By Matt Scott
April 30 – Greek football has been in the grip of a match-fixing and corruption culture for 20 years, a special Insideworldfootball investigation has found. But, as the stakes have risen with the increasing riches available in football, in recent seasons the system of match manipulation has reached breaking point.
The Greek courts are pursuing an investigation into allegations of organised criminality that has penetrated the game, with more than two dozen senior Hellenic Football Federation [HFF] and club officials charged in recent days. There are several serious charges the officials are facing. One, that of a membership of a ‘criminal organisation’, carries a prison sentence of up to 10 years.
Now, after conducting a series of exclusive interviews with key figures from across football in Greece, Insideworldfootball can reveal how:
· Illegal betting brings a slew of dishonest results
· Referees are routinely selected according to their willingness to fix matches
· Hellenic Football Federation elections are rigged to appoint favourable candidates
· The status quo is maintained by threats, intimidation and violence
The situation has grown so bad that the Syriza government in Greece has drawn up legislation to push through reform of the HFF. That move has met with resistance from UEFA and FIFA, whose statutes ban government interference in the administration of football.
But it is very clear that however it arrives, reform of Greek football is desperately needed. In the first part of our exclusive two-part series, we speak to a number of club owners and former officials who are dismayed at what they all describe as ‘The System’, the name given to describe a shadowy cartel that everyone on the outside looking in believes has been running the game for its own ends.
Panathinaikos’s owner, Yiannis Alafouzos, described it to me thus: “The System, today it’s a group of people who are either high-ranking employees or officials of the HFF. Together with one specific team and its owner [they] are controlling and conducting which teams go up or go down, disciplinary decisions, who will be punished, who will be prosecuted by the football authorities, which referee will be appointed to a game. All this is done for profit financially and football success or getting a team relegated so a friendly team can come up.
“In addition to this there is illegal betting. We have many cases of illegal betting that have been investigated, with a very small minority where anything has been done about them. In addition to that is the money given through Super-League TV rights, which is the carrot to make smaller teams participate in the cartel. Then they exchange players between themselves on loan.
“They fix games to relegate certain clubs and save others, and for betting purposes. Refereeing plays an important role in going after their enemies, going after the teams who are not in The System or for favouring a team in The System.”
Alafouzos is far from a lone voice. Evangelos Aslanidis, a medical doctor and the chief executive of Panathinaikos’s city rival AEK Athens, corroborated his view. “I speak as a doctor and Greek football was, not many years ago, so healthy,” he told me. “Then, 15 years ago, when the money in football grew a lot, this was a period where we had a deterioriation of the health of Greek football.
“Betting on football with a lot of money made this situation worse. In the beginning the people who were around football wanted to have an interest in Greek public institutions and political interests etc. But, from the moment Greece becomes more and more poor, the people who came around Greek football were people around betting.
“This was the deterioration of the system because it was not one or two or three people. It’s very organised in Greek football. This System means that even before the play has started you know what will happen at the end of the final act: shamelessly and without any caution; none at all. Year after year The System grows more and more strong. It’s a cancer metastasising.”
‘The corruption starts with the Football Federation itself’
Throughout his career Lawrie Sanchez has made a habit of taking on the biggest reputations in the game and winning. As a player he scored the only goal in the famous Wimbledon team’s 1-0 defeat of Liverpool in the 1988 FA Cup final. As a manager, he led Northern Ireland to victory in a FIFA World Cup qualifier against England at Windsor Park, the first win in 19 games between the two teams. Four years previously he had guided Wycombe Wanderers, then a mid-table fourth-tier side, to the FA Cup semi-final.
When he joined Apollon Smyrni in the Greek Super League as manager in mid-November of last season they were in the bottom three but he still thought he had a chance of keeping them up. However, as he told the BBC’s World Football Podcast, even he was unable to upset the odds there. “Every conversation around the dinner table about football ultimately ended up with, ‘That player fixed that game or this player fixed this game,'” he told the BBC’s Alan Green. “I used to sit there open mouthed and say that can’t be the case, that can’t be right. But everybody – everybody – that’s all they spoke about.”
Sanchez told Green a story about how Apollon’s fall from the top flight was sealed when one of their relegation rivals scored a crushing victory against a mid-table team before putting together a still-more-surprising sequence of results to finish the season. “What I didn’t factor in was that teams would have unbelievable runs that were far in excess of their ability and far in excess of what any manager could do,” he added.
