FIFA Keeps Close Eye on Match-Fixing

By Soccernet staff

FIFA has said it is monitoring World Cup games for match-fixing, with the most attention centring on the final round in the group stage.

FIFA legal director Marco Villiger said those matches presented the highest risk of being fixed, especially ones involving teams that already qualified for the second round or have been knocked out.

"We use our means to keep our focus on these matches," Villiger said. "Anything else would be naive. What we see is clean, but this does not mean we see everything. If we have indications that something happened in the qualifiers, then we would definitely go into this. We could sanction this team and expel them, possibly from further tournaments."

FIFA has created a special hotline for this tournament to allow players, referee or team officials to report approaches by fixers, but Villiger said to date nobody had contacted it. FIFA has also created a company called Early Warning System, which monitors global betting patterns.

Match-fixing by illegal betting syndicates is regarded by FIFA as the biggest threat to football's integrity. Police are currently working with UEFA to investigating suspected fixing of more than 200 matches involving teams from at least 12 countries.

"If you had asked me in 2006, I would not have believed that the World Cup could be the goal of the betting mafia," Villiger said. "We realised that only the monitoring is not enough. In the investigation side, there is definitely room for improvement."