Last week, the Sports Rights Owners Coalition—an umbrella organization for top-level institutions in several sports, including football—met with EU representatives in Brussels to discuss a report currently being prepared in the European Parliament on the explosion of online gambling. What was emphasized in the meeting is a matter of dispute: the sports organizations are saying one thing, and the gambling organizations are saying something else, and the conflict provides an insight into the bizarre conglomeration of interests that governs professional sport in the 21st century.
According to the sports organizations represented by the SROC (which includes both FIFA and UEFA), the meeting focused on protecting the integrity of competition against the impetus to corruption represented by online gambling, which provides both a powerful incentive for match-fixing and a jurisdiction-blurring virtuality that makes basic evidence-gathering, much less prosecution, enormously difficult in cases where corruption appears to have occurred.
In other words, the sports heads say, the increasingly vast sums of money controlled by internet bookmakers have created a correspondingly increasing danger that players, coaches, referees, or other football officials will agree to throw matches as a result of bribery or intimidation. At the same time, when the only evidence of a crooked match in East Anglia is a suspicious fluctuation on an Asia-based gambling website that serves clients throughout the world, the anonymity of the internet as well as the sheer multiplicity of legal frameworks makes it almost impossible to prove, trace, or punish the crime. This is exactly the problem encountered, for instance, by the FA in their probe into suspected match-fixing in the Norwich-Derby match last month, which they’ve recently called off as a result of the difficulty of procuring information from Asian bookmakers.
The sports organizations’ emphasis on the integrity of competition has led to many reports suggesting that the SROC (which, in addition to football, includes other sports ranging from snooker to horse-racing) is hostile to online gambling and seeking to restrain it. The Telegraph, for instance, ran a report today, sourced to an unnamed “adviser to the British National Governing Bodies of Sport,” asserting that the meeting in Brussels was the first step to creating a global anti-corruption agency “which will be able to use state powers of investigation, force strict licensing on bookmakers and, ultimately, have the power to exclude nations that did not comply from major tournaments such as the World Cup.”
The online gambling industry has a very different interpretation of the SROC’s interest in its business. According to the bookmakers, the heads of global sport are less interested in protecting the ideal of competition than they are in helping themselves to a share of the bookmakers’ profits. This is because, in addition to asking for help fighting the corruption of sports betting, the sports organizations are simultaneously demanding a “fair financial return” from it. In plain language, they want a share of the gambling proceeds in return for the fact that sports betting depends on their “products” for its existence. In rather less plain language, here’s what UEFA has to say:
[A]s sports competition organisers own the rights to their events, legislative initiatives should confirm that commercial exploitation through sports betting can only be undertaken with their consent and with a fair financial return to the sports movement for reinvestment in sports development initiatives. According to the solidarity principle between professional and amateur sport, the whole sports movement would benefit from this additional funding.
So the sports heads want a piece of the gambling money, but only so they can reinvest it in “sports development initiatives,” which, they twistily almost-say, could potentially include some sort of return for amateur athletics. Fine…but someone help me with the logic of this position. Because it looks to me like the SROC is saying:
(1) Limited access to gambling money at a low level makes sports corrupt.
(2) Therefore, we need much greater access to gambling money at a much higher level.
And I’m not sure I follow that. If preserving the integrity of competition is your primary goal, isn’t there as great a conflict of interest in sports organizations taking a legitimate share of gambling profits as there is in players potentially take an illegitimate share of gambling profits? Obviously the Premier League wouldn’t have the same motivation to fix matches as a goalkeeper in the Championship. But wouldn’t they have a motivation to fix their league to benefit the online gambling industry? I don’t want to spell out a lot of concrete disaster scenarios, but do we really want what’s good for online bookmakers to be what’s good for the organizations that regulate professional sports? Isn’t there a basic contradiction in the sports heads’ implying that they want to rein in online gambling and profit from its expansion at the same time?
In any case, the SROC is asking that a new set of gambling regulations currently being devised in France reflect their ideas and be taken as a best-practices model for other countries. We’ll see whether that happens and what the EU report finally recommends. In the meantime, it’s a telling state of affairs for contemporary sport that its governing bodies are treating corruption-fighting as a revenue stream, that the media is passing along their claims at face value, and that the only people calling them on it are the agents of corruption themselves.
Read More: Corruption, FIFA, UEFA
by Brian Phillips · December 7, 2008
Grandees in “Keep it Away from the Plebes” shock.
There is an ineluctable odour of hypocrisy around the entire subject, and this initiative in particular, but I’m not sure that it’s quite as bad as a stench as you make out.
