Monday, December 07, 2009
Football - European Lower League Corruption and Bribery
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New York Times - December 7, 2009
In Lowly Leagues, a Soccer Culture Ripe for Bribery
By KATRIN BENNHOLD
In this small stadium in Bavaria, most stands are not just empty — they are covered in slippery grass and moss. There are no television cameras. Among the sponsors advertised on the hoarding is Delphi, a local Greek restaurant.
At stake for the visiting soccer club from Ulm: Moving from ninth to sixth place in one of Germany’s three fourth-division regional league tables.
Or, as even its manager, Markus Lösch, acknowledged: “Nothing at all.”
Two weeks ago, Ulm, a charming Swabian town on the Danube, was best known for having the tallest church spire in the world and being the birthplace of Albert Einstein. Now Ulm, and a handful of other German towns, have become associated with the biggest betting scandal in European sporting history, a scam that has laid bare the little-known, often bankrupt, underbelly of the world’s favorite sport.
But for a few sweet hours Saturday, none of that mattered. SSV Ulm beat FC Eintracht Bamberg, 3-1. The Ulmers dominated the pitch. They played a beautiful game and loved every minute of it.
Who cared that only 39 fans in Ulm’s black-and-white colors made the 250 kilometer trip to Bamberg, or 155 miles, and that not even the local sports reporter from the Neu Ulmer Zeitung bothered to come?
For those few hours — with music blasting in the steaming locker room and the post-match euphoria — everyone could forget that three of Ulm’s best players were just fired for allegedly fixing matches.
“Ulm players aren’t bribable,” the 39 fans chanted, in spirited self-deprecation. “Too bad you didn’t cheat today,” retorted a Bamberg fan across the two metal fences separating them.
Of the 200 European soccer games under investigation by prosecutors, 32 took place in Germany and more than half of them — 18 — in the lowly fourth division, where experts are unsurprised that betting rings appear to have flourished.
In the higher leagues, cheating is both harder and less tempting.
The scrutiny of television cameras means a deliberate handball or conveniently missed penalty are less likely to go undetected. The ignominy of fixing a match stacks up poorly against the rewards of high pay and bonuses, and shares of hefty TV fees.
In the lower leagues, a poisonous combination of high expectations, meager success and astonishingly low pay make players in Germany’s 33 standard regional division clubs vulnerable targets for bribery.
These men operate on the fault line between professional and amateur soccer, where youthful dreams of greatness live side by side with end-of-career cynicism and frustrated mediocrity.
The athletes play below the radar of public interest, and often below the poverty line.
Sponsors, media and fans are scarce. Twenty-six of the regional league clubs have balance sheets in the red, according to the German Football Association. Their average deficit exceeds €2 million, about $3 million.
Regional players earn as little as €150 — the legal minimum for a basic monthly salary, excluding match bonuses, in Football Association guidelines. Five figure salaries are very rare, the six and seven figure wages of top stars a mere dream. Some clubs are so poor that they are forced to lure players with promises of jobs with corporate sponsors or mileage payment for attending training.
“The regional leagues want to play professionally but they don’t have the money the professional leagues have,” said Theo Zwanziger, president of the German Football Association, which is based in Frankfurt and governs German soccer. “That makes the players in those leagues generally the most susceptible.”
In his office underneath the grandstand of the local stadium, the Ulm trainer, Ralf Becker, put it more bluntly: “They are all potential offenders.”
“When guys earn 500 euros to play soccer, you can’t allow bets worth thousands of euros and expect that it won’t have an impact,” said Becker, who thinks all betting on fourth division matches should be banned. The betting on fourth division matches happens largely in private betting companies. The state-run outfit largely sticks with top league soccer.
“They have all the pressures of professional football: The fear of injuries. The weekly competition to be selected to play. The 90 minutes on the playing field on the weekend. The knowledge that your career is over at 35,” said Becker, himself a former professional player who had to stop at 34 because of an ankle injury.
“But Bundesliga players earn at least 10 or 20 times more.”
The three fired Croatian players Davor Kraljevic, 31, Dinko Radojevic, 31, and Marijo Marinovic, 26, are a case in point. They are under investigation for allegedly rigging four matches last season and two matches this season for several thousand euros each.
Earning between €3,000 and 4,000 a month, they were among the best and highest-paid players on the club. But, as one official familiar with the investigation explains, their choice was between €350 in taxable bonus payments if the club had won, and about €5,000 in cash per rigged match.
“Their calculation was: Get paid well to lose or get paid poorly to win,” the official said, who declined to be identified because the investigation is ongoing.
