media have struggled to suppress in their desire to maintain the fake positivity of the insider trading nirvana that is Premier League football - money love in the time of cholera.
Tens of thousands of former footballers suffer (or suffered prior to death) from dementia and related conditions.
Being an elite sport, the industry only started to pay more serious attention to dementia when an elite player Bobby Charlton was diagnosed (the fifth member of the England 1966 World Cup winning team to have their lives ruined through heading footballs).
Since the death of former West Bromwich Albion player Jeff Astle in 2002, the authorities, the sport and most media have peripheralised any focus on the dangers of repeatedly being hit about the head. There was also evidence from other sports (particularly rugby, boxing and American football). But the FA did fuck all and didn't even respond when the wife of former England captain Stan Cullis contacted them after dementia confined her husband to a nursing home. Indeed the FA (along with the PFA) refused to accept any linkage between heading footballs and dementia.
Astle's coroner in the UK said that his death should be recognised as an industrial disease and, furthermore, the positive correlation found between US gridiron players dying early and the presence of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), together with concussion issues in rugby union, should have produced action from an array of sporting authorities. But as with matchfixing, doping, insider trading, third party ownership of players, illicit club ownership and the ever-present whiffs of mafia, the sports decided that their product (and associated revenue streams) were all that mattered - who cares about a bunch of older men who bring nothing to the table anymore?
Once research in 2019 showed that footballers were indeed three and a half times more likely to die of dementia and 5 times as likely to die from Alzheimer's, football's authorities and their yoked media expressed shock and surprise - we predict that this will be exactly the same response when an uncontrollable future crisis arrives around matchfixing or doping.
Of course the reason that powerful sporting bodies were ostrich-like in facing up to the deaths of former sportsmen was the issue of financial compensation.
Jim Holden: "The game knew, but the game neglected its idols."
And now we are left with an unpleasant stench of pass the parcel as every body attempts to stick onto every other body the financial consequences of two decades of inertia and an ongoing conveyor belt of death.
Did nobody foresee the 4C's?
Corruption: when we compare all major football leagues around the world for matchfixing, doping and insider trading - UK football is the worst culprit. A total Omerta exists in the British game as realities are buried away under a sea of spectacle.
Timothy Snyder: "Post-truth is pre-fascism. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place."
Climate Catastrophe: 2020 was the second hottest year on record. The ten hottest years globally since 1880 have been: 2016, 2020, 2019, 2015, 2017, 2021, 2018, 2014, 2010 and 2013. In 2010, global leaders signed up to create "ambitious goals to protect wildlife and ecosystems" - they have failed on every point. The increase in travel which will be the outcome of Project Big Picture together with the new FIFA and UEFA tournament matrices are simply not sustainable. Football isn't a special case.
Covid-19: UK football has put itself ahead of a dying population throughout the pandemic, a strategy that reached its nadir when hillbilly former Burnley manager Sean Dyche suggested that footballers should receive vaccines before the vulnerable just so bookmakers and insider traders could profit. Government advisers stated in response that older people will die with such a strategy. In Dyche's dichotomous world, football is seen as a blood sport and a death cult profiting mafia and their apologists while Dyche chats with opposing managers covering his mouth with his hands.
Steve Bruce, on the other hand, sees it differently: "It is morally wrong to make players and staff work during covid crisis."
And there may be more to come.
The Economist: "If there is a combination of mutations that can get around the immune response which a vaccine induces, then there is a fair chance that nature will find it."
Concussion: Bobby Charlton, Ferenc Puskas, Nat Lofthouse, Nobby Stiles, Gerd Muller, Martin Peters, Stan Bowles, Tommy Carroll, Jimmy Hill, Alf Ramsey, Danny Blanchflower, John Charles, Bob Paisley, Ray Wilson, Jack Charlton, Jeff Astle, Bellini, Peter Bonetti, Dave Mackay, Stevie Chalmers, Billy McNeill...
When will the sport ban heading in training? When will it become necessary to ban heading a football altogether? Who will pay for the death and misery being felt across the globe? That the sport of football has attempted to hide the cause of death of so many of the heroes of our childhoods is one thing, the fact that the mafia-backed moneymen who control the future of our sport choose to minimise the impact of these deaths is another.
