On Monday 19 December 2011, China commenced the trials of about 60 players, referees and officials over allegations of corruption and match-fixing, after a crackdown that began in January 2010 (see above video). Besides match-fixing for gambling syndicates linked (inevitably) with organised crime in East Asia, the trials cover more petty forms of corruption such as the sale of positions in the Chinese men’s national soccer team, which has gone from qualifying for the World Cup in 2002 and making the final of the Asian Cup in 2004 to not qualifying for any World Cup since then. To put this in perspective, North Korea qualified last time and China did not.
The Chinese trials raise questions regarding the issue of match-fixing in sport worldwide (similar scandals have been uncovered in soccer in Greece and Italy recently, and in cricket in Pakistan) and also as to the wider issue of corruption and lack of transparency in what is rapidly becoming the world’s most powerful nation.
China has for many years pursued sporting triumphs for nationalistic purposes. One only has to witness the zeal and money it has put into its Olympics teams (and, of course, into hosting the Olympics in 2008) to see China’s desire to prove it can do anything it turns its collective mind to at least as well as the West. The world’s most widely played game and biggest sporting event, the World Cup, were a natural target for Chinese ambition.
As mentioned above, in the early 2000s this seemed to be working. Then in 2004 the Chinese Football Association (a government entity, of course) decided to eliminate the old “Jia A” league which was plagued by match-fixing and not watched even by the locals (though the major European leagues rated very highly on TV) and created the new Chinese Super League organised along the lines of the English Premier League, with loads of TV coverage on state-run TV channels and plenty of funding. Not only would China’s national team challenge, it would have a respected domestic league too.
Sadly for China, it has become extremely apparent that the Chinese Super League has been corrupt since the beginning and that the combination of loads of money with an endemic tendency to shove problems under the carpet was a very bad one. Everyone from poorly-paid referees to three vice-presidents of the Chinese Football Association seems to have had their noses firmly in the trough. The underperforming national team was “for sale”, with the corruption so established that there were set levels of bribes to get into the squad, to get on the field as a substitute or to be in the starting XI for a game. Even exhibition games against foreign teams like Manchester United and Sydney FC were fixed.
Of note is the fact that rumours were rife in the football community for years, but arrests were only finally made in January 2010, and the cases are only now coming to trial. The trials are closed to the public and we have only the word of Chinese state-run media as to what is being admitted or proved. One can probably assume that we will not hear the most embarrassing revelations, or how high up in the Communist Party the corruption really ran, exactly the culture of cover-ups and a lack of transparency that helped the corruption become so widespread in the first place….
What steps the Chinese authorities will take to remove the conditions which made bribe-taking so attractive and whistle-blowing so unattractive remains to be seen. The Chinese Football Association’s official statement on the matter is that “Corruption exposed flaws in the administrative system and imperfections in the supervision mechanism” , which is completely true while giving away nothing about what the CFA intends to do about those flaws and imperfections.
It also remains to be seen whether it dawns on the Chinese authorities that the behaviours they have inadvertently encouraged in soccer administration are writ large across China, and the fixes they put in place may have wider application. It would be a brave man or woman who was willing to assume that recent Chinese trade scandals like tainted baby milk and lead-painted toys , all facilitated by bribed officials, are not just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
This is, of course, not by any means only a Chinese problem. Turkey, Greece and Italy have all had recent match-fixing problems in soccer. Pakistan has recently jailed three cricket players for match-fixing (often not involving the fixing of entire matches, but rather fixing “spot betting” markets such as what will happen on a particular ball, which is both easier to do and reduces the chances of detection). In South East Asia, match-fixing is often rumoured to be endemic due to the prevalence of gambling even on high school sport . As with the Chinese, it will take something embarrassing to force governments there to do something about it, and also as with China it can be taken as a warning sign of a permissive attitude to corruption in general that goes far beyond sports.
Investigative reporter Declan Hill wrote a book published in 2008 called “The Fix” which describes in great detail how match-fixing happens and the sorts of organisations involved. To research his book, Hill actually went undercover in a match-fixing organisation and made tapes of the participants, allowing him to prove beyond reasonable doubt exactly how the syndicates operate. “The Fix” was cited by the prosecutor overseeing the recent Greek match-fixing arrests, Ms Popi Papandreou, as her guide in a 10-month investigation that led to the arrest of 68 soccer officials in Greece.
Hill has proposed Ten Commandments of Anti-Corruption. While aimed at the specific issue of corruption in sport, it doesn’t take a genius to realise how the issues Hill deals with- from job security to whistle-blower protection to education to incentives for doing the right thing- can be applied well beyond soccer, whether in China or elsewhere. Well worth a read.
Perhaps professional wrestling will get the last laugh. At least Vince McMahon is honest that his show is scripted
