Manipulated Markets
Jean Baudrillard: "... exchange is a delusion, an illusion, but everything conspires to have us act as though ideas, words, commodities, goods and individuals can be exchanged... That death itself can be exchanged for something"
Manager of Club B: "Cool!"
Club Owner A: "But you must only win by one goal. And we mustn't score"
Manager of Club B: "Okay"
Club Owner A: "We're going to give you the return league game too. Once again by one goal. Only this time the score must be 2-1"
Manager of Club B: "Wunderbar!"
Club Owner A: "Silence is critical if we are to control the markets. Okay?"
Manager of Club B: "Schtum!"
Club Owner A: "We must agree market access points and timing"
Manager of Club B: "No problem. And thanks for the six points. You truly are the Great Enabler, always in control by kick off"
Asian Handicap (A/H) markets have transformed football outcomes and tilt the power markedly in favour of insider traders and matchfixing consortia.
A/H markets allow any match to be priced up so that the odds are between 1.70 and 2.30 (7/10 and 13/10 in old money). So Brazil versus Billericay may be set up so that traders can get approximately even money on a Brazil victory minus, say, 10 goals if that is the perceived differential between the teams. This is far more beneficial to insider traders than 1/1,000 odds that such a game would be priced on fixed odds markets.
A/H markets also allow duplicitous trading.
So one can back the favourite on fixed odds at, for example, 1/3 while selling the favourite on the A/H markets at +1.5 goals and, as long as the match outcome is a win for the favourite by one goal, your two trades are both landed (even though opposite in stance).
With Both-Teams-To-Score options added in, a 2-1, 3-2 or greater outcome offers a triumvirate of winning positions on the same event.
Total control.
Such holistic trades are denied to outsiders...
... but for insiders, the market and match control is absolute - both bets and points distribution are safe.
And the conspiratorial nature of such market activities hides these realities from most prying eyes.
Here is the first ever Football is Fixed blog post 'Manipulated Markets' from November 11th 2006:
"English Football is currently reeling from the impacts of the Stevens inquiry into the bung culture, the standard and ethics of referees and the revelation that Victor Chandler International allegedly took bets from some Premier League managers and players. The words “tip” and “iceberg” spring to mind.
I have traded professionally on global football betting markets for the past 15 years. In my experience, all the brokers, market makers and bookmakers that I have traded with take bets from insiders in the game. It is regarded as buying information. Undoubtedly, some of this exchange of information borders on the corrupt. The recent betting scandal in Germany and the uproar in Italy’s Serie A show that this isn’t merely a British problem.
Asian market makers regularly accept bets of greater than £1 million without blinking (Gianluigi Buffon – the Juventus goalkeeper – was found with betting slips for several million euros in his possession during the Calciopoli scandal). Inevitably, the liquidity of the Asian markets persuades some football people to enhance their earning capacities. To my knowledge, such individuals include players, managers, referees, bookmakers, agents and the criminal fringe. It isn’t just the Italian mafia centres of Napoli, Palermo and Reggio di Calabria that are actively involved in football markets!
To date, all attempts to clean up the game have been peripheral. In Germany, some selective sweeping under the carpet and wrist slapping went on in response to the referee Robert Hoyzer admitting that he took money to alter football match outcomes. But, I believe that there are other match officials in the Bundesliga who were merely demoted or, indeed, allowed to continue to officiate. In Italy, in the aftermath of Calciopoli, two referees were suspended but the other six that were under investigation are still involved in Serie A.
Although there are many corrupt players, it is the match officials who are the key component of this crisis. Some have links to individual clubs, some to bookmakers and some to the underworld. There are also many honest people in the game who are just trying to do their jobs. However, until football cleans up its act, corruption will persist. Falling attendances in Italy and England are partially related to deficiencies in the sport on offer. Although the prawn sandwich brigade remain oblivious to anything, the true fans know when they are being short changed. The recent assertion by Graeme Souness that British football is “the most honest in Europe” is simply laughable...
The football authorities need to take a lead in this area and not just in the betting arena. In the lead up to the last World Cup, there was a real concern within FIFA that Uzbekistan were going to make it to the finals. This would have been politically unacceptable. In the first leg of the Asian Play Off with Bahrain, the Uzbeks won 1-0 and had a legitimate penalty denied them by the Japanese official. FIFA ludicrously ordered the game to be replayed due to the referee error and a 1-1 draw resulted. Bahrain won through in the Second Leg on away goals – the official for that second game (obviously by chance in the light of recent occurrences) was a certain Mr Graham Poll!"
The Thing from Tring struck again!
Certain clubs e.g. Brighton and Hove Albion linked closely with government ministers of the time e.g. Oliver Dowden to create templates to maximise financial returns to the sport while bookmakers and rogue agents worked together to optimise market access and media holistics for illicit financial flows within the game.
All perceived weak points were addressed by these networks as it was critical for the sport to offer no leaks regarding the machinations taking place behind closed doors.
So the Guardian and Telegraph newspapers serve mainly to promote the clients of a select group of agents and to squash any unfortunate realities that mustn't be exposed.
Even though academic economists have shown that match-day football crowds in February and March 2020 were linked to higher covid-19 cases and deaths before spectators were banned, members of the Department of Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) liaised with certain clubs to create the conditions for fans to return to stadiums despite the risks of accentuating the covid-19 pandemic.
So the Premier League hierarchy leaked narratives (£530 million lost due to Chinese television contract after Suning refused to pay for Project Restart matches or £540 million potentially lost due to match-day shortfall due to fans not being in the grounds) to pressurise government to give special status to a corrupted sport.
So the Premier League hierarchy leaked narratives (£530 million lost due to Chinese television contract after Suning refused to pay for Project Restart matches or £540 million potentially lost due to match-day shortfall due to fans not being in the grounds) to pressurise government to give special status to a corrupted sport.
Accordingly non-insider talking heads at Sky Sports and ITV were replaced by compliant voices while World Soccer magazine was partially transformed into an outlet for the promotion of players from a cartel of US / UK football agents.
So all institutional appointments, including the disastrous attempt to place the Guardian Media Group's former chief executive David Pemsel as the new chief executive of the Premier League, the eventual appointment of Dick Masters to the post and the creation of pseudo FA bodies entirely under the control of criminal agents, are the united front to prevent any leakage of reality.
Indeed, the same head hunters and the same firms of agents appear to have total control over all new appointments and roles in the English game.
In the same manner that the inept Conservative government is secreting its failures over covid-19 by distorting and hiding the death rates, football is using the pandemic crisis to undertake a financial power grab via institutional control and matchfixing with no media oversight.
This short-termism by state and sport is myopic as the real number of excess deaths will eventually be exposed as will the full extent of the systemic corruption in the national sport.
These are both prime examples of the Tullock Paradox which demonstrates that democracy allows more graft than autocracy.
We would have to ask why the state (in the form of Oliver Dowden and the DCMS) liaised so intimately with the likes of the insider gambling Brighton and Hove Albion owner, Tony Bloom.
Is this healthy?
In addition to running his football club, Mr Bloom also runs the Starlizard gambling syndicate via his cousin and long-term collaborator Steve Edery. Other club board members are also powerfully involved in the betting syndicate.
There are obvious conflicts of interest and integrity here and yet the UK sports media never mentions such issues...
... mainly because Starlizard is where many UK insider traders place their illicit bets.
The secret operations of Starlizard and the trading on Brighton and Hove Albion matches are not for this place and time but even the public face of the betting company and its proximity to a Premier League football club are suspicious.
According to a Business Insider article on Bloom from 2016, Starlizard is the biggest gambling syndicate in Britain making £100 million in a good year (this is an underestimate of Bloom's personal trading profits). The article also stated that the company may have £1 million riding on any match (this is also an underestimate of Bloom's proprietary positions).
Starlizard describes itself as a betting consultancy that uses complex statistical models to generate more accurate prices (the entity also utilises insider information to the same end).
Starlizard has been in operation since 2006 and conversations with former Brighton manager Gus Poyet showed that Bloom would undermine the professionalism of the manager by seeking information on the Uruguayan player diaspora so that such information could be fed into his trading models.
Poyet was disgusted by this linkage of football and betting.
Tony Bloom is the biggest client of Starlizard which is unsurprising given that it is his company!
At the same time as Starlizard was established for high rolling punters, Bloom also established a gambling syndicate where 'close associates' could pool money for high-stakes betting. You need to fork out £2 million a year to join.