The three were the backbone of the game: Center back, center midfielder and striker — a straight axis to the goal. Or, as some Ulmers say jokingly these days: the axis of evil.
Marinovic is suspected of having staged a handball that gave a penalty to Kassel in a match Ulm lost, 3-0, last season. Radojevic, the club’s top goal scorer, missed a penalty in a match this autumn against Darmstadt. Kraljevic, according to investigators, moved in the same circles as Ante Sapina, the Croatian ring leader of a 2005 match-fixing scandal who is once again believed to have orchestrated the rigging.
Many players bitterly recall a club dinner the night before police raided the homes of the Croatian players and presented evidence to the club.
“We were all trying to understand why we were losing so many matches where we were winning 1-0 at halftime,” an Ulm player, Florian Treske, said.
The 163-year-old SSV Ulm club is in many ways a microcosm of the bitter-sweet world of German soccer, a blighted, little reported universe of shattered hopes, financial woes, low-level corruption and rarely realized dreams.
In 1997, Ulm started on the long climb that resulted in the near impossible: it rose from third to second division and then — for one short exuberant season — into the Bundesliga.
Holger Betz, 31, who was a goalkeeper for the club then, recalls the thrill of playing in front of 85,000 people.
But the fall was as spectacular as the rise. By 2001, Ulm was back in third division and insolvent, virtually bankrupted by the decision to keep on expensive players. A former senior official of the club is under investigation for failing to pay payroll charges on players’ salaries in the years after.
Since then, the club lives on €1.5 million a year and has been a typical fourth-division melting pot of would-be and former stars and a large group in the middle who are neither.
Twenty year-old players like Burak Tastan with boyish ambitions to join the German national team play side by side with former stars like Heiko Gerber, who spent 10 years in Bundesliga clubs and at 37 is winding up his career.
There are, too, those like Betz who spent virtually his entire career here. There are mid-level foreigners hoping to make it in the mythical soccer country Germany, like the fired Croatians.
Now the Croats have been sacked, no Ulm player earns more than €3,650 a month before tax. Players get €150 for just attending a match, and progressively more in the case of victory.
The average pay, said Lösch, the manager, is closer to €1,800 and some earn as little as €200. A few, like Betz, work part-time.
“Nobody here drives a Porsche,” Becker said.
Parked outside the stadium during training on Friday was an Audi Q7, a small Citroën, a Renault Twingo and a couple of bicycles.
Tastan, whose parents emigrated from Turkey and who speaks German with a Bavarian accent, drives his father’s car. He rents a tiny studio flat on the fourth floor of a high rise outside of Ulm for €390 euros a month. He won’t say what he earns but says it is enough to live on, just.
Rigging a game for money?
“Never,” he said. “I could not do that to the fans.”
Some older players are less starry eyed about their supporters. Andreas Mayer, 28, has changed club seven times. Fans, he said, are fickle. “People come when you’re successful,” he said.
Mayer has been insulted by fans, even spat upon. Earlier this season, when the club came back from a match against Stuttgart in which they drew 0-0, rows of sitting fan had blocked the home stadium challenging the players to explain themselves. The whole club had to get out of the bus and get a drubbing.
“The negative sides leave their mark,” Mayer said. “Not everything is positive in football.”
But for all the frustrations, many here have an undiminished passion for the game. They are local heroes. Local children ask them for their autographs. They are, in many ways, living their boyhood dream.
Tastan for one feels fortunate to be paid at all to do what he loves most. Maybe, he admits, some players earn the same as waiters or hair dressers. “But we get to play football all day,” he said. New York Times
New York Times - December 7, 2009
In Lowly Leagues, a Soccer Culture Ripe for Bribery
By KATRIN BENNHOLD
In this small stadium in Bavaria, most stands are not just empty — they are covered in slippery grass and moss. There are no television cameras. Among the sponsors advertised on the hoarding is Delphi, a local Greek restaurant.
At stake for the visiting soccer club from Ulm: Moving from ninth to sixth place in one of Germany’s three fourth-division regional league tables.
Or, as even its manager, Markus Lösch, acknowledged: “Nothing at all.”
Two weeks ago, Ulm, a charming Swabian town on the Danube, was best known for having the tallest church spire in the world and being the birthplace of Albert Einstein. Now Ulm, and a handful of other German towns, have become associated with the biggest betting scandal in European sporting history, a scam that has laid bare the little-known, often bankrupt, underbelly of the world’s favorite sport.
