By Andrew Warshaw
December 9 – FIFA’s head of security believes certain games at this year’s Gold Cup may have been rigged in the latest match-fixing controversy to hit world football.
Chris Eaton says irregular betting patterns at the tournament in June did not go unnoticed at FIFA headquarters in Zurich.
Eaton told Sports Illustrated’s website: “There has been information that some matches in the Gold Cup were manipulated.
“We worked with CONCACAF at the time and CONCACAF have been very interested in following up any information that can be revealed in the future on that.”
Eaton has been in New York this week assisting the FBI and CONCACAF with various footballing matters.
The Gold Cup, the showpiece events of the CONCACAF calendar, featured several high-scoring games.
Focus fell especially on Grenada which lost three matches by a combined 15-1 score and Cuba who were outscored 16-1.
Speaking to reporters before the June 25 final, outgoing CONCACAF general secretary Chuck Blazer admitted that certain matches had allegedly been at risk.
“Early on we were aware of comments made by a party in Europe, who believed that certain games were potentially targets in this competition,” he said.
“We tracked those [games], we found that there were no significant anomalies and when we analysed the games overall, found that they were pretty consistent with both history, as far as the results, and we didn’t find any unusual patterns.
“There was nothing that was out of sync with what reasonable expectations would have been.
“We had no reason to find that there was anything of greater concern.”
This year’s Gold Cup drew a record attendance of 601,702, including 93,420 at the Rose Bowl for Mexico’s 4-2 win over the Unitred States in the final.
Eaton worked for 12 years at Interpol before becoming FIFA’s head of security.
He has visited nearly 40 countries in the past year while FIFA has allocated $20 million (£13 million/€15 million) towards working with Interpol as well as setting up full-time investigative offices in Kuala Lumpur, Jordan and Colombia.
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