As well as paying for access to Bloom's proprietary odds (or at least the versions of which he is willing to share - there are always secreted market prices hidden away) clients are also purchasing access to underground betting markets in Thailand, China, Indonesia et al via brokers.
In the same manner that the inept Conservative government is secreting its failures over covid-19 by distorting and hiding the death rates, football is using the pandemic crisis to undertake a financial power grab via institutional control and matchfixing with no media oversight.
This short-termism by state and sport is myopic as the real number of excess deaths will eventually be exposed as will the full extent of the systemic corruption in the national sport.
These are both prime examples of the Tullock Paradox which demonstrates that democracy allows more graft than autocracy.
We would have to ask why the state (in the form of Oliver Dowden and the DCMS) liaised so intimately with the likes of the insider gambling Brighton and Hove Albion owner, Tony Bloom.
Is this healthy?
In addition to running his football club, Mr Bloom also runs the Starlizard gambling syndicate via his cousin and long-term collaborator Steve Edery. Other club board members are also powerfully involved in the betting syndicate.
There are obvious conflicts of interest and integrity here and yet the UK sports media never mentions such issues...
... mainly because Starlizard is where many UK insider traders place their illicit bets.
The secret operations of Starlizard and the trading on Brighton and Hove Albion matches are not for this place and time but even the public face of the betting company and its proximity to a Premier League football club are suspicious.
According to a Business Insider article on Bloom from 2016, Starlizard is the biggest gambling syndicate in Britain making £100 million in a good year (this is an underestimate of Bloom's personal trading profits). The article also stated that the company may have £1 million riding on any match (this is also an underestimate of Bloom's proprietary positions).
Starlizard describes itself as a betting consultancy that uses complex statistical models to generate more accurate prices (the entity also utilises insider information to the same end).
Starlizard has been in operation since 2006 and conversations with former Brighton manager Gus Poyet showed that Bloom would undermine the professionalism of the manager by seeking information on the Uruguayan player diaspora so that such information could be fed into his trading models.
Poyet was disgusted by this linkage of football and betting.
Tony Bloom is the biggest client of Starlizard which is unsurprising given that it is his company!
At the same time as Starlizard was established for high rolling punters, Bloom also established a gambling syndicate where 'close associates' could pool money for high-stakes betting. You need to fork out £2 million a year to join.
As well as paying for access to Bloom's proprietary odds (or at least the versions of which he is willing to share - there are always secreted market prices hidden away) clients are also purchasing access to underground betting markets in Thailand, China, Indonesia et al via brokers.
Bloom's prices are fake. He directly manipulates the markets against all outsiders.
Globally there are approximately twelve sizeable professional gambling syndicates.
Most of these are involved in matchfixing.
This is where unexplained wealth comes from.
Allegedly, Bloom doesn't trade on Brighton matches...
... which, of course, is very very true, despite the suspicious betting patterns and outcomes being in the market before a ball has been kicked.
Globally there are approximately twelve sizeable professional gambling syndicates.
Most of these are involved in matchfixing.
This is where unexplained wealth comes from.
Allegedly, Bloom doesn't trade on Brighton matches...
... which, of course, is very very true, despite the suspicious betting patterns and outcomes being in the market before a ball has been kicked.
There is also the Infamous Wu Shu Hackers (IWSH) evidences which we will release when we feel like it.
Why is the state allowing this individual to take such a senior role in the progress of English football?
This is beginning to look like a standard state corruption template and bears remarkable parallels with the arms trade.
As Andrew Feinstein shows in his book "The Shadow World - Inside The Global Arms Trade", we are seeing the crossover of the ultimate deal and the ultimate crime.
Lord Gilmour, a former Defence Minister, once told BBC Newsnight: "You either got this business and bribed or you didn't bribe and didn't get the business."
The bribery template in the military industrial matrix shares structural equivalence with the matchfixing template in football.
Eddie Cunningham a former employee of Robert Lee International which was contracted by British Aerospace (BAE) in relation to the incredibly corrupt Al Yamamah arms deal lubricated by Tony Blair stated "it's an unhealthy relationship between the Ministry of Defence (MOD) and BAE. I found the attitude of the MOD was 'don't upset these people, they're bringing money into this country, look at this money... we can condone those little things.'"
A whistleblower handed over bank records to two investigative journalists (David Leigh and Rob Evans) "... which were key to revealing an entire global money laundering system, an enormous worldwide network of secret cash payments amounting to literally billions of dollars that had gone on for years with the connivance of the British government."
Similarly to the football industry, BAE was a believer in self-regulation - "we've looked at ourselves and haven't seen anything criminal, so why should anyone else investigate us?"
Because matchfixers operate from many locations around the world, and transfer money and place trades across multiple jurisdictions through intricate channels, it is easy to avoid any oversight. And, of course, there is no regulation. There is also a distinct lack of political will to prosecute matchfixers due to their links to state intelligence agencies or other quasi-state actors. In extreme cases, matchfixers are integral components of organised crime networks that include political operatives while others are or have been useful to powerful politicians who explicitly or tacitly condone their actions.
As the Dutch Campaign Against the Arms Trade state: "Dutch arms dealers guilty of brokering outside the Netherlands have little to fear from the Dutch authorities... International initiatives and requests from parliament for more adequate legislation have been delayed by government."
Both matchfixers and arms dealers operate in a shadow world, taking advantage of gaps in the international legal system and hiding behind the protective cover of powerful politicians and intelligence agencies, as they continue to grease the wheels of dictatorships, mafia states and other unaccountable governments.
Feinstein: "As a consequence our world is a more dangerous place for the majority of us to live but a more lucrative place for the small group of criminals and their protectors who have become fabulously wealthy through the immiseration of others."
Football is Fixed: "As a consequence the football industry is a more corrupt place for the majority of participants and spectators but a more lucrative place for the small group of criminals and their protectors who have become fabulously wealthy through the destruction of the integrity of the sport."
And these networks of corruption become immeasurably more robust (in the immediate future at least) when tied together by culture. Such cultural templates are short-termist. A paper by Benjamin Enke of Harvard University shows that tight kinship operations can gain in the immediate window by reducing the fear of being exposed but are less efficient and profitable long term - think of a comparison between the Lombardy region and the Mezzogiorno in Italy.
Strategy versus shafting.
Global arms dealing often fragments more readily because many of the major loci of corruption are geographically and culturally diverse e.g. Britain and Saudi Arabia in Al Yamamah or the activities of Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout across huge swathes of the planet - he was eventually arrested (just) in Thailand on US whims before recently being released in a shady backroom deal.
The most dynamic part of the Project Restart family of operatives are Jewish, for instance.
Tony Bloom, Steve Edery and Daniel Levy at Brighton, Starlizard and Tottenham Hotspur are working together to monetise the sport via the return of fans, the continuation of the sport as if there were no pandemic and, in case of Brighton/Starlizard, the trading of the resultant match outcomes.
Oliver Dowden is a former chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Jews which aims to broaden and deepen the links between government and Jewish businesses - he was paramount in putting economics before people throughout the pandemic giving football (and horseracing) a special status while removing life from those who weren't strong enough to "take it on the chin".
Bloom had been desperate to forge links with Roman Abramovich (the former Chelsea owner) and it was at the pre-season friendly between Brighton and Chelsea that small numbers of spectators were first allowed to return (with extremely limited public disclosure prior to this idiocy). Meanwhile Tottenham Hotspur were pushing for 50% fan attendance at their Wembley home or, at the very least, ground access to their highest paying customers.
Several key bookmakers are also under Jewish ownership and the Stellar agency who currently represent all three England goalkeepers (Pope, Pickford and Henderson), the two main Wales keepers (Hennessey and Ward) and the Scotland goalie David Marshall is run by two Jewish gentlemen who attend the same synagogue and are pro gamblers.
Indeed, six of the starters in the September 2020 Wales victory over Bulgaria in the UEFA Nations League were represented by Stellar!
Sweet.
Obviously no temptations there for the former casino owner Jonathan Barnett to influence outcomes.
Such structures are the norm in corrupt 'families' - look at the role of Irish Catholic culture in British and Irish horseracing, for example, or WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) masonics in offshore financial centres.
Keeping it in the family offers an extra level of security.
And in football, of late, we have seen the takeover of numerous English clubs as well as two problematical UK agencies Key Sports Management and Base Soccer Agency by the US-based Wasserman Media and CAA respectively as these two countries coalesce to control the sport.
