The Big Fix (12 page)

Sophisticated criminals are quick to take advantage of innovation. The match-­fixing syndicates found enormous potential in the advent of in-­game betting. Previously, they had to guard against placing pregame bets so high that they would alert bookmakers to an upcoming fix. Now they could wait until a match began, then place their bets during the action. Once a game had started, a league or federation wasn't going to stop it. And if the syndicates placed their bets judiciously, it would be too late before the bookie could detect them, if ever.

Live betting also placed a fixer in the stands at a game, smartphone in hand, monitoring the shifting odds of numerous bookies, communicating with his players and referee. These constant line and odds changes stimulated betting, invigorating the market. There was no innovation that could have better enhanced the business of fixing.

Carsten Koerl alerted his clients to this new reality, to the dangers of live betting. He also told them that he had developed the tool to combat it.

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portradar currently employs 650 ­people worldwide. Two hundred IT experts code, develop, and maintain the infrastructure. Another ­couple of hundred operatives manually collect data from matches. There are roughly 150 journalists on stringer agreements to provide the minutiae from remote locales and clubs. To the games themselves, Sportradar dispatches roughly two thousand scouts, who for a nominal fee transfer match info directly by touch-­tone phone keypad. All of this data goes into the system.

In 2009, Koerl launched Sportradar's new product, the Fraud Detection System (FDS), which analyzes the shifting data from a game in order to identify a fixed match, real-­time. The system originates its baseline odds based on three parameters: time elapsed and remaining in a game, the number of goals for each team and total, and the number of red cards. This allows the system to calculate the true probability of a team's winning a match. The FDS then overlays this against the offers of 350 bookmakers, measuring the differences. When the deviation between the baseline offer and the actual offers grows too great, the system issues an alert to Sportradar's analysts. If a match is considered suspect, analysts assign a warning level to it, yellow for suspicion, red for certainty. Everything happens instantaneously.

“Bookmaking is not a genius sitting in a dark chamber coming up with odds,” Koerl says. “That doesn't happen anymore. It's driven by algorithms, mathematicians, massive progression models. It's much more related to financial markets.”

And as the FDS has progressed away from the individual, it has become more personal. Prosecutors across Europe frequently rely on Sportradar's data in fixing cases. Through these experiences, Koerl has realized that what prosecutors and judges value is not raw data or endless analysis, but evidence that implicates players, refs, and coaches. “We learned that the system needs to deliver more information about individuals,” he says.

Sportradar developers added features that enabled the FDS to identify and track suspicious actors. If one club had participated in manipulated matches, and one or more of its players ultimately moved to another team, the FDS would make a notation that allowed a system user to collate related information. The FDS goes into great detail, pinpointing even a player's performance in a game, a season, or a career. If a defender causes two penalty kicks in a match, for example, the likelihood of his being involved in a fix increases, a fact duly noted in the system. With 190,000 personal profiles in its database, the FDS is the Big Brother of match-­fixing.

But what good is all of this data? Some soccer industry professionals complain that Koerl and his ­people at Sportradar are a mop-­up crew. Once the fixing syndicate strikes, it is gone, it has won its bets, and the game is over. The FDS is not a system of prevention. It is retrospective, even as it clocks real-­time progressions in the market. Some federation officials complain about Sportradar's voluminous reports about fixed matches, the paperwork filled with data and figures that mean little to anyone but an IT professional.

Conversely, Koerl claims that he has provided some of his clients with information that points unquestionably to the fraudulent activity of players in their leagues, to no avail. “Sometimes I'm not happy with some federations, how they integrate our information, how they go about using it,” he says. “I tell them the right thing to do, without political intentions.” The recognized authority in his field, Koerl has been searching for the landmark criminal case that would prove Sportradar's prescriptive value.

 

CHAPTER 19

ANTALYA, TURKEY, FEBRUARY 2011

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portradar was scrutinizing events in Turkey. The Mediterranean resort town of Antalya was hosting two friendlies: Latvia versus Bolivia, and Estonia versus Bulgaria. This was another round in the endless series of exhibitions that held relatively little significance in any standings. This inconsequence made matches of this nature particularly vulnerable to manipulation, though that didn't stop bookmakers from offering odds on them. Invariably, any game between national teams drew mass liquidity in the global market. Recognizing the fact that large numbers of bettors were eager to wager on a game for which the players themselves didn't care, was elemental to understanding how the fixing syndicate was able to strangle the sport. That was the criminal genius behind Perumal's fake Togo match. He realized that it didn't matter who wore the national team jersey. ­People were going to bet regardless.

Footy Media International had arranged the Antalya games (in the name of Blapp Johnsen), and in a way that immediately aroused the suspicions of Janis Mezeckis, the general secretary of the Latvian Football Federation. On behalf of Footy Media, Anthony Raj Santia had traveled to Riga and offered the federation €30,000. He said that his company would arrange travel and accommodation for the Latvians, as well as the rental of the stadium and the selection of match referees. Mezeckis signed a contract with Footy Media on December 14, 2010. But he and his colleagues questioned how Footy Media planned to profit from the matches, as TV and sponsorship rights were not included in the proposal. Santia claimed that his company was eager to build its profile in Europe and so viewed this deal as an investment in future business.

It didn't add up for Mezeckis. He contacted FIFA. Chris Eaton alerted Sportradar. The Antalya matches went ahead as planned, one of the most egregious episodes of match-­fixing ever conducted.

