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.

(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.

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.