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Ramirez and Cabrera both had at least 100 caps for the national team and had served as captains. The Guatemalan football association imposed a national ban last month; FIFA made it worldwide on Wednesday in Zurich.
Meanwhile, Ari Pusa of AP gives of Helsingin Sanomat in Finland gives us an analysis of how match-fixing could be arrived at below.
Which player will be the first to get shown a yellow card? Which side will win — or even which player will deliver — the first free-kick?
At what minute into the game will the first goal be scored? Will there be more than five goals or fewer than five goals? Which tennis player will lose the first set? Who will win the next point?
Options are plentiful when it comes to match-fixing and other forms of manipulating sporting events. Basically, a bet can be placed on anything for whatever sum of money. Live in-play betting only adds to the rich variety of subjects on which one can have a punt.
There is nothing wrong with betting, so long as the results have not been agreed on beforehand.
Result-fixing, however, has become the biggest problem in today’s sports. In scale it already exceeds doping.
Doping will give an athlete an advantage over the competitors, but one still has to win the actual race for it to be of any benefit.
Match-fixing and other ways to manipulate the goings-on in a sporting event, on the other hand, eat away at the entire fabric of sports as the fundamental attraction of it all – the unpredictability of the outcome – goes up in smoke.
On Wednesday, a seminar took place in Helsinki, at which results manipulation and agreed outcomes of games were looked into.
The reports presented were startling.
The manipulation of sporting results always comes back to organised crime and economic crimes, through which tens of millions of euros end up in the wrong hands. Through the agency of sports, criminal organisations can launder money and maintain tax havens.
“Result-fixing is a form of hidden criminality in which there are no direct victims. Hence it is something that is difficult to investigate”, said Johanna Peurala, who is working on her doctoral dissertation on the subject.
The criminal organisations do not just offer bribes, they blackmail, too. In the worst case scenario, the target of the bribery may wind up dead if he fails to deliver what has been agreed on.
“The parties concerned are always in physical danger if they blow the whistle on the result-fixing. Dealing with hardened criminals is not child’s play”, said Risto Nieminen, the former CEO of Veikkaus, Finland’s state-run gaming and lottery company.
Nieminen’s current post as the President of the World Lottery Association will end at the end of the year.
Apart from players, coaches, and referees, the targets of the organisers of the result-fixing scam may include almost anybody, such as a team physician.
In one case that has been uncovered, a team doctor was discovered having mixed muscle relaxant into a goalkeeper’s drink. As a result of having his drink spiked, the poor player moved around the pitch like in slow motion. —AP
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