Some context may be useful. Unlike their North American counterparts, the vast majority of European sports administrators have always both recognised the reality of sports gambling and tried to make money off of it. In the vast majority of continental cases, they did this in connection with the government of the day, which usually operated a rather extensive state-owned betting monopoly that covered everything from lotteries to horse and dog racing to sports betting. As a result, the bizarre to Americans fact that the Totocalcio football prediction bets (which were once as integral to Italian society as the familial Sunday lunch) is run by the Italian National Olympic Committee (which is in turn a governmental-entity) is not particularly noteworthy to Europeans (who would have seen similar setups with the Quinella in Spain, Loto Sportif in France, etc.). The industry in the UK was private, but that was the exception rather than the rule (and a reflection of the very long tradition of private bookmakers in the UK).
This kind of “common ownership” allowed for a relatively simple transfer of some of the betting profits to the sports themselves, while in England the same thing happened through a combination of taxes and the somewhat bizarre idea that the Football League fixtures are subject to copyright, and can only be used or reproduced by purchasing a right to do so from the League.
The fact that the state ran sports gambling of course made it somewhat difficult for them to at the same time make it completely illegal, and the fact that the game benefited from it financially made it clear that the fundamentalist bans on the practice common in North America were (and are) pretty much unheard of in Europe (fixing matches is both illegal and contrary to sporting rules, but betting on other sports, other teams or on your own team to win generally is not).
The internet has done a great deal to upset this rather cozy arrangement, by making the driving the final stake into the economic feasibility of maintaining the monopolies (which were already under legal attack) while at the same time breaking the link with government funding of sport and/or the tax system (the website operations of established UK “turf accountants” are virtually all offshore).
The result has been scrambling all over Europe, from the various bans on advertising online sites (you may recall bwin-sponsored teams appearing sponsorless in UEFA matches played in France and certain German Laender), to attempts to block access (Italians often need to use proxy servers to access sites that aren’t “approved” by the relevant state authority), to you can’t beat them join them efforts (the Italian state betting company recently opened a heavily-promoted internet site of its own).
SROC’s efforts are just the latest in this series of attempts to turn back the tide, and indicate the relevant governments’ realisation that individual efforts are doomed to failure.
Ursus, thanks for this invaluable context. A couple of things jump out at me:
(1) The kind of government involvement in the transfer of betting profits to sports organizations is viable only if it includes strict measures to protect the integrity of competition and remove the incentive for match-fixing. As you suggest, it’s easier to imagine how those measures might work when betting is relatively local and supervisable than when it’s global and anonymous. It’s far easier, for me at least, to imagine the EU brokering some form of payment from bookmakers to sports leagues than to imagine the “global anti-corruption bureau with state investigative powers and the authority to ban countries from the World Cup” taking shape any time soon. And I suspect that the SROC would be perfectly happy to accept those payments even if they were de-coupled from the anti-corruption measures they want. That, to my mind, would materially increase the potential for corruption, and that’s the precise nature of the hypocrisy I’m savoring here.
(2) I wonder to what extent gambling was seen as an explosive growth industry during the “cozy” period you describe. Part of the problem now seems to be that the internet has lifted the ceiling from the aspirations of the bookmakers and no one knows how far it’s going to go. If that’s the case, then giving sports leagues a financial motive to encourage that giddy rise seems to ally them to gambling in a way that wasn’t quite the case in the heyday of Totocalcio. If (a) gambling is taking off and (b) the leagues are making money from it even though (c) those stringent anti-corruption iniatives are still tied up in deliberation, then don’t the leagues start to care less, over time, about the integrity of competiton, or at least to start thinking about it the way a casino thinks about the integrity of the roulette wheel?
That may be a somewhat far-fatched state of affairs—and I’m certainly not reflexively anti-gambling. It’s just that I suspect that we would mind that outcome more than the leagues themselves would mind it.
1) the “global anti-corruption bureau” is a spin-driven chimera. It would be extremely impossible to implement on anything like a world wide without violating applicable privacy laws, not to mention the Sissiphyian tasks of getting the various bodies that currently have jurisdiction to agree to cooperate.
Perhaps even more importantly, it isn’t really necessary. Betfair has itself alterted the relevant authorities to virtually all of the most recent betting scandals and any betting site that isn’t being operated for the benefit of fixers has an intrinsic need to do what it can to avoid fixing, given that the direct economic victims are its customers (and, if they haven’t balanced their book, themselves).
2) Gambling was anything but an explosive growth industry in the heyday of totocalcio. It was a utility; you stopped at the bar to fill out a schedina with your morning capuccino or afternoon espresso, or at the tobacconist when you picked up your pack of cigarettes. The landscape certainly has changed, but I tend to think that the real threat isn’t just the growth of sites, but rather the large scale popularisation of bets that don’t impact results.
Spread betting on stuff like time of the first corner, or first goal kick, or first foul in the second half allows a player to “fix” a result that is meaningful in betting terms (and potentially lucrative if the market is large enough) without betraying his teammates. And those bets are exactly the type of thing that appeals to those who simply crave continuous “action”. Both the loss of that taboo effect and the increasing popularity of in-game bets are already being felt in cricket (particularly on the subcontinent), and it would be naive to think that the same is not happening in football.