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June
World Cup goal: Keep the field level
Miami,FL,USA - June 07, 2006
Suspected widespread corruption, in the form of betting and match-fixing
scandals, has provoked a disturbing question for soccer's World
Cup: Can the results of the planet's largest and most important
sporting event be trusted?
The sport's world governing body, FIFA, has reacted to club scandals
in such soccer-consumed countries as Italy, Germany and Brazil by
taking extraordinary measures to ensure the legitimacy of the World
Cup, which opens Friday and will continue for a month in 12 cities
across Germany.
For the first time, players, referees and coaches are being required
to sign pledges that neither they nor their immediate families will
bet on the World Cup. By the estimate of one online sports book,
as much as $1.89 billion in bets will be placed with British bookmakers
alone during the World Cup.
FIFA has also created a company called Early Warning System. It
is designed to work in concert with the international gambling industry
to spot attempts to manipulate the outcome of World Cup matches.
Few details of the system have been made public. But FIFA officials
have said they are concerned about the proliferation of Internet
gambling and the influence of Asian betting syndicates. If any suspicious
betting patterns were detected, officials said, they might take
such pre-emptive action as switching a referee prior to a particular
match.
"A number of scandals have affected football - for instance,
the problem with the referees," FIFA's president, Sepp Blatter,
said this week at a news conference in Munich.
"When you see a circle drawn," said Blatter, "the
referee is at the heart of it."
Source Code: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/07/news/cup.php |