As game time approached on February 9, 2011, Janis asked Santia to confirm the identity of the match officials. Would they be from FIFA's approved list? Santia had assured him that they would be, and that the officials would be Czech. One hour before kickoff, Santia informed Mezeckis that the refs were Hungarian. Mezeckis walked down to the referees' dressing room in Antalya's Mardan Stadium. There, the officials said that they were, in fact, Croatian. In actuality, they were Bosnian.

Darren Small, the chief operating officer of Sportradar, watched the betting for each game in Antalya behave identically. The pregame over-­under was 2.5 goals, meaning that if you bet the over, and the two teams in a match combined to score three or more goals, you would win. This line generated massive betting on international bookmaker sites. Once the first goal of each game was scored, most bookmakers that Sportradar monitored pushed their over-­under offer to 3.5, and the betting action subsided. With scoreless time passing in each game, the line dropped on most books, returning to 2.5. The betting action increased once more. “There was severe support for more than three goals in both games,” Small says. “The support in the marketplace for those games was nowhere near logical, with about five million euros bet per match on the over-­under.”

But it wasn't the betting movement that singled out these matches. It was how the results were achieved. There were at least three goals scored in aggregate in each game, as the betting patterns suggested there would be. Together, the games generated seven goals. This would be unremarkable but for the fact that all seven were scored from penalty kicks. In the case of one penalty kick, after the player missed, an assistant referee ordered that it be retaken.

Although Chris Eaton and his subordinates believed that Perumal was behind the Antalya matches, this was not the case. Perumal was watching from afar. When he learned about the way that the fix had transpired, he laughed. “How dumb can you be to play seven goals in a match?” he says. “You're better off if you flash one red card to that team, and make sure the other wins by two–nil. So it doesn't seem so awkward. And it's not so obvious. Seven penalties. Same venue. Same day. Same company. Something is very wrong. Dan Tan destroyed a lot of things.”

Perumal believed, rightly so, that an obvious fix spoiled the business for everyone in it. He had been guilty of the trespass himself, with the fake Togo match. His resentment was focused on Dan Tan, who he believed was better in the background, rather than in operations. The two of them had arranged a December 2010 fix in Córdoba, Argentina, between the under-­twenty national teams of Argentina and Bolivia. The plan was for Argentina to win in the last five minutes of the game. The referee disallowed a legitimate goal in the thirty-­fifth minute. Regulation time expired with no further scoring. When the ref awarded Argentina with a penalty (successful) in the twelfth minute of injury time, it made a mockery of the game. Perumal claims that Dan Tan got greedy. “You have to be prepared to lose at some stage, and not win every fucking spin of the roulette,” he says. “You are fixing. One time it can fall on the wrong number. When they scored this twelfth-­minute injury time penalty, the whole of South America came to know about match-­fixing. Dan Tan completely destroyed our business in South America. He had this feeling he was bulletproof, that nobody is watching him, that nothing is going to happen, that you have license to do this.”

The obvious fraud in Antalya also insulted Chris Eaton's sense of propriety. Further, he believed that he wasn't dealing with sophisticated criminals, since Santia had done little to conceal the fix. Any child who had ever kicked around a ball in the backyard could tell that there was something wrong with these games. Yet Santia paid the refs. The players jogged off the field. And somewhere in the Far East, the syndicate was counting its money.

If a fix could be conducted so obviously and openly, Eaton realized, no amount of policing could defeat it. Or it would have already done so. A new approach was needed. Eaton began to think of fundamental reform, an institutional shift, a new set of regulations that would infiltrate the syndicate, protect players, and steadily dislodge the fixers from their entrenched position.

And Eaton thought of Perumal, and how Antalya had come and gone without him. “We thought we had Perumal there,” he says. The chase would continue, though Eaton feared that it might go on forever.

 

CHAPTER 20

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erumal was angry over the fact that Dan Tan had left him out in the cold, but he kept his sentiments to himself. He needed money to cover his mounting debts. In Finland, he negotiated on behalf of a Hungarian front group, agreeing on a $500,000 sale price with the Finnish owners of the club. When Perumal received this cash amount from syndicate runners, he gave the Finns only $200,000, retaining the balance for himself. The Finns phoned the Hungarians. The Hungarians called Singapore. When everyone gathered in an office in Rovaniemi, it was clear who had been the cause of the misunderstanding.

Perumal's charm had begun to wear off in anger and irritability. By early 2011, relations between Perumal and his main corrupted player at RoPS, Christopher Musonda, were strained. On February 16, RoPS lost to the club Vaasan Palloseura by a score of 3–0, though Perumal had arranged with Musonda to lose 4–0. This enterprise was bleeding money. When Musonda returned to the locker room after the game, he received a text message from Perumal. “U guys are stupid,” it read. “Where is the one more goal. So close n still cant get the job done.”

It was a wonder why Perumal stuck with his Finnish club for so long. But by the end of February 2011, with the arctic winter having closed in, he had reached his limit. On February 23, RoPs drew a 1–1 tie against Tampere United, though Musonda and his teammates were supposed to have lost. Perumal met Musonda and two of his teammates at Fransmanni, a formal French restaurant near the stadium. Perumal scolded them. He was so consumed in the frustration that his business caused him that he failed to notice that he had been followed to Fransmanni. Perumal well understood that injuring the syndicate's business carried a price. The Singapore syndicate had finally made its determination about Wilson Perumal. It wouldn't be long before he knew what it was.