Computational biology offers some hope though. The Deep Mind computer is getting close to be able to predict a protein's shape from a knowledge of its constituent amino-acids. As misshapen proteins are thought to underpin Alzheimer's, this avenue of research is very promising. AI to the rescue.
The state and the sport need to look after its actors until these advances occur.
Spies are not priests or saints but "... a squalid procession of vain fools... sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives" - John Le Carre.
In the darkness, the state tells all the stories.
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You May Ask Yourself, "What Is That Beautiful House?"
Internet Commentator: "The artificial crowd noise is really beginning to get behind Manchester United here"
Marginal gains. That's how corrupt markets work. If we've said it once we've said it a thousand times...
The absence of real fans from the grounds during the pandemic produced the most bizarre templates of fake crowd noise allegedly to aid our experience of the game. Sky Sports, BT Sport and the BBC work alongside EA Sports to produce this soundscape.
UK football originally considered using theatre sound design company Autograph for spectator ambience - Autograph has over 40 years experience of working in the West End - but Autograph is not a captured entity in the same manner as EA Sports is.
So just as VAR replays are carefully selected to hide any unfortunate realities e.g. the handball goal for Tottenham Hotspur versus Manchester City in the 2018/19 Champions League Semi Final 2nd Leg at the Etihad or the goal that should have relegated Aston Villa in Premier League season 2019/20 or any number of EPL offside decisions where the timing of the pass is secreted off-screen, crowd noise has become a part of the corruption template.
When a shot flashes across the goal, there is an entirely different behavioural impact on the viewer (and therefore the bettor) if the artificial output yields a high decibel major key "whooooooooowhhhhhhhh!" rather than a two-men-and-his-dog minor key depressive utterance of a "uuuuuuuurrrrgggghhhhhhhhh".
Tony Bloom, now an █████ █████, used to be a broker and bookmaker and we would discuss the pro's and con's of watching matches with or without the match commentary. Virtually all talking heads on televised football are being rewarded for a playing career of corruption compliance (check out the early years of the Football is Fixed blog to see just how many on-field integrity-challenged entities from 2006 are now gracing our screens in 2022).
Bloom and I agreed that listening to the commentary was only positive if one knew whether the output was corrupted or not. So Michael Owen telling us that Liverpool are "really up for this match today" meant exactly the opposite and had a value. If one doesn't know who is telling the truth and who isn't then it is best to listen to the match with volume set to zero.
Similarly with marginally gained crowd noise and studio punditry...
Jock Stein: "Without fans who pay at the turnstile, football is nothing."
And the legendary Glasgow Celtic manager knows of what he speaks as an insider at the Scottish club informed us that Mr Stein used to receive a piece of paper in the Directors' Box at half-time in every home game at Parkhead. On said paper was written a number. This number represented the number of Celtic fans who had passed through a particular turnstile - all the monies from the Stein 'Stile supporters went straight into Mr Stein's pockets as an extra little earner on the side.
Stealing Stein-style has evolved into Draw-No-Bet Desmond and La-La Lawwell. Same shit.
It can sometimes seem that only the Green Brigade on the North Curve have Celtic's best interests at heart.
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All We Want Is A Fair Suck Of The Sauce Bottle
John Kenneth Galbraith: "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable"
Data-driven journalism looks to the present and to the past to paint a modernist picture of the avant-garde world in which we live. Data-driven journalism is not predictive.
Unless, that is, the construct being analysed is corrupt.
So, for example, all of the fundamental information relating to a football match should be "in the price" - new manager at Team B, return of an injured goalkeeper at Team A, the selection of a referee who favours the home team, the wicked wind whipping in from the Fylde coast (because there's no stand there anymore as Oyston swapped it for a bison), the alteration to 3-4-3 formation by Team B etc etc etc. Every market participant is aware of some or most or all of such inputs (dependent on their experience or proximity to the core of the market).
Some value may be created by developing configurative sub-models based on such fundamentals.
But, apart from in highly unusual windows, such data are not predictive or only marginally so.
Football though is under the absolute control of insider traders and once this corruption surfaces in the dark pool markets, the future is very much more predictable. One of the many disturbing developments in football over recent seasons has been the consolidation of corruption into robust mafia-based and state-based constructs. Control of matches can be absolute whereas historically there were competitive corruption entities battling for control of the match outcomes and, prior to that, minimal corruption at all.