Or take the Balkan holistic after 1989 in the former Yugoslavia where organised crime and the secret police worked hand in glove to the degree that it was difficult to tell the two apart with extremely violent and damaging consequences. As Misha Glenny states in his book McMafia: "Croats, Albanians, Macedonians, Montenegrins and Serbs cooperated splendidly in shifting contraband, narcotics and women from territory to territory."
Or in Russia, Glenny states that post-'89: "... the oligarchs were in a position to exercise influence over the residual forces of law and order in what is known as the 'deep state', the mighty forces of political influence that operate behind the scenes even in ostensible chaos. It went further though - the integration of high-ranking KGB and MVD [Russian Interior Ministry] personnel into the paid retinues of the oligarchs triggered the privatisation of the Russian security forces... In one fundamental sense, they were no different from the Solntsevskaya Bratva [an organised crime syndicate]: their services were available to the highest bidder."
Aside from Gus Poyet, we have been inundated with former insiders, operatives and employees of Brighton and Hove Albion wishing to dish the dirt on how Mr Tony Bloom has amassed a personal (and paranoid) wealth in excess of £1.7 billion. Indeed, we have been approached by approximately four times as many individuals from Brighton / Starlizard as from any other club / entity!
What has become of English football that such a structure is so close to the levers of state power?
_________________________________________________________________________________
Something Is Rotten In The State Of Britain - Bookmakers
Jurgen Habermas: "One never really knows whose one's enemy is"
All financial markets are gamed by insiders seeking cornered structures, collaborative manipulations and inappropriate competitive advantages.
The surprising factor is that human behaviouralism results in exactly the same corrupt edifices being constructed across the market continuum - Goldman Sachs betting against disinformational advice sold to clients, banks working together to manipulate the LIBOR (London Inter-Bank Offered Rate), football agents working to inflate the values of their clients, bookmakers working in unison to achieve the required outcomes in criminalised football matches...
The parallel simplicities of these corruptions are marked - due to minimal external enforcement of the rules and laws in existence, the perpetrators do not have to put much effort into covering their murky tracks.
So they don't.
Let's explore these parallels and the issues arising.
The Economist: "It [the LIBOR] is supposed to be constructed using banks' own honest estimates of what it costs for them to borrow money. But regulators around the world suspect that LIBOR... has been subject to manipulation."
Banks' individual borrowing costs proved to be remarkably similar considering their varied levels of risk.
The Economist continues: "The court documents suggest that a group of traders regularly contacted one another to discuss how to influence the Yen LIBOR rate."
And so it is with football betting markets and the player transfer markets.
Primary level betting organisations, taking their cue from the highly liquid underground dark pools that are the foundation of postmodern football, co-ordinate match prices between themselves to optimise returns from the event.
This disguises the hyperreality of corruption from the public eye.
This collaboration between the market makers works through competitive pricing in the micro (i.e. the bookmakers want to rip off mugs primarily) and their competitor firms secondarily and strategically.
Or take the transfer market.
Agents, club agents and club managers hold a series of private meetings whereby the value of a player is assessed.
But this 'value' is not real - it is an inflation on price to the benefit of the various agents, intermediaries, catalysts and the club manager(s) involved in the deal.
One former Cardiff City manager even charged his players contractually for selection to the team!
Why is the state allowing this individual to take such a senior role in the progress of English football?
This is beginning to look like a standard state corruption template and bears remarkable parallels with the arms trade.
As Andrew Feinstein shows in his book "The Shadow World - Inside The Global Arms Trade", we are seeing the crossover of the ultimate deal and the ultimate crime.
Lord Gilmour, a former Defence Minister, once told BBC Newsnight: "You either got this business and bribed or you didn't bribe and didn't get the business."
The bribery template in the military industrial matrix shares structural equivalence with the matchfixing template in football.
Eddie Cunningham a former employee of Robert Lee International which was contracted by British Aerospace (BAE) in relation to the incredibly corrupt Al Yamamah arms deal lubricated by Tony Blair stated "it's an unhealthy relationship between the Ministry of Defence (MOD) and BAE. I found the attitude of the MOD was 'don't upset these people, they're bringing money into this country, look at this money... we can condone those little things.'"
A whistleblower handed over bank records to two investigative journalists (David Leigh and Rob Evans) "... which were key to revealing an entire global money laundering system, an enormous worldwide network of secret cash payments amounting to literally billions of dollars that had gone on for years with the connivance of the British government."
Similarly to the football industry, BAE was a believer in self-regulation - "we've looked at ourselves and haven't seen anything criminal, so why should anyone else investigate us?"
Because matchfixers operate from many locations around the world, and transfer money and place trades across multiple jurisdictions through intricate channels, it is easy to avoid any oversight. And, of course, there is no regulation. There is also a distinct lack of political will to prosecute matchfixers due to their links to state intelligence agencies or other quasi-state actors. In extreme cases, matchfixers are integral components of organised crime networks that include political operatives while others are or have been useful to powerful politicians who explicitly or tacitly condone their actions.
As the Dutch Campaign Against the Arms Trade state: "Dutch arms dealers guilty of brokering outside the Netherlands have little to fear from the Dutch authorities... International initiatives and requests from parliament for more adequate legislation have been delayed by government."
Both matchfixers and arms dealers operate in a shadow world, taking advantage of gaps in the international legal system and hiding behind the protective cover of powerful politicians and intelligence agencies, as they continue to grease the wheels of dictatorships, mafia states and other unaccountable governments.
Feinstein: "As a consequence our world is a more dangerous place for the majority of us to live but a more lucrative place for the small group of criminals and their protectors who have become fabulously wealthy through the immiseration of others."
Football is Fixed: "As a consequence the football industry is a more corrupt place for the majority of participants and spectators but a more lucrative place for the small group of criminals and their protectors who have become fabulously wealthy through the destruction of the integrity of the sport."
And these networks of corruption become immeasurably more robust (in the immediate future at least) when tied together by culture. Such cultural templates are short-termist. A paper by Benjamin Enke of Harvard University shows that tight kinship operations can gain in the immediate window by reducing the fear of being exposed but are less efficient and profitable long term - think of a comparison between the Lombardy region and the Mezzogiorno in Italy.
Strategy versus shafting.
Global arms dealing often fragments more readily because many of the major loci of corruption are geographically and culturally diverse e.g. Britain and Saudi Arabia in Al Yamamah or the activities of Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout across huge swathes of the planet - he was eventually arrested (just) in Thailand on US whims before recently being released in a shady backroom deal.
The most dynamic part of the Project Restart family of operatives are Jewish, for instance.
Tony Bloom, Steve Edery and Daniel Levy at Brighton, Starlizard and Tottenham Hotspur are working together to monetise the sport via the return of fans, the continuation of the sport as if there were no pandemic and, in case of Brighton/Starlizard, the trading of the resultant match outcomes.
Oliver Dowden is a former chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Jews which aims to broaden and deepen the links between government and Jewish businesses - he was paramount in putting economics before people throughout the pandemic giving football (and horseracing) a special status while removing life from those who weren't strong enough to "take it on the chin".
Bloom had been desperate to forge links with Roman Abramovich (the former Chelsea owner) and it was at the pre-season friendly between Brighton and Chelsea that small numbers of spectators were first allowed to return (with extremely limited public disclosure prior to this idiocy). Meanwhile Tottenham Hotspur were pushing for 50% fan attendance at their Wembley home or, at the very least, ground access to their highest paying customers.
Several key bookmakers are also under Jewish ownership and the Stellar agency who currently represent all three England goalkeepers (Pope, Pickford and Henderson), the two main Wales keepers (Hennessey and Ward) and the Scotland goalie David Marshall is run by two Jewish gentlemen who attend the same synagogue and are pro gamblers.
Indeed, six of the starters in the September 2020 Wales victory over Bulgaria in the UEFA Nations League were represented by Stellar!
Sweet.
Obviously no temptations there for the former casino owner Jonathan Barnett to influence outcomes.
Such structures are the norm in corrupt 'families' - look at the role of Irish Catholic culture in British and Irish horseracing, for example, or WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) masonics in offshore financial centres.
Keeping it in the family offers an extra level of security.
And in football, of late, we have seen the takeover of numerous English clubs as well as two problematical UK agencies Key Sports Management and Base Soccer Agency by the US-based Wasserman Media and CAA respectively as these two countries coalesce to control the sport.
Or take the Balkan holistic after 1989 in the former Yugoslavia where organised crime and the secret police worked hand in glove to the degree that it was difficult to tell the two apart with extremely violent and damaging consequences. As Misha Glenny states in his book McMafia: "Croats, Albanians, Macedonians, Montenegrins and Serbs cooperated splendidly in shifting contraband, narcotics and women from territory to territory."