“You tend to think, ‘There’s something really strange about this result.’ And then when the journalists pick up on it and say, ‘This result disgraces Greek football,’ you’re thinking that perhaps there is something that you’re not part of that is the bigger picture.”
The man who hired Sanchez had rescued Apollon from bankruptcy in the fourth tier of Greek football, bankrolling their rise during three promotions in four years, which culminated in their return to the Super League in 2012-13. Yet Stamatis Vellis had not been prepared for what he would encounter in the top division.
When the Greek public prosecutors approached him to assist in their investigation into corruption in football, he was happy to testify. He was also keen to explain to me how bad things have become in Greek football. “I am always only speaking of my personal opinion as you can understand – it is my view,” he told Insideworldfootball. “Whatever I had to say to the State prosecuting authorities, I have said it in private.
“But also it is the general view, and not just my own, I strongly believe it is of the greatest majority of people who are involved in football and of the fans, regardless of which team they support, that the football situation here in Greece is extremely rotten and corrupt.
“The corruption starts with the [Hellenic] Football Federation itself. Because if you have a Federation which has ethics and wants really to support and promote football, then no matter how dirty a team owner or president or manager is, he won’t find the space or the opportunity to do whatever [crime] it is that he wants to do.
“The problem is that the door is open and a very big part of the Federation, which even includes most of the Board members and even those who award the sports-disciplinary penalties, are involved in this ‘criminal organisation’ which is currently under investigation.”
Vellis points to how several key figures from the Federation and League, including disciplinary-tribunal judges and board members have in recent days been banned by public prosecutors from having any involvement in football until after the cases against them are heard.
The former Apollon owner also believes several Super League clubs’ annual accounts betray evidence of financial foul play. “I put a lot of money, several millions of euros, in to the team, but I was happy that I brought it back to the top level,” Vellis told me. “And here rises yet another question: When I look at the financial statements of other teams I notice that almost no other team has a share capital equal to mine.
“And my football company was far younger in age than most of them. So I wonder, how do these teams support themselves with so little share capital? We all know that income from tickets is almost non-existent, sponsoring is once again almost non-existent – whatever there is, it is available only for the few top teams – and that TV money is not enough to cover all the budget expenses. So how do they support the team, if they do not put [in] money of their own? Unanswered question.”
Alafouzos, the Panathinaikos owner, echoes Vellis’s concerns over the financial health of Super League clubs. “Lots of clubs owe €2 million or €3 million to the tax authorities or players,” he told me. “But there are really only three or four professional clubs. No bank lends to clubs. Two clubs dropped out of the Super League this season because of financial difficulties. In UEFA Licensing there were seven teams cut off and two that did not even participate and submit the forms. This was all because of overdue payables. This is the case at five or six clubs at least.”
It seems that, for some clubs at least, this financial distress could be a contributory reason behind the slew of fixed matches that frequently appear in Greece. UEFA’s disciplinary code indicates how match fixing is considered football’s most serious offence – it is not subject to the statute of limitations and sanctions cannot be suspended and clubs can be excluded from its competitions upon discovery even of historical incidents.
In 2013 UEFA banned Fenerbahce, Besiktas and Steaua Bucharest for failing to comply with its regulations governing match-fixing. Yet at the HFF there is an unusual barrier to successful prosecution of match-fixing offences.
“Since I’ve been involved in professional football there have been incredible scandals,” said Alafouzos. “There was one famous [Super League] game in which €6 million was bet on the game, as Sportradar showed – which is more than you get on Barcelona versus Real Madrid.”
“Every week we see alert reports from Sportradar and another company who do a similar service. These are sent to the HFF and either they do absolutely nothing about it or, now, because of the way the rules are written, no one is penalised.
“You need three footballers to be caught fixing a game to have penalties against a team. But despite the Sportradar reports there is never any provable evidence of player involvement. So they do no meaningful investigation and then dismiss the case. You can’t accuse a chairman or anyone else because there are not three players provably involved. Of course that is not the case under the UEFA disciplinary code, just the HFF.
“UEFA should be concerned about the threat of contagion [across the region]. It has to make the right noises to show it is interested in clean football. We know it is and it should be more active in participating in the cleansing process for football otherwise it is supporting this and it becomes part of the problem.”
Look out for another Insideworldfootball exclusive on the developing scandal in Greek football tomorrow
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