We have developed software based on the Python language that unifies complex network theory and nonlinear time series analysis (as all corrupt systems evolve in a chaotic manner at least until the corruption becomes systemic). The software works like a macroscope and provides us with a holographic overview of the trading nodes and networks of corrupted events.
Take the Premier League match between Sheffield United and Newcastle United on January 12th 2021. Sheffield United had amassed two points and no victories in 17 Premier League matches - their last win being 21 games earlier on July 11th 2020 (186 days previous).
Pre-match, the dark pool markets indicated a victory (against the odds) for the Blades - the insider trading came from very revealing sources so, without knowing the reasons for the confidence of these insiders, we mimicked their corrupt trades to cover our overheads.
The information underlying our trade was predictive. It defined a future reality that had not yet happened.
The game potentially revealed these invisible inputs. Ryan Fraser - a rogue player who refused to play for his former club AFC Bournemouth at the conclusion of the 2019/20 season helping to ensure their relegation from the Premier League is represented by Wasserman, who took over a █████ █████ Key Sports (fronted by John Colquhoun, who █████ █████ to behave according to his private trading templates) - got booked and then red carded for an astonishingly unprofessional pair of fouls in three crazy minutes just before half-time. It was almost like he didn't care.
Sheffield United went on to record their first victory of the season through a later penalty. Of interest, several other Newcastle players represented by agents who cartel in a fragmented fashion also markedly underperformed.
Corrupt events are predictable.
Systemically corrupted football is a totally weird Black Swan outlier in the world of data-driven journalism.
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Dobbing The Moolah
Benoit Mandelbrot: "Randomness has more than one 'state', or form, and each, if allowed to play out on a financial market, would have a radically different effect on the way prices behave"
For a market analyst, the FA Cup offers an entirely different market structure to the Premier League. Until recent years, the Far East Asian underground bookmakers would go nowhere near FA Cup matches for reasons demonstrated by a Third Round televised match in 2014 between Nottingham Forest and West Ham United (then managed by Sam Allardyce).
Forest opened at 3.20 (11/5); by kick-off they were priced at 1.35 (4/11). West Ham drifted from Evens to 9/2. Betting turnover was at levels only normally seen in EPL Top Six events. But over 50% of the betting volume surfaced before Allardyce announced his team selection - nine changes, three debutants and an experimental three-man defence where two players were making their first appearance of the season and the other was a midfielder who had been out for a month being played out of position. A couple of substitutes were also debutants.
In our database of over 100,000 games covering over a quarter of a century, we have only seen such price dynamics on a few other occasions (related to teams playing juniors due to covid-19, for example).
Forest won 5-0.
It is entirely valid to rest players for cup games but it isn't valid when knowledge of this selection surfaces via some people in-the-know as a colossal coordinated insider gamble across the planet. Fans pay their austerity-bitten earnings to watch a football match, not a boiler room scam.
The Magic of the Cup or the Tragic of the Murk?
Former Ladbrokes ambassador Gordon Strachan: "The fans know nothing."
Fat Sam the Bandit was already known to us over the Play Off Semi Final 2nd Leg between Blackpool and Bradford City in 1996. The Mighty Pool led 2-0 from the away leg and the Yorkshiremen were 33/1 for qualification. It was also the last match my late father ever attended and after ten minutes he turned to me and said: "this is a fix, son". And he was right. We have since discovered that several Blackpool players traded against their own club while Allardyce had been instructed by the upper hierarchy not to get promoted as it would expose the financial pressures about to break at the club due to Owen Oyston's impending imprisonment for serial rape.
Bradford City won 3-0. And without this insider traded corruption, they would never have reached the Premier League a few seasons later - Mandelbrot's views on randomness spread to corrupted football!
Of course, Allardyce was also at the heart of the English football bung scandal and additionally was sacked as England manager after just one game and 67 days in charge following the Telegraph disclosing that he offered advice on how "to get around" rules on player transfers and third party ownership corruptions while aiming for an inappropriate £400,000 contract with supposed Far East businessmen in a sting.
English football is █████ █████ that the █████ █████ have to be repeatedly recycled back into the game to ensure that the systemic corruptions remain in-house. Just like a █████ █████, in fact.
John Steinbeck: "Money has no honour nor any memory."