Or in Russia, Glenny states that post-'89: "... the oligarchs were in a position to exercise influence over the residual forces of law and order in what is known as the 'deep state', the mighty forces of political influence that operate behind the scenes even in ostensible chaos. It went further though - the integration of high-ranking KGB and MVD [Russian Interior Ministry] personnel into the paid retinues of the oligarchs triggered the privatisation of the Russian security forces... In one fundamental sense, they were no different from the Solntsevskaya Bratva [an organised crime syndicate]: their services were available to the highest bidder."
Aside from Gus Poyet, we have been inundated with former insiders, operatives and employees of Brighton and Hove Albion wishing to dish the dirt on how Mr Tony Bloom has amassed a personal (and paranoid) wealth in excess of £1.7 billion. Indeed, we have been approached by approximately four times as many individuals from Brighton / Starlizard as from any other club / entity!
What has become of English football that such a structure is so close to the levers of state power?
_________________________________________________________________________________
Something Is Rotten In The State Of Britain - Bookmakers
Jurgen Habermas: "One never really knows whose one's enemy is"
All financial markets are gamed by insiders seeking cornered structures, collaborative manipulations and inappropriate competitive advantages.
The surprising factor is that human behaviouralism results in exactly the same corrupt edifices being constructed across the market continuum - Goldman Sachs betting against disinformational advice sold to clients, banks working together to manipulate the LIBOR (London Inter-Bank Offered Rate), football agents working to inflate the values of their clients, bookmakers working in unison to achieve the required outcomes in criminalised football matches...
The parallel simplicities of these corruptions are marked - due to minimal external enforcement of the rules and laws in existence, the perpetrators do not have to put much effort into covering their murky tracks.
So they don't.
Let's explore these parallels and the issues arising.
The Economist: "It [the LIBOR] is supposed to be constructed using banks' own honest estimates of what it costs for them to borrow money. But regulators around the world suspect that LIBOR... has been subject to manipulation."
Banks' individual borrowing costs proved to be remarkably similar considering their varied levels of risk.
The Economist continues: "The court documents suggest that a group of traders regularly contacted one another to discuss how to influence the Yen LIBOR rate."
And so it is with football betting markets and the player transfer markets.
Primary level betting organisations, taking their cue from the highly liquid underground dark pools that are the foundation of postmodern football, co-ordinate match prices between themselves to optimise returns from the event.
This disguises the hyperreality of corruption from the public eye.
This collaboration between the market makers works through competitive pricing in the micro (i.e. the bookmakers want to rip off mugs primarily) and their competitor firms secondarily and strategically.
Or take the transfer market.
Agents, club agents and club managers hold a series of private meetings whereby the value of a player is assessed.
But this 'value' is not real - it is an inflation on price to the benefit of the various agents, intermediaries, catalysts and the club manager(s) involved in the deal.
One former Cardiff City manager even charged his players contractually for selection to the team!
Emiliano Sala paid for the criminality defining British football with his life when on the verge of signing for the Welsh team via Willie McKay and his family.
Once again, football on the whole loses out so that insiders might take a much larger slice of the action via their percentage cuts and the variety of brown envelopes and briefcases changing hands.
The Economist prints the case filing on the LIBOR manipulation where one trader from a whistleblowing bank (Trader A) helps to manipulate the market with a Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) insider: "Trader A explained to one RBS IRD trader who his collusive contacts were and how he had and was going to manipulate Yen LIBOR. Trader A also communicated his trading positions, his desire for a certain movement in Yen LIBOR and gave instructions for the RBS IRD trader to get RBS to make Yen LIBOR submissions consistent with Trader A's wishes. The RBS IRD trader acknowledged these communications and confirmed that he would follow through. Trader A and the RBS IRD trader also entered into transactions that aligned their trading interests in regards to Yen LIBOR."
Or...
Bookmaker A explained to Bookmaker B who his collusive contacts (bookmakers, players, agents, referees) were and how he was going to manipulate the match outcome. Bookmaker A also transmitted his trading positions, his desire for a certain result and gave instructions for Bookmaker B to get his organisation to use its contacts to enhance the match manipulation. Bookmaker B acknowledged these communications and confirmed that he would follow through. Bookmaker A and Bookmaker B also entered into transactions that aligned their trading interests in regards to the match outcome.
Or...
Agent A explained to Manager B who his collusive contacts (other agents, club agents, managers) were and how he was going to manipulate the transfer fee. Agent A also transmitted his player valuations, his desire for a certain minimum transfer fee and gave instructions to Manager B to use his contacts to inflate the price. Manager B acknowledged these communications and confirmed that he would follow through. Agent A, Manager B and other interested parties also entered into transactions that aligned their financial interests in regards to the inflated transfer fee.
All of which is illegal, although in football that matters little as there is no regulation and being bent-as-a-nine-bob-note is evidently a core competency.
But this is short-termist and psychopathic.
Civil cases may be brought against the perpetrators.
* Large individual cases might be brought by other bookmaking organisations or club owners outside the loop with respect to betting and transfer corruptions.
* Traders on the wrong side of manipulated bets or club employees suffering the consequences might bring class action suits.
* Traders whose winnings are limited or clubs who lose out on future transfer fees might also have a case if intent can be proved.
* Individual bettors can group together to create lawsuits to reclaim losses on events manipulated by insiders.
The similarities in the forms of financial market manipulation is enhanced in a wired world where mass behaviouralisms become global consciousness 'wisdoms' at a pace while the individual manipulators believe that their omnipotence places them ahead of the curve.
But, in reality, there is no robustness whatsoever in such rubbish in / rubbish out corruptions.
Just a symbiotic relationship between market makers and crime.
Still.
The criminals who manipulate financial, betting and transfer markets utilise the same tactics...
... some of them are even the same individuals/organisations.
What a weird fluke!
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.
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 near future 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 UK Treasury is reluctant to target the bookmaking sector...
... as the Treasury benefits (allegedly indirectly) via proximity 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 are the normal matrix while, in parallel, the vast majority of bookmakers refuse to allow winning accounts from all other clients which, coupled with the disinformational advertising, persuades leisure punters to part with their monies 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) - the sport of British football is being asset stripped with the complicity of areas of our Deep State.
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 (now part of Ladbrokes). Although fiercely competitive, the British bookmaking sector operate as a fragmented cartel to protect mutually beneficial holistics when the need rises.
Gambling is an addiction. There are an estimated 2 million people who are problem gamblers or at risk of becoming so in the UK and most of these individuals are persuaded by wall-to-wall advertising and extensive sponsorship to become / remain addicted by an industry that cleared £14.5 billion profit in 2019. Half a million people have a serious gambling addiction in the country while bookies only return pennies to help with problem gambling. But £14.5 billion is not the whole story - the real profits from the industry are much greater as dark pool trading is both entirely non-regulated and underground - the profits are hidden and no taxes are paid to the state. Any state.
None of this ubiquitous advertising was allowed prior to Blair's government allowing the industry to regulate itself via a voluntary code of operation.
And Blair's influence still persists in football as his former director of communications and strategy, the odious sociopathic war criminal Alastair Campbell, served as a secreted public relations consultant to the Project Restart money grab.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Off The Radar - Infinite Jest
Gore Vidal: "Everybody is conspiring"
As already mentioned, at least 70% of Premier League matches over the last three seasons have had their outcome secreted somewhere in the betting architecture pre-match i.e. they are fixed.
Now you might think that Sportradar (who gather 'intelligence' on suspect betting markets), the FA Sport Betting Integrity Forum, the International Betting Integrity Association, the now defunct Federbet and Early Warning Systems GmbH (who were disbanded in 2018 and 2016 respectively) or Europol / Interpol or members of the UK mainstream media (some of whom have first hand knowledge of these rigged events) would be disclosing this mass corruption to the fans.
Dream on.
And to understand why...
... read on.
Firstly, let's take a glance at three of these bodies allegedly addressing matchfixing and money laundering in sport.
1. The FA's Sport Betting Integrity Forum (FASBIF) - the futility of this talking shop is proved by some of the membership. The British Horse Racing Authority (conspicuous money impacts on outcome in UK racing); the England and Wales Cricket Board (matchfixing in English cricket is dominated by Dawood Company mafia operating from their base in Pakistan); the FA (not fit for purpose); the Tennis Integrity Unit (see Djokovic revelations below); 5 bookmakers (most of whom allow insider trading); the Association of British Bookmakers; the Association of Chief Police Officers, Police Scotland and the National Crime Agency (none of whom have disclosed any of the huge body of fixed football matches in the Premier League, the Sky Bet Championship or the Scottish Premier League).
