Kanika Datta: Betting on a great divide

The football betting scandal with its epicentre in Asia has surprised those who closely follow the business of football in one respect only. Many expected it to be much larger than the $11 million in profits and $3 million in bribes from some 680 matches that a 19-month investigation by Europol revealed. Almost everybody in the business knows matches at some level are fixed, that the money is of Asian origin – the betting business in Europe, the nerve centre of the sport, is too established for undetected large-scale crookery to reign – and that this has been going for years.
 

The question is whether officialdom in the beautiful game can do something about it. Moralists might shake their heads and attribute the malaise to the enormous sums that have poured into the game. They can be safely ignored. Sports stopped being a shamateur undertaking many decades ago and, in the case of football in particular, has been all the better for it. The big money has enriched and empowered people from the poorest echelons of European and, increasingly, African, Latin American and Asian in a manner no socialist or communist party has ever managed. It is a great equaliser too because education and socio-economic class count for much less than a lad’s raw skills with a 22 cm diameter globe of synthetic leather.

The malaise in the sport comes from the great inequalities in the administration of the game. Two Great Divides prevail, leaving the field vulnerable to the match fixers.

One is the deep pockets of club owners. Although this has made it possible for a humble factory hand to become a billionaire before he’s 30, it has also distorted the nature of the sport. Today, victory can depend as much on the ability of rich owners to shell out vast sums of money to buy the best footballers and win a league – Manchester City and Chelsea’s sudden rise in the English Premier League (EPL) courtesy their West Asian and Russian owners respectively are prominent examples.

The upshot is that the wage gap between footballers in top teams and the lowest-ranked ones is wider than the Pacific. Consider this. In January, EPL team Liverpool played an away match to Mansfield Town from the Conference National (the third rung of English football) for an FA Cup fixture. Not only did 93 league places divide the two teams, Mansfield’s captain said his annual mortgage was less than the weekly salary of Liverpool’s Uruguayan striker Luis Suarez.

He probably wasn’t joking: Mr Suarez earned £120,000 a week. Nobody says he doesn’t deserve these wages; he is sublimely gifted. The point is whether Liverpool, which suffers heavy losses, would have been able to pay him these wages (which is actually middling for the top European leagues) had it not been for the club’s American owner.

The huge wage differentials and the lavish lifestyles of top footballers explain why hundreds of players and club officials down the league tables connive to do a bit of “spot fixing” on the side — make bets such as the first throw-in, the first offside, the first corner and so on. Harmless? Well, given that some footballers’ throwing arm can propel the ball into the six-yard box and that an offside call can mean a goal not scored, these bets can change the course of the game, as Europol’s investigations suggest.

To be fair, UEFA, the body governing the European sport, has tried to level the playing field by introducing the Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules, proposed in 2009 and due to kick in from the 2014-15 season. Under these rules, teams that make losses will be banned from European competitions; later, fines, point deduction and other penalties will be applied.

But these rules are hedged by so many exemptions as to be practically useless. Manchester City, for instance, made a loss of £97.9 million last year. That is roughly three times the losses of £39. 4 million that the FFP rules permit clubs to make between 2011 and 2014 and provided the losses are bankrolled by the owner. Will the Sheikh Mansour-owned team be disqualified from the lucrative European championships?

There’s the catch. The club plans to wriggle through loopholes in the rules, such as deducting from these losses money spent on infrastructure. In Man City’s case, this is a £140 million stadium. Who’s paying for this? Sheikh Mansour, of course! So that’s one fair play rule out the window.

The other great divide has to do with the income clubs earn from TV rights. The EPL is the most equitable in the way it goes about this and is – relatively – scam-free. In the EPL, the broadcast fees are shared thus: 50 per cent equally between the 20 clubs irrespective of rank, 25 per cent in facility fee and 25 per cent in merit payment (linked to rank). As a result, the broadcasting ratio between top to bottom-earning clubs in the EPL is the lowest among the top leagues at 1.54 to 1. In Spain, where these payments are negotiated, the ratio is 12: 1; it’s basically Barcelona and Real Madrid versus The Rest in a tournament that’s become notorious for nudge-and-wink “suitcase deals” to fix matches. In the Italian Serie A, the ratio is 10.1 and no surprise that the league suffered a crippling match-fixing scandal in 2006. It also explains why many players are exiting clubs in Spain to the Bundesliga where the broadcasting ratio is 2:1.

This is an easy problem to solve, and it would go a long way in tamping the incentive for lesser teams to fix matches. The big question is whether football’s officialdom really wants to do so.