At the 2007 Poland Open tennis tournament, Nikolay Davydenko, ranked fourth in the world, was drawn to play Martin Vassallo Arguello, ranked 87th, in the second round.
Inexplicably, Davydenko’s price to win the match opened at 2.3-1. He won the first set 6-2. Astonishingly, his price went out, offering even better value.
Arguello fought back, winning the second set 6-3 and then, trailing 2-1 in the deciding set, Davydenko withdrew, injured.
The total staked on this relatively minor match was close to £3.6million. It was to inspect anomalies such as this that the Tennis Integrity Unit was formed in 2008.
The easiest sports to fix involve individuals: tennis, snooker, darts, computer gaming. Quite simply, one person controls the outcome. Get to him — or her — and it all falls into place.
Team sports, for obvious reasons, are considerably more complex, which is why most attempted fixes involve an individual, such as the goalkeeper, or an individual discipline — such as a no-scoring over in cricket.
The rest of the game is too wide-ranging to be properly controlled. You can offer Harry Kane £50,000 to score against Croatia on Sunday, but he can’t attempt it without involving others. Kane could maybe bribe a defender to commit a foul and give away a penalty, which he would take — but he would need to fix Croatia’s goalkeeper, too, ensuring he doesn’t make a save. Now three people know, and suppose one isn’t into it?
Jimmy Greaves tells a story about playing for Chelsea against West Brom and the captain, Peter Sillett, arriving with a proposition. He had been approached by an individual willing to pay very good money for Chelsea to lose. This was when players still earned a maximum wage and the sum discussed was significant. Sillett didn’t want to take it, he said, but didn’t think he could speak for everybody. He would be guided by what the majority wanted.
Greaves said the players discussed it, but were angry enough to then go out and beat West Brom comfortably. Football is a hard fix.
Unless you choose to make it easy, of course. Unless you choose to run markets on events that put the game in the hands of the individual: and bookmakers do. Remember the pie man at Sutton United?
That’s an individual bet. He has total control over whether or not he eats a pie. It was a warped market, created as a publicity stunt, and a very obvious one. The extensions of this are bets involving in-play events, and at the high end, bets involving managerial appointments, sackings and player transfers.
These are serious markets, with serious volume, but are plainly vulnerable to informed influence. Who knows the identity of the next Fulham manager?
Claudio Ranieri and the executives making the appointment. Who knows the next manager to be sacked? The people doing the sacking. And transfers are in the command of the player, too.
Daniel Sturridge to West Brom may have come as a surprise to many, but it wouldn’t have come as a surprise to Sturridge, or to West Brom once the deal was sufficiently advanced.
Usually, bookmakers love these bets because there is no skill or expertise involved on the part of a gambler, making them no better than mugs.
Where is Sturridge going? Have a guess, because that’s all it is. There is no form, no times to work from, no finite means of calculation. It’s a hunch, a stab, a feeling in your water; it turns everybody into a pin-sticker.
Unless you happen to know one of the protagonists so are actually making a smart judgment, based on well-sourced information. And then the bookmakers cry foul and grass you up.
Sturridge is facing a number of very serious FA charges because, it is claimed, inside information was used in a betting coup when he swapped Liverpool for West Brom on loan this year. To actually know stuff is not playing fair, apparently. We have all got to be blindfolded, clueless, betting in the dark, sticking our pins.
‘Have a bang on that,’ we are told. Unless you actually know the subject on which you are having a bang, in which case, no bangs allowed. It’s illegal to bang with knowledge. You need to be under-informed, under-qualified to bang. Sturridge’s alleged offence concerns passing on ‘information relating to football which the participant has obtained by virtue of his or her position within the game and which is not publicly available at that time’.
Yet bookmakers use insider information constantly. Mike Dillon of Ladbrokes was legendarily well connected and his firm’s opening prices were the best indicator of whether one stable in particular was confident or not. So they can know, but you cannot.
If bookmakers do not want footballers involved in gambling why was the agent, Will Salthouse, given £10,000 in free bets as an incentive to get his clients into private boxes at Cheltenham? They want it all ways. They want these kids — and many are little more than kids — to invest their significant earnings in areas where they have little expertise but heaven help them if they slip a little inside information to a friend about events in their own world.
Anyway, what is a player supposed to do during the transfer window? Take a vow of silence? Go into hiding? Lie to his mates, to his family, to his next door neighbour? He didn’t create this market. The bookmakers did. And now he has to watch what he says for a month because an industry in which he has no part is making money off his back?
In 2005, Harry Redknapp was being linked with a return to Portsmouth from Southampton. In an Italian restaurant with his wife he met a former player, Richard Hughes, who asked him directly if he was going back. Redknapp said there was a strong possibility. Hughes later put a bet on.
‘He’s a friend,’ said Redknapp. ‘He asked me a straight question, I gave him a straight answer. What he did with that information is his business — I didn’t tell him to bet. I talk frankly to everyone. If a cabbie had asked me the same question that night, I wouldn’t have lied. I like Richard, a lot. What was I to do? Lead him up the garden path? Tell him to get lost?’
It is worth pointing out that at various times in his career Redknapp has been convinced of a future at Leicester, Newcastle and Tottenham — the first time they asked — only to change his mind when the deal looked done. Good friends could have lost substantial sums wagering the constancy of Redknapp.
The same is true of Sturridge. He might have failed a medical, he could have changed his mind, the last minute may have brought a better offer, Liverpool could have suffered a training ground-injury to change their plans.
Even the best information can prove false. Gary McAllister rejected a lucrative move to Nottingham Forest from Leicester in 1989 — fee agreed — when Brian Clough asked him if he had a girlfriend and, when McAllister demurred, added: ‘What are you, a poof?’
Anyone who knew McAllister would have confidently stated he was Forest-bound. One unexpected sentence altered that.
‘If betting on managerial appointments is wrong, ban it completely,’ said Redknapp, after an FA investigation concluded without penalty. He’s right.
Football should be one of the easiest sports to police. What complicates it is the bookmakers’ desperation to entice customers into blind, uninformed punts, to enter into a game with all the skill of snakes and ladders. Who do they wish to attract? Lads, lads, lads — and everybody. But not you. Not if you actually know a snake or have a ladder.