FASBIF is not robust.
2. Europol / Interpol - Ronald Noble, former Secretary-General of Interpol, is exposed in Andrew Jennings' book 'The Dirty Game' as, at the very least, a facilitator of the burying of bad matchfixing news relating to FIFA. Additionally, Europol direct any enquiries regarding matchfixing back to the local police authorities, like any Albanian citizen is going to go to Tirana police to report Skenderbeu games! There are no market analytical skills within these bodies. Consequently, they massively underestimate the scale of the problem.
3. Sportradar - this body claims to reach deep into the underground markets but merely skim the surface of the dark pools that dominate matchfixing globally. When Sportradar detect a suspect event, do they go to the media? No fucking chance. In effect, they sell their analyses (sic) back to the sports betting industry so that markets might be made more efficient and mugs might be mugged - the suspect markets aren't suspended but traded aggressively with patsies being unaware that their leisure punt is a certain loser. No improvement in integrity. No support for the punter.
One of Sportradar's marketing slogans is "realise opportunities - everywhere" which says it all really.
Let's take tennis as an example.
On the eve of the ITF Australian Tennis Open in Melbourne in January 2016, Novak Djokovic disclosed that he had been offered considerable money to throw a tennis game earlier in his career.
The International Tennis Federation (ITF) and other tennis boards quickly moved to state that there had been no suppression of evidence of historical matchfixing in tennis.
But Australia's anti-doping chief Richard Ings has shown that, when he worked at the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), the body buried a report disclosing extensive matchfixing in the sport over a decade ago.
Four Corners, an Australian investigative journalist group, disclosed on the ABC website in February 2016 that more than 40 tennis matches were flagged as matchfixing events in just three months.
Furthermore, 350 tennis professionals were on a blacklist of matchfixers.
One of Sportradar's partners is the ITF.
So when Sportradar detect corruption, one of the following scenarios is played out:
a) Sportradar inform the relevant governing body who then take no action or,
b) Sportradar inform bookmakers who trade the information and adjust their internal markets but make no public disclosure or,
c) Sportradar inform both governing bodies and bookmakers and all enjoy privileged inside information at the public's expense with no release of the corruption to the press.
Whichever of these constructs is the reality, Sportradar are exposed as charlatans who are a problematical input to integrity in world sport.
As they scream on their website - ITF and Sportradar: A Unique Partnership.
Additionally, virtually all tennis coaches in the UK have contracts with British territory bookmakers that enables private information regarding player form, injury, psychological state, fitness to be shared for mutual gain.
Yet players themselves and family members / friends have to sign non-disclosure contracts to prevent them from utilising private information in the betting markets!
Top-down insider trading is allowed...
... bottom up trading is banned.
Which is where we come in - we copwatch.
Football is Fixed are trusted as purveyors of integrity which means that we are given highly privileged market information at least two levels deeper than the stratum reached by Sportradar in the dark pool trading platforms that dominate global betting markets.
There are also extensive chapeau blanc detection and analytical abilities in our network.
We know of only one other British entity that has similar access to these markets.
Yet this lack of deeper access cannot be used as an excuse for the inaction of the bodies detailed above - although they might not witness the specific multi-million pound trades, the market structure means that this information floats to the surface of the public markets where, with bespoke analysis, it is detectable.
Furthermore, many bookmakers operate in both the dark pools and in the public markets and are fully aware of the matchfixing bifurcating between these two layers of layers.
Think of this when watching your highly manipulated Premier League match of choice when the latest round of the crime saga surfaces.
There are two core inputs to the trading process - market price and market timing.
Knowledge of the former represents the 'value' on offer - the difference in price between the market and reality - while knowledge of the latter fine tunes the process for maximisation of profits.
But the latter also offers a route to proprietary profits based not on skill but on one's position in the marketplace,
In 1929, financial market traders were dependent on the ticker-tape.
In a pre-IT world, all trades were manually recorded by armies of under-privileged people.
At that time, there was no other option.
Once the operators at the top of the Ponzi scheme decided that the fake price summit had been reached, they sold across the board and extensively.
When this Crash occurred, the ticker-tape operators were unable to keep up with the tsunami of "sell" orders.
Consequently, the ticker-tape started to fall behind time.
So the ticker-tape meant that the reality was lost on the general trading population until it was too late.
Traders (and normal human beings too) were selling stock without being able to gauge the price at which they were selling their assets, as the prices were out-of-date and everybody understood that there was a run going on.
This was a very early example of a pitchsiding structure in the financial sector - insiders gaining (or losing less) at the expense of the bewildered and the befuddled who were outside the loop.
Move forward to now and the same market advantage is built into modern day financial market architecture via the utilisation of High Frequency Trading (HFT) algorithms, dark pool operations and selective arbitrage trading.
Inevitably, these distortions of time entered the world of sport once markets were attached to events - it is termed 'pitchsiding' or 'courtsiding'.
The first occasion that I witnessed pitchsiding was at British racecourses in the 1990's.
Operatives would park up a vehicle outside the racecourse with line-of-sight link to the bookmakers trading on the rails and utilise bullet microphones to listen into these primary tier bookies. Once insider money surfaced, the operatives took advantage of the information (and the available price) to trade the inside information at a timing advantage to the remainder of the market before the markets were able to react.
These behaviours also have their origins in the Depression when illegal street bookies would offer prices on races that had already been run - think Thomas Shelby and 'Peaky Blinders'!
Pitchsiding spread to other sports once global markets were developed on sporting events.
There is an inevitable time delay on images being flashed around the world.
Other communication routes are almost instant.
So in football, there can be a 15 second delay between the action taking place on the pitch and the HDTV images hitting your screen. A lot can happen in fifteen seconds!
Pitchsiding is particularly profitable and far easier to facilitate when the geographical distances are greater with the result that the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015 in Australia and New Zealand was always a prime target for the pitchsiders.
Hence, some good news for once.
There was a modicum of momentum within the International Cricket Council (ICC) to eradicate sports corruption and the pitchsiders present at the opening World Cup match between New Zealand and Sri Lanka were removed from the ground.
Pitchsiding is a criminal offence in parts of Australia and carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.
Unfortunately, in the world of football and other sports, legal pitchsiding is merely seen as another competitive advantage for the bookmakers like insider trading and access to dark pools, whereas private pitchsiding is illegitimate.
So, a punter sitting next to a tennis court in Melbourne using time advantage at 40-30 in a set decider is banned while a bookmaker accepting a trade while knowing that a goal has already been scored opposite to the bet being placed simply puts the money into his virtual satchel.
And, of course, no action is taken.
Temporal market distortions to the benefit of a financial elite are never a problem.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Dark Pools Produce Black Swans; Black Pools Produce Black Holes
The Economist: "The drive to downsize the state was born of the belief that the market is a more efficient decision-maker. Pandemics challenge this"
Incipit parodia...
There is a Russian saying - another's soul is a dark pool...
The infrastructure of financial markets is an inverted underground pyramid, which would seem apt for such a pernicious Ponzi scheme.
Firstly, we are presented with the public markets with their tenuous links to reality but then there are the dark pools and, most importantly, deeper still the even darker pools (black pools?).
All investment banks operate their own proprietary dark pool out of sight of regulatory bodies and non-insider traders.
This is dodgy enough.
But these separate pools then conglomerate and trade off one another in even darker pools which effectively are the High Stakes Poker Tables that determine every hyperreality.
And who can blame an antisocial corporate body for behaving in such a psychopathic manner?
Would one rather place one's trade secretly and anonymously in non-regulated underground markets and earn the kudos of the brokerage (plus rewards) while gaming the release of this information to the public markets or would one prefer going to the public markets, dealing with the Commitment of Traders Reports etc and with the associated risks of all sorts of upsets from the loss of input price to getting cornered?
As Noam Chomsky says, we are dealing with "cognitive regulatory capture" by the banks, shadow markets and exchanges.
The Economist: "The main worry is that central banks are repeating the same mistake they have made for the last 25 years. They have intervened to support asset prices by cutting rates whenever markets faltered. This encouraged speculators to borrow money to buy assets, inflating one bubble after another. Ongoing quantitative easing and negative interest rates are just the logical endpoint of this process where central banks are cutting out the middleman and buying assets directly while savers are punished for holding cash.
