Corrupt football clubs and officials still scoring own goals
After the English Football Association Cup Final in January
1884 between Preston North End and the London side Upton Park, it was revealed
that Preston was breaking the rules by paying its players and so their manager
was duly expelled from the annual competition.
In 1885, the English FA decided to make it permissible for a
club to pay players, but only if they were born or had lived for at least two
years within a six-mile radius of the club’s ground.
In 1901, the same FA imposed a maximum weekly wage of £4 per
player in even the top football clubs.
Manchester City was involved in a scandal at the climax of
the 1904-5 season when it needed to beat Aston Villa to top the First Division.
Aston Villa won 3-1, meaning Manchester City finished two points behind
Newcastle United in the championship.
Aston Villa’s captain said that one of Manchester’s star
players had offered him a £10 bribe to lose the game. The Manchester player was
found guilty, fined and banned from playing for 18 months. As the club refused
to help him financially, the Manchester player divulged publicly that his club
had been paying players over the £4 a week legal limit. The outrage resulted in
the dismissal or suspension of nine senior officials and a ban on 17 players
for ever playing for the club again.
Since those harsh punishments more than a century ago,
corruption has spread throughout the footballing world, including Portugal, and
it has exploded into a quagmire of criminal activities involving vast amounts
of money.
Top Portuguese clubs have yet again been making headline
news for the wrong reasons. Public prosecution officials last week made
searches in premises closely associated with FC Porto and its chief executive,
Jorge Nuno Pinto da Costa. Among other things, they are investigating the
payment of €9 million to two agents as part of the €50 million transfer deal
for a Brazilian player from Porto to Real Madrid in 2019. The investigation is
looking into suspected tax fraud, swindling, abuse of trust and money
laundering connected with the transfer of players.
Investigators have long taken an interest in Pinto da Costa.
In the so-called Golden Whistle scandal in 2004 and for several years after
that, he was suspected of corrupting or attempting to corrupt match referees.
In 2008, the Portuguese Professional League suspended him for two years,
relegated FC Porto and imposed a fine of €150,000. Lisbon’s Boavista FC was
also relegated and fined €180,000.
‘Golden Whistle’ phone taps on Pinto da Costa conspiring in
2010 to offer not only cash but prostitutes to referees were leaked and
published on YouTube, but not accepted as proof of wrong-doing by the courts.
The accusations, however, backed up opinions that he was not only one of the
most successful executives in Portuguese football but also one of the most
corrupt.
Many other Portuguese football officials are said to have
been involved in various kinds of deep-seated corruption, none more so than
Luís Filipe Vieira, president of Lisbon’s Benfica, the most popular of all
football clubs in Portugal and FC Porto’s biggest rival. He too has long been
suspected of tax fraud and money laundering on a grand scale. He is said to
have been helped because he is on friendly terms with highly influential
Benfica fans, including judges and leading politicians.
Vieira was detained and placed under house arrest in July
this year while investigations continued into suspected tax fraud, money
laundering and other crimes involving more than €100 million “that may have
caused considerable damage to the state and several companies”, according to
Portugal’s Central Department of Investigation and Criminal Action.
Vieira, who ran Benfica for 18 years, resigned and a court
ordered him to hand over his passport and allowed him 20 days to pay bail of €3
million. Among three other people detained and released on bail was Vieira’s
son, Tiago.
The Portuguese whistle-blower, Rui Pinto, who grew up as an
FC Porto fan, gathered millions of confidential documents and 3.4 terabytes of
information that exposed corruption on a truly massive scale, not only in
Portugal but across Europe and beyond. Among other things, the data indicated
the role of offshore tax havens for huge transfer deals and club investments
that were poorly policed.
Rui Pinto’s football leaks fed to a network of investigative
journalists resulted in him being arrested, extradited from Hungary and
eventually brought before the Lisbon Central Criminal Court to face scores of
charges related to hacking.
But the cat was out of the bag. Judicial inquiries were
launched in France, Spain, Belgium and Switzerland. Major clubs, transfer
agents and top players were implicated. Among the latter was the Portuguese
international superstar, Cristiano Ronaldo, who ended up in 2019 agreeing to
pay €18.8 million in Spain for tax evasion.
World football’s governing body, FIFA, has been steeped in
corrupt practices dating back at least two decades, with evidence of everything
from ticket fiddling and awarding dodgy media contracts to vote rigging in
Qatar’s bid to host the 2022 World Cup.
FIFA has been in the spotlight again very recently as its
former president, Sepp Blatter, ousted in an extraordinary fraud scandal in
2015, has now been indicted on fraud, criminal mismanagement and forgery
charges in Switzerland for arranging a secret €2 million payment in 2011. Also
charged is Michel Platini, who allegedly received the payment when he was the
head of the much-blighted European football union, UEFA.
On and on it goes … Manchester City FC, which was up to
those tricks more than a century ago, was last year banned by UEFA from
competitions for two years and fined €30 million, but this decision was
overturned on appeal because its alleged corruption activity dated back more
than the five-year statute of limitation. UEFA was left looking more shame-faced
than Man City.
The latest news connected with corruption is that the
British government has just endorsed in principle the setting up of an
independent regulator for English football. Not a bad idea for other countries
to consider, but, like the coronavirus pandemic, vile corruption in the world
of football is not likely to go away any time soon.
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