OT: FIFA looking in to possible match fixing
It's been a slow day on the board.
They are looking into the recent Argentina v Nigeria friendly and a few of the Gold Cup matches.
Here's the interesting part:
Der Spiegel reported Saturday that three unidentified CONCACAF Gold Cup matches are under scrutiny because of suspicious betting patterns in Asia. The bets were made on high-scoring games, and two of the matches ended 5-0, with the other finishing 4-0.
Mexico beat El Salvador and Cuba 5-0 while Costa Rica also beat Cuba by that score. Two games, Jamaica and Guatemala's wins against Grenada, finished 4-0.
It'll be interesting to see how this ends up especially with Mexico and the banned substances incident. Some of these Gold Cup teams are just bad, so I don't think some of these score lines are unusual.
I also think FIFA investigating shady activity is laughable.
http://espn.go.com/sports/soccer/news/_/id/6676581/fifa-looking-gold-cu…
It's the inexplicable that charms us about sport, but if it's too inexplicable, we think fixing must have been involved. "Fix" is the default reason used to make sense of poor performances of home teams or officials in cities all over the world.
the world of soccer lately, there's plenty of evidence of corruption. Whether it extends to the matches in question. . . ?
But seriously, how could Dempsey miss that goal against Guadalupe?
That Spiegel article has some background on recent match fixing incidents, and some of them certainly seem to go far beyond the usual fans' grumbling about poor performances: Bahrain hosted a match against Togo that turned out to be against eleven amateurs dressed in Togolese uniforms. Several other matches are described with scorelines that seem to have been very heavily influenced by the match official (seven goals, all penalties, for example) and with some odd similarities:
- the matches all had the same referee
- the matches were all organized by a company in Singapore that has since turned off its webpage and disappeared from official Singaporean registries
- there was unusually heavy betting activity on the matches
There's a lot of this stuff going on lately--big scandals in Italy, Germany and South Korea alongside the usual corruption in Bulgaria and the like--and I can see why they'd want to investigate whenever they see an unusual concentration of betting activity. And I can see why the betting parlors would want to cooperate.
http://www.spiegel.de/sport/fussball/0,1518,769127,00.html
http://www.spiegel.de/sport/fussball/0,1518,718539,00.html
a candidate for FIFA president quit due to bribing, the Quatar World Cup was bought, the worst refereeing in any soccer match happens during the world cup yet those refs are inited back the next time, the Calciopoli scandal happened for virtually every team in Italy ( you must assume they bribed Jorge Larrionda too) and the list goes on and on that match fixing is very much a reality as well.
If you think the worst officiating happens at the World Cup, then you don't watch a lot of soccer.
When every play is scrutinized by the largest television audiences in the world for any sport, people will find mistakes.
Being a soccer referee is tough. The offsides call is one of the hardest in all sports to make correctly.
Think of how tough it can be at times to look at both a baseball player's glove catching a ball while at the same time looking at the runner's feet to see if he was safe before the ball was caught.
Same deal when you are looking in football at a receiver gaining possession of the ball and landing with two feet in bounds. Difficult to look at both at the same time but at least you have replay to back you up now.
Then go to soccer. Offsides is called if an offensive player is behind the last defender before the pass to them is made. Sometimes this pass can come from 20-30 feet away so a linesman is supposed to somehow look at when the ball is kicked and where the offensive player was at that time which can sometimes be impossible (the difference being in baseball and football the examples I gave were within a couple feet of vision).
When goals are at a premium and there is no replay the soccer referees mistakes are even more glaring than in other sports.
Anyways, back to the OP, I don't know if anything illegal was going on but really when it's Cuba I mean 4-0 5-0 isn't out of the ordinary.
...but the ideal match fix would be one where nothing out of the ordinary seems to happen and no questions are ever asked. That's presumably why they're focusing on betting patterns.