"In the long run, however, asset values are constrained by the growth rate of the economy. Any attempt to maintain them artificially will either end in failure or will be successful only by inflating other prices until they come in line."
During the Spring 2020 first peak of the covid-19 pandemic, France, Spain and Italy placed restrictions on short-selling turning the markets into one-way-bet only to the detriment of market efficiency and realistic pricing.
Feed the Ponzi was the cry!
Phillip Stevens: "There are a couple of things to say about Britain's banks. They still pose a serious threat to the nation's long term stability and prosperity. They rely for their profits - for the huge bonuses paid to senior staff - on the fact that taxpayers are underwriting the risks. Thus public subsidy is turned into private profit."
Additionally, the competitive nature of neo-liberal banking causes structural deficiencies on the road to anti-competitive monopolies or, if we are lucky, duopolies or cartels.
In Australia, meanwhile, the Big Four banks are forbidden by bipartisan agreement to take each other over.
John Grimond: "That meant they [the banks] had no incentive to pump up their share price or earnings through dealing in dubious products."
Psychopathic short-termism pervades all aspects of this system.
Take outsourcing...
The fundamental stupidity of the globalising firms utilising outsourcing, offshoring and other psycho-fads was that by removing skilled employees, supply bases and infrastructure, distribution networks and sourcing plants from their home country, they had absolutely nothing to return to once the inevitable wage inflation took off in the outsourced territories followed by trading wars and a return to national self-sufficiency as the limits of globalisation were eventually realised.
They destroyed, in an act of selfish greed, in order to optimise short term returns to their shareholders.
Strategic this was not.
Through leaving externalities out of their system, the Friedmanists produce successions of Black Swan events - statistically unlikely eruptions in the system caused by chaos and stuff.
Naseem Taleb summed up the 2007/08 financial crisis (even if the imbecility of his concept of Anti-Fragility is just another ruse to continue with a system that has nowhere left to turn) - super-systemic risk out-quantums evolutionary shock absorption any day of the week.
His within-system solution is to have maluses as well as bonuses to prevent traders and executives gaming the system.
A deconstruction of the entire farcical edifice would, of course be, preferable.
But let us return to the pre-hypothesis of Anti-Fragility.
Being human, all of our market constructs share structural similarities - currency markets, the insurance industry, options and futures, bookmaking, derivatives - effectively a hierarchy of psychopathic matrices that only vary to the degree that they are willing to sell their own grandmother.
Taleb's attempt at deep thought is simply blinkered.
For sure, all systems are in a state of constant flux and benefit from the shocks and new templates that roller-coaster along their evolutionary paths.
Temporary equilibrium states are a conglomeration of these instabilities.
But this does not justify pushing aspects like man-made climate change to the limits as there is another level to evolutionary progress - a quantum one.
For the sake of the argument, look at football betting markets in-running.
As the action unfolds in front of our eyes and the roles of the participants become clear, the state of equilibrium is repeatedly disturbed by micro-events on the field of play.
As these motivational and manipulated inputs progress, there is a build up to a completely different quantum reality - the change from a 0-0 scoreline to 1-0.
Once the goal has been scored, the anti-fragility continues but at an entirely new level.
So it is with climate change - Taleb needs to get holistically real!
Living in a world of state-based economic systems, it should not be surprising that statist structures mimic the dark pool / black pool template.
Global leaders speak of the need for "secret, dark debates in economic policy making."
Ah! Democracy...
Jack Rasmus: "Malthus may turn out to be right, but with broader implications than he may have imagined."
The degree of simulation is surreal - we are experiencing "the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal" according to Baudrillard.
In 'The Perfect Crime' he goes further: "The only suspense that remains is that of knowing how far the world can derealise itself before succumbing to its reality deficit or, conversely, how far it can hyperrealise itself before succumbing to an excess of reality (the point when, having become perfectly real, truer than true, it will fall into the clutches of total simulation)."
Meanwhile Slavoj Zizek foresees a time when "money will finally become a purely virtual form of reference, no longer materialised in any particular object."
Free market capitalism, in its psychopathic short-termist greed, has lost this plot big style...
By 2020, 12% of financial market activity is located in these private dark pool environments.
In football the percentage is considerably higher.
These constructs are the future of financial markets.
These structures are highly regressive.
There are so many loopholes in dark pools that the fabric of pseudo-regulation crumbles to pieces - there is not enough 'solidity' to allow the holes to be looped!
But, insider trading opportunities are surely the most pernicious aspect.
Company officers are being allowed a massive perk here - the ability to privately back or lay their company (or other companies in which they hold directorships or primary level inside information) without such positioning being reported to any regulatory body nor, obviously, any public place.
This creates a very tilted marketplace to the benefit of the elite and the disadvantage of everybody else, including the lower tiers of financial capitalism.
By taking advantage of private markets to trade their information, insiders are severely hampering price transparency.
Without price transparency, free market capitalism works even less well than is already the case.
So, the global economic well-being deteriorates just to allow the Chosen Few to trade at yet another of the poker tables underpinning our existences.
Of course, eventually, the private trading reaches the public space, but only after it has visited numerous other private spaces on the way.
Repeated cloned trading by brokers announces the neohyperreality to the public markets so that the massed middle classes are eventually able to add such data to their software and charts.
In a Depression, the temporal edge is the most important.
Markets are volatile in Depressions.
Trading this volatility is easy money.
Gaining solid price enhances these profits.
The only question remaining is surely this.
Will this Depression be the Even Greater Depression or the Permanent Depression?
_________________________________________________________________________________
Maura Dooley:
Snow flies fierce across the land
as cardboard doors unfold,
a star shines clear on bitterness,
on lack and want and cold.
An old tale tells of spite's true cost
how greed's full rhyme is need.
The City's rime is piss and frost,
icesharp in word and deed.
_________________________________________________________________________________
© 2023 Football is Fixed
Once again, football on the whole loses out so that insiders might take a much larger slice of the action via their percentage cuts and the variety of brown envelopes and briefcases changing hands.
The Economist prints the case filing on the LIBOR manipulation where one trader from a whistleblowing bank (Trader A) helps to manipulate the market with a Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) insider: "Trader A explained to one RBS IRD trader who his collusive contacts were and how he had and was going to manipulate Yen LIBOR. Trader A also communicated his trading positions, his desire for a certain movement in Yen LIBOR and gave instructions for the RBS IRD trader to get RBS to make Yen LIBOR submissions consistent with Trader A's wishes. The RBS IRD trader acknowledged these communications and confirmed that he would follow through. Trader A and the RBS IRD trader also entered into transactions that aligned their trading interests in regards to Yen LIBOR."
Or...
Bookmaker A explained to Bookmaker B who his collusive contacts (bookmakers, players, agents, referees) were and how he was going to manipulate the match outcome. Bookmaker A also transmitted his trading positions, his desire for a certain result and gave instructions for Bookmaker B to get his organisation to use its contacts to enhance the match manipulation. Bookmaker B acknowledged these communications and confirmed that he would follow through. Bookmaker A and Bookmaker B also entered into transactions that aligned their trading interests in regards to the match outcome.
Or...
Agent A explained to Manager B who his collusive contacts (other agents, club agents, managers) were and how he was going to manipulate the transfer fee. Agent A also transmitted his player valuations, his desire for a certain minimum transfer fee and gave instructions to Manager B to use his contacts to inflate the price. Manager B acknowledged these communications and confirmed that he would follow through. Agent A, Manager B and other interested parties also entered into transactions that aligned their financial interests in regards to the inflated transfer fee.
All of which is illegal, although in football that matters little as there is no regulation and being bent-as-a-nine-bob-note is evidently a core competency.
But this is short-termist and psychopathic.
Civil cases may be brought against the perpetrators.
* Large individual cases might be brought by other bookmaking organisations or club owners outside the loop with respect to betting and transfer corruptions.
* Traders on the wrong side of manipulated bets or club employees suffering the consequences might bring class action suits.
* Traders whose winnings are limited or clubs who lose out on future transfer fees might also have a case if intent can be proved.
* Individual bettors can group together to create lawsuits to reclaim losses on events manipulated by insiders.
The similarities in the forms of financial market manipulation is enhanced in a wired world where mass behaviouralisms become global consciousness 'wisdoms' at a pace while the individual manipulators believe that their omnipotence places them ahead of the curve.
But, in reality, there is no robustness whatsoever in such rubbish in / rubbish out corruptions.
Just a symbiotic relationship between market makers and crime.
Still.