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Stickybeaking The Standover Man
Fela Kuti: "Je n'wi temi" ["Don't gag me"]
Meanwhile. The World Turned Upside Down.
Sport and associated corruptions has been entirely transformed in Australia since the arrival of the Pommie Bastard Bookies over the last fifteen years.
It is the new English disease.
It makes one mad as a cut snake.
For fuck's sake, the soccer referees over here are no longer called referees but "Entertainment Facilitators".
Where is the allowance for that in the Rules of the Game?
Let's take a look at the corruption that underpinned the 3rd Round of the 2020/21 FA Cup.
So what's the John Dory?
The FA Cup claims to be the oldest cup competition in the world but, like the oldest profession in the world, it is now controlled by pimps and the underworld. (Incidentally, the FA Cup is preceded by the Melbourne Grammar School - Scotch College Cordner - Eggleston Australian Rules Football Cup which was founded 13 years earlier).
Out of 32 matches, 34 of the goalkeepers selected are represented by Stellar, Unique, Wasserman / Key Sports, CAA / Base or subsidiary outfits or third party investors linked to one or other of these firms - over 50% of the goalies were, in effect, potentially owned.
Mock the ocker, mate.
Just corruption gone troppo.
In seven games representatives of one or other of these agents scored the winning or key goal(s) against goalkeepers also represented by one or other of this cartel - meaning 22% of the 3rd Round ties were likely family affairs with corrupted outcomes. Several of the other matches saw keepers make errors that enabled their puppet-masters to pocket profit. Betting patterns are the source to break the code.
And do they create spectacle? Three shocks were not shocks but planned. No drama!
Holy Dooley, the drongo dills are set for the divvy van.
These systemic manipulations are several stubbies short of a six-pack of soccer integrity.
Strewth! What a bunch of bastards!
Worse still, the draws for the FA Cup 4th and 5th Rounds were made by just one individual - Peter Crouch who is represented by Stellar. As a result the █████ █████ of teams remarkably have got the routes they desired as the 'oldest' competition in the world becomes an agreed flow of games and a private array of betting markets akin to Project Restart.
What a weird fluke - Crouch 'n stuff.
Fair dinkum.
More tragedy. More murk.
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Don't Believe What You See
Anne McLaughlin: "Scientists have found a way to block the pervasiveness of illusory pattern perception, this is critical thinking. Critical thinking is something that can be taught and if people are trained in the right way, pseudoscience and false conspiracies can be combated with logic and reasoning. The brain may try to make false connections but that doesn't mean you have to believe it"
Corruption mashes up your intuition and your biases!
The only way to determine the presence of matchfixing and insider trading is via market analytics, access to insiders and / or critical thinking to detect the illegitimate reality via money flows and privileged information and the detection of the contorted infrastructures of extortion.
This is where all potentially well-meaning investigative bodies fall short (including Europol) - the lack of market analytical skills scuppers the reinstallation of integrity, the absence of inside information is blinding and the Lego can not be constructed without other (absent) inputs. And, in the exception that proves the rule, where such skills are present within an entity, they are utilised for malfeasance e.g. █████ █████.
Price transparency is a fundamental right in any market.
Well, obviously not real price transparency otherwise the insiders and market manipulators would not be able to establish profits solely out of proprietary machinations.
They would need to develop Alpha instead.
Price transparency is an extremely important factor in the authenticity of any market.
So dark pools, where mega-institutional trading occurs in the modern day equivalent of smoke-filled rooms, distort markets.
Such platforms tilt the markets in favour of the few.
Bookmakers manipulate their own Scrooge machinations by promoting their products by referring to your 'winnings'. But this advertising tactic is a complete misnomer - you're not allowed to win, they shut your accounts - only a handful of betting companies allow winning accounts unless of course such winning accounts are linked to inside information and insider trading - a very different kettle of fishy event! But, for the average bettor, you are not allowed to win - your 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.
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 multi 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.
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. All the usual suspect MPs past and present (Tom Watson for example) are hovering around scraping up fees for enhancing structural inaction.
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 seasonal matchfixing agenda, some of these ill-gotten gains ended up in Deep State coffers (a point which our legal team raised forcefully in 2016 with George Osborne when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer).
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 at any opportunity.
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 chanted cry in the trading room".
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.