The criminals who manipulate financial, betting and transfer markets utilise the same tactics...
... some of them are even the same individuals/organisations.
What a weird fluke!
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.
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 near future 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 UK Treasury is reluctant to target the bookmaking sector...
... as the Treasury benefits (allegedly indirectly) via proximity 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 are the normal matrix while, in parallel, the vast majority of bookmakers refuse to allow winning accounts from all other clients which, coupled with the disinformational advertising, persuades leisure punters to part with their monies 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) - the sport of British football is being asset stripped with the complicity of areas of our Deep State.
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 (now part of Ladbrokes). Although fiercely competitive, the British bookmaking sector operate as a fragmented cartel to protect mutually beneficial holistics when the need rises.
Gambling is an addiction. There are an estimated 2 million people who are problem gamblers or at risk of becoming so in the UK and most of these individuals are persuaded by wall-to-wall advertising and extensive sponsorship to become / remain addicted by an industry that cleared £14.5 billion profit in 2019. Half a million people have a serious gambling addiction in the country while bookies only return pennies to help with problem gambling. But £14.5 billion is not the whole story - the real profits from the industry are much greater as dark pool trading is both entirely non-regulated and underground - the profits are hidden and no taxes are paid to the state. Any state.
None of this ubiquitous advertising was allowed prior to Blair's government allowing the industry to regulate itself via a voluntary code of operation.
And Blair's influence still persists in football as his former director of communications and strategy, the odious sociopathic war criminal Alastair Campbell, served as a secreted public relations consultant to the Project Restart money grab.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Off The Radar - Infinite Jest
Gore Vidal: "Everybody is conspiring"
As already mentioned, at least 70% of Premier League matches over the last three seasons have had their outcome secreted somewhere in the betting architecture pre-match i.e. they are fixed.
Now you might think that Sportradar (who gather 'intelligence' on suspect betting markets), the FA Sport Betting Integrity Forum, the International Betting Integrity Association, the now defunct Federbet and Early Warning Systems GmbH (who were disbanded in 2018 and 2016 respectively) or Europol / Interpol or members of the UK mainstream media (some of whom have first hand knowledge of these rigged events) would be disclosing this mass corruption to the fans.
Dream on.
And to understand why...
... read on.
Firstly, let's take a glance at three of these bodies allegedly addressing matchfixing and money laundering in sport.
1. The FA's Sport Betting Integrity Forum (FASBIF) - the futility of this talking shop is proved by some of the membership. The British Horse Racing Authority (conspicuous money impacts on outcome in UK racing); the England and Wales Cricket Board (matchfixing in English cricket is dominated by Dawood Company mafia operating from their base in Pakistan); the FA (not fit for purpose); the Tennis Integrity Unit (see Djokovic revelations below); 5 bookmakers (most of whom allow insider trading); the Association of British Bookmakers; the Association of Chief Police Officers, Police Scotland and the National Crime Agency (none of whom have disclosed any of the huge body of fixed football matches in the Premier League, the Sky Bet Championship or the Scottish Premier League).
FASBIF is not robust.
2. Europol / Interpol - Ronald Noble, former Secretary-General of Interpol, is exposed in Andrew Jennings' book 'The Dirty Game' as, at the very least, a facilitator of the burying of bad matchfixing news relating to FIFA. Additionally, Europol direct any enquiries regarding matchfixing back to the local police authorities, like any Albanian citizen is going to go to Tirana police to report Skenderbeu games! There are no market analytical skills within these bodies. Consequently, they massively underestimate the scale of the problem.
3. Sportradar - this body claims to reach deep into the underground markets but merely skim the surface of the dark pools that dominate matchfixing globally. When Sportradar detect a suspect event, do they go to the media? No fucking chance. In effect, they sell their analyses (sic) back to the sports betting industry so that markets might be made more efficient and mugs might be mugged - the suspect markets aren't suspended but traded aggressively with patsies being unaware that their leisure punt is a certain loser. No improvement in integrity. No support for the punter.
One of Sportradar's marketing slogans is "realise opportunities - everywhere" which says it all really.
Let's take tennis as an example.
On the eve of the ITF Australian Tennis Open in Melbourne in January 2016, Novak Djokovic disclosed that he had been offered considerable money to throw a tennis game earlier in his career.
The International Tennis Federation (ITF) and other tennis boards quickly moved to state that there had been no suppression of evidence of historical matchfixing in tennis.
But Australia's anti-doping chief Richard Ings has shown that, when he worked at the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), the body buried a report disclosing extensive matchfixing in the sport over a decade ago.
Four Corners, an Australian investigative journalist group, disclosed on the ABC website in February 2016 that more than 40 tennis matches were flagged as matchfixing events in just three months.
Furthermore, 350 tennis professionals were on a blacklist of matchfixers.
One of Sportradar's partners is the ITF.
So when Sportradar detect corruption, one of the following scenarios is played out:
a) Sportradar inform the relevant governing body who then take no action or,
b) Sportradar inform bookmakers who trade the information and adjust their internal markets but make no public disclosure or,
c) Sportradar inform both governing bodies and bookmakers and all enjoy privileged inside information at the public's expense with no release of the corruption to the press.
Whichever of these constructs is the reality, Sportradar are exposed as charlatans who are a problematical input to integrity in world sport.
As they scream on their website - ITF and Sportradar: A Unique Partnership.
Additionally, virtually all tennis coaches in the UK have contracts with British territory bookmakers that enables private information regarding player form, injury, psychological state, fitness to be shared for mutual gain.
Yet players themselves and family members / friends have to sign non-disclosure contracts to prevent them from utilising private information in the betting markets!
Top-down insider trading is allowed...
... bottom up trading is banned.
Which is where we come in - we copwatch.
Football is Fixed are trusted as purveyors of integrity which means that we are given highly privileged market information at least two levels deeper than the stratum reached by Sportradar in the dark pool trading platforms that dominate global betting markets.
There are also extensive chapeau blanc detection and analytical abilities in our network.
We know of only one other British entity that has similar access to these markets.
Yet this lack of deeper access cannot be used as an excuse for the inaction of the bodies detailed above - although they might not witness the specific multi-million pound trades, the market structure means that this information floats to the surface of the public markets where, with bespoke analysis, it is detectable.
Furthermore, many bookmakers operate in both the dark pools and in the public markets and are fully aware of the matchfixing bifurcating between these two layers of layers.
Think of this when watching your highly manipulated Premier League match of choice when the latest round of the crime saga surfaces.
There are two core inputs to the trading process - market price and market timing.
Knowledge of the former represents the 'value' on offer - the difference in price between the market and reality - while knowledge of the latter fine tunes the process for maximisation of profits.
But the latter also offers a route to proprietary profits based not on skill but on one's position in the marketplace,
In 1929, financial market traders were dependent on the ticker-tape.
In a pre-IT world, all trades were manually recorded by armies of under-privileged people.
At that time, there was no other option.
Once the operators at the top of the Ponzi scheme decided that the fake price summit had been reached, they sold across the board and extensively.
When this Crash occurred, the ticker-tape operators were unable to keep up with the tsunami of "sell" orders.
Consequently, the ticker-tape started to fall behind time.
So the ticker-tape meant that the reality was lost on the general trading population until it was too late.
Traders (and normal human beings too) were selling stock without being able to gauge the price at which they were selling their assets, as the prices were out-of-date and everybody understood that there was a run going on.
This was a very early example of a pitchsiding structure in the financial sector - insiders gaining (or losing less) at the expense of the bewildered and the befuddled who were outside the loop.
Move forward to now and the same market advantage is built into modern day financial market architecture via the utilisation of High Frequency Trading (HFT) algorithms, dark pool operations and selective arbitrage trading.
Inevitably, these distortions of time entered the world of sport once markets were attached to events - it is termed 'pitchsiding' or 'courtsiding'.
The first occasion that I witnessed pitchsiding was at British racecourses in the 1990's.
Operatives would park up a vehicle outside the racecourse with line-of-sight link to the bookmakers trading on the rails and utilise bullet microphones to listen into these primary tier bookies. Once insider money surfaced, the operatives took advantage of the information (and the available price) to trade the inside information at a timing advantage to the remainder of the market before the markets were able to react.
These behaviours also have their origins in the Depression when illegal street bookies would offer prices on races that had already been run - think Thomas Shelby and 'Peaky Blinders'!
Pitchsiding spread to other sports once global markets were developed on sporting events.
There is an inevitable time delay on images being flashed around the world.
Other communication routes are almost instant.
So in football, there can be a 15 second delay between the action taking place on the pitch and the HDTV images hitting your screen. A lot can happen in fifteen seconds!
Pitchsiding is particularly profitable and far easier to facilitate when the geographical distances are greater with the result that the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015 in Australia and New Zealand was always a prime target for the pitchsiders.
Hence, some good news for once.
There was a modicum of momentum within the International Cricket Council (ICC) to eradicate sports corruption and the pitchsiders present at the opening World Cup match between New Zealand and Sri Lanka were removed from the ground.
Pitchsiding is a criminal offence in parts of Australia and carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.
Unfortunately, in the world of football and other sports, legal pitchsiding is merely seen as another competitive advantage for the bookmakers like insider trading and access to dark pools, whereas private pitchsiding is illegitimate.
So, a punter sitting next to a tennis court in Melbourne using time advantage at 40-30 in a set decider is banned while a bookmaker accepting a trade while knowing that a goal has already been scored opposite to the bet being placed simply puts the money into his virtual satchel.
And, of course, no action is taken.
Temporal market distortions to the benefit of a financial elite are never a problem.
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Dark Pools Produce Black Swans; Black Pools Produce Black Holes
The Economist: "The drive to downsize the state was born of the belief that the market is a more efficient decision-maker. Pandemics challenge this"
Incipit parodia...
There is a Russian saying - another's soul is a dark pool...
The infrastructure of financial markets is an inverted underground pyramid, which would seem apt for such a pernicious Ponzi scheme.
Firstly, we are presented with the public markets with their tenuous links to reality but then there are the dark pools and, most importantly, deeper still the even darker pools (black pools?).
All investment banks operate their own proprietary dark pool out of sight of regulatory bodies and non-insider traders.
This is dodgy enough.
But these separate pools then conglomerate and trade off one another in even darker pools which effectively are the High Stakes Poker Tables that determine every hyperreality.
And who can blame an antisocial corporate body for behaving in such a psychopathic manner?
Would one rather place one's trade secretly and anonymously in non-regulated underground markets and earn the kudos of the brokerage (plus rewards) while gaming the release of this information to the public markets or would one prefer going to the public markets, dealing with the Commitment of Traders Reports etc and with the associated risks of all sorts of upsets from the loss of input price to getting cornered?
As Noam Chomsky says, we are dealing with "cognitive regulatory capture" by the banks, shadow markets and exchanges.
The Economist: "The main worry is that central banks are repeating the same mistake they have made for the last 25 years. They have intervened to support asset prices by cutting rates whenever markets faltered. This encouraged speculators to borrow money to buy assets, inflating one bubble after another. Ongoing quantitative easing and negative interest rates are just the logical endpoint of this process where central banks are cutting out the middleman and buying assets directly while savers are punished for holding cash.
"In the long run, however, asset values are constrained by the growth rate of the economy. Any attempt to maintain them artificially will either end in failure or will be successful only by inflating other prices until they come in line."
During the Spring 2020 first peak of the covid-19 pandemic, France, Spain and Italy placed restrictions on short-selling turning the markets into one-way-bet only to the detriment of market efficiency and realistic pricing.
Feed the Ponzi was the cry!
Phillip Stevens: "There are a couple of things to say about Britain's banks. They still pose a serious threat to the nation's long term stability and prosperity. They rely for their profits - for the huge bonuses paid to senior staff - on the fact that taxpayers are underwriting the risks. Thus public subsidy is turned into private profit."
Additionally, the competitive nature of neo-liberal banking causes structural deficiencies on the road to anti-competitive monopolies or, if we are lucky, duopolies or cartels.
In Australia, meanwhile, the Big Four banks are forbidden by bipartisan agreement to take each other over.
John Grimond: "That meant they [the banks] had no incentive to pump up their share price or earnings through dealing in dubious products."
Psychopathic short-termism pervades all aspects of this system.
Take outsourcing...
The fundamental stupidity of the globalising firms utilising outsourcing, offshoring and other psycho-fads was that by removing skilled employees, supply bases and infrastructure, distribution networks and sourcing plants from their home country, they had absolutely nothing to return to once the inevitable wage inflation took off in the outsourced territories followed by trading wars and a return to national self-sufficiency as the limits of globalisation were eventually realised.
They destroyed, in an act of selfish greed, in order to optimise short term returns to their shareholders.
Strategic this was not.
Through leaving externalities out of their system, the Friedmanists produce successions of Black Swan events - statistically unlikely eruptions in the system caused by chaos and stuff.
Naseem Taleb summed up the 2007/08 financial crisis (even if the imbecility of his concept of Anti-Fragility is just another ruse to continue with a system that has nowhere left to turn) - super-systemic risk out-quantums evolutionary shock absorption any day of the week.
His within-system solution is to have maluses as well as bonuses to prevent traders and executives gaming the system.
A deconstruction of the entire farcical edifice would, of course be, preferable.
But let us return to the pre-hypothesis of Anti-Fragility.
Being human, all of our market constructs share structural similarities - currency markets, the insurance industry, options and futures, bookmaking, derivatives - effectively a hierarchy of psychopathic matrices that only vary to the degree that they are willing to sell their own grandmother.
Taleb's attempt at deep thought is simply blinkered.
For sure, all systems are in a state of constant flux and benefit from the shocks and new templates that roller-coaster along their evolutionary paths.
Temporary equilibrium states are a conglomeration of these instabilities.
But this does not justify pushing aspects like man-made climate change to the limits as there is another level to evolutionary progress - a quantum one.
For the sake of the argument, look at football betting markets in-running.
As the action unfolds in front of our eyes and the roles of the participants become clear, the state of equilibrium is repeatedly disturbed by micro-events on the field of play.
As these motivational and manipulated inputs progress, there is a build up to a completely different quantum reality - the change from a 0-0 scoreline to 1-0.
Once the goal has been scored, the anti-fragility continues but at an entirely new level.
So it is with climate change - Taleb needs to get holistically real!
Living in a world of state-based economic systems, it should not be surprising that statist structures mimic the dark pool / black pool template.
Global leaders speak of the need for "secret, dark debates in economic policy making."
Ah! Democracy...
Jack Rasmus: "Malthus may turn out to be right, but with broader implications than he may have imagined."
The degree of simulation is surreal - we are experiencing "the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal" according to Baudrillard.
In 'The Perfect Crime' he goes further: "The only suspense that remains is that of knowing how far the world can derealise itself before succumbing to its reality deficit or, conversely, how far it can hyperrealise itself before succumbing to an excess of reality (the point when, having become perfectly real, truer than true, it will fall into the clutches of total simulation)."
Meanwhile Slavoj Zizek foresees a time when "money will finally become a purely virtual form of reference, no longer materialised in any particular object."
Free market capitalism, in its psychopathic short-termist greed, has lost this plot big style...
By 2020, 12% of financial market activity is located in these private dark pool environments.
In football the percentage is considerably higher.
These constructs are the future of financial markets.
These structures are highly regressive.
There are so many loopholes in dark pools that the fabric of pseudo-regulation crumbles to pieces - there is not enough 'solidity' to allow the holes to be looped!
But, insider trading opportunities are surely the most pernicious aspect.
Company officers are being allowed a massive perk here - the ability to privately back or lay their company (or other companies in which they hold directorships or primary level inside information) without such positioning being reported to any regulatory body nor, obviously, any public place.
This creates a very tilted marketplace to the benefit of the elite and the disadvantage of everybody else, including the lower tiers of financial capitalism.
By taking advantage of private markets to trade their information, insiders are severely hampering price transparency.
Without price transparency, free market capitalism works even less well than is already the case.
So, the global economic well-being deteriorates just to allow the Chosen Few to trade at yet another of the poker tables underpinning our existences.
Of course, eventually, the private trading reaches the public space, but only after it has visited numerous other private spaces on the way.
Repeated cloned trading by brokers announces the neohyperreality to the public markets so that the massed middle classes are eventually able to add such data to their software and charts.
In a Depression, the temporal edge is the most important.
Markets are volatile in Depressions.
Trading this volatility is easy money.
Gaining solid price enhances these profits.
The only question remaining is surely this.
Will this Depression be the Even Greater Depression or the Permanent Depression?
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Maura Dooley:
Snow flies fierce across the land
as cardboard doors unfold,
a star shines clear on bitterness,
on lack and want and cold.
An old tale tells of spite's true cost
how greed's full rhyme is need.
The City's rime is piss and frost,
icesharp in word and deed.
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© 2023 Football is Fixed
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