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Omerta
Hannah Arendt: "... every activity, since its end is never reached while it is still active, ultimately it aims at its own self-destruction; the means disappear when the end is reached"
On November 18th 2014, we wrote the following:
"The two women who acted as whistleblowers over the multiple corruptions within FIFA have been publicly traduced by Judge Hans-Joachim Eckert.
"Bonita Mersiades and Phaedra Almajid both now live in fear for their families and themselves.
These FIFA corruptions have effectively been whitewashed in a secret report at the expense of the lives of two women (Almajid now has FBI protection).
"This will no doubt discourage any future moral and ethical stances over the utter lack of integrity in global football just as the treatments of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange and the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia would tend to make any political whistleblower think twice".
One of the most remarkable aspects of the FIFA Affair (Qatargate) is that it was a clear indication of how the locus of football criminality had shifted towards the blackest of markets. In the 2014 scenario, Michael Garcia was being painted as a white knight riding to the rescue against the backroom deals and payments of bribes and other enhancing consumerisms of FIFA.
We had discussed this previously when Garcia was appointed to this role: "A parallel example of murkiness is at FIFA where the Secretary General of Interpol, Ronald Noble, supported the appointment of Michael Garcia as FIFA chief investigator of corruption when Garcia's review of the FIFA / ISL scandal is seen as a cover up by Reform consultant Michael Pieth and FIFA judge Hans-Joachim Eckert."
Manus manum lavat as we must repeat from time to time.
So we have a standard Italian structure being the cover up of choice - but football actually needs a mani pulite (clean hands) approach to dealing with corruption.
On the bases established by these whitewashes, the foundations of future corruptions are built.
Global corruption requires global action and global regulation, not internalised double-teaming.
Illicit money destroys the beautiful game - Bella Ciao Ciao Ciao.
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The Sicilian Defence
Professor Kenneth Regan: "The pandemic has brought me as much work in a single day as I have had in a year previously"
Professor Regan is an international chess master and computer scientist who helps the sport's governing body Fide detect suspicious patterns of play online. As with football, cheating and corruption have flourished joining the pandemic.
Archie Bland: "In one chess tournament, five of the top six were disqualified for cheating. In another, the doting parents of 10-year-old competitors furiously rejected evidence that their darlings were playing at the level of the world No 1 (Magnus Carlsen)."
Fide's general director Emil Sutovsky calls it "computer doping" and the attempts at eradication are in the same stratosphere to those employed by VAR (multiple camera angles) and WADA / UK Anti Doping (remote access). Again, as with doping, "... paranoia has become the culture... There is this very romantic vision of the game which is being scuppered" according to Gerard Le-Marechal at Chess.com.
Regan's model is similar to the one utilised by Football is Fixed - "a model that detects cheating as the deviation from the proclivities of an honest human player." The same analytics reveal matchfixing and doping in football.
Regan: "With enough evidence, such models produce a high level of confidence that a given player could not possibly have played a particular set of moves unaided."
Football is Fixed: "With enough evidence, such models produce a high level of confidence that a given team could not possibly have played with such boundless energies without illicit doping."
As ever in these matters, it is █████ █████ who resides at the cutting edge of corruption.
In chess, the slickest operators playing online have learned to only utilise computer programs on occasion so that, to an outsider, it looks like a good move or a good run of moves in attack or defence.
█████ █████ mimics South East Asian owned clubs in his doping and matchfixing strategies, deliberately losing or drawing some matches that look eminently winnable while offsetting any points totalisation loss by winning or drawing against superior opposition via doping and rogue referee inputs. Such one-off bespoke corruptions can only be discovered via the insider trading that monetises the corruptions on the field of play - if █████ █████ didn't trade it, we couldn't prove a thing (unless we knew hackers, of course!).
At █████ █████, the situation is easier to analyse and detect as the doping and matchfixing is more systemic and not subject to the whims of one flawed lizard.
But, as Prof Regan states: "If you cheat on a single move I will disclaim any ability to catch you. You can fly under the radar. But if you keep going at the same rate, you will come into the radar in the end."
And that is █████ █████ dilemma as he desperately attempts to launder his crimes - there is little point in matchfixing some games to your benefit and some to your detriment unless it is to confuse the betting markets so that you can clean up on an event.
Without betting, █████ █████ is nothing.
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© 2023 Football is Fixed
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