But for a few sweet hours Saturday, none of that mattered. SSV Ulm beat FC Eintracht Bamberg, 3-1. The Ulmers dominated the pitch. They played a beautiful game and loved every minute of it.
Who cared that only 39 fans in Ulm’s black-and-white colors made the 250 kilometer trip to Bamberg, or 155 miles, and that not even the local sports reporter from the Neu Ulmer Zeitung bothered to come?
For those few hours — with music blasting in the steaming locker room and the post-match euphoria — everyone could forget that three of Ulm’s best players were just fired for allegedly fixing matches.
“Ulm players aren’t bribable,” the 39 fans chanted, in spirited self-deprecation. “Too bad you didn’t cheat today,” retorted a Bamberg fan across the two metal fences separating them.
Of the 200 European soccer games under investigation by prosecutors, 32 took place in Germany and more than half of them — 18 — in the lowly fourth division, where experts are unsurprised that betting rings appear to have flourished.
In the higher leagues, cheating is both harder and less tempting.
The scrutiny of television cameras means a deliberate handball or conveniently missed penalty are less likely to go undetected. The ignominy of fixing a match stacks up poorly against the rewards of high pay and bonuses, and shares of hefty TV fees.
In the lower leagues, a poisonous combination of high expectations, meager success and astonishingly low pay make players in Germany’s 33 standard regional division clubs vulnerable targets for bribery.
These men operate on the fault line between professional and amateur soccer, where youthful dreams of greatness live side by side with end-of-career cynicism and frustrated mediocrity.
The athletes play below the radar of public interest, and often below the poverty line.
Sponsors, media and fans are scarce. Twenty-six of the regional league clubs have balance sheets in the red, according to the German Football Association. Their average deficit exceeds €2 million, about $3 million.
Regional players earn as little as €150 — the legal minimum for a basic monthly salary, excluding match bonuses, in Football Association guidelines. Five figure salaries are very rare, the six and seven figure wages of top stars a mere dream. Some clubs are so poor that they are forced to lure players with promises of jobs with corporate sponsors or mileage payment for attending training.
“The regional leagues want to play professionally but they don’t have the money the professional leagues have,” said Theo Zwanziger, president of the German Football Association, which is based in Frankfurt and governs German soccer. “That makes the players in those leagues generally the most susceptible.”
In his office underneath the grandstand of the local stadium, the Ulm trainer, Ralf Becker, put it more bluntly: “They are all potential offenders.”
“When guys earn 500 euros to play soccer, you can’t allow bets worth thousands of euros and expect that it won’t have an impact,” said Becker, who thinks all betting on fourth division matches should be banned. The betting on fourth division matches happens largely in private betting companies. The state-run outfit largely sticks with top league soccer.
“They have all the pressures of professional football: The fear of injuries. The weekly competition to be selected to play. The 90 minutes on the playing field on the weekend. The knowledge that your career is over at 35,” said Becker, himself a former professional player who had to stop at 34 because of an ankle injury.
“But Bundesliga players earn at least 10 or 20 times more.”
The three fired Croatian players Davor Kraljevic, 31, Dinko Radojevic, 31, and Marijo Marinovic, 26, are a case in point. They are under investigation for allegedly rigging four matches last season and two matches this season for several thousand euros each.
Earning between €3,000 and 4,000 a month, they were among the best and highest-paid players on the club. But, as one official familiar with the investigation explains, their choice was between €350 in taxable bonus payments if the club had won, and about €5,000 in cash per rigged match.
“Their calculation was: Get paid well to lose or get paid poorly to win,” the official said, who declined to be identified because the investigation is ongoing.
The three were the backbone of the game: Center back, center midfielder and striker — a straight axis to the goal. Or, as some Ulmers say jokingly these days: the axis of evil.
Marinovic is suspected of having staged a handball that gave a penalty to Kassel in a match Ulm lost, 3-0, last season. Radojevic, the club’s top goal scorer, missed a penalty in a match this autumn against Darmstadt. Kraljevic, according to investigators, moved in the same circles as Ante Sapina, the Croatian ring leader of a 2005 match-fixing scandal who is once again believed to have orchestrated the rigging.
Many players bitterly recall a club dinner the night before police raided the homes of the Croatian players and presented evidence to the club.
“We were all trying to understand why we were losing so many matches where we were winning 1-0 at halftime,” an Ulm player, Florian Treske, said.
The 163-year-old SSV Ulm club is in many ways a microcosm of the bitter-sweet world of German soccer, a blighted, little reported universe of shattered hopes, financial woes, low-level corruption and rarely realized dreams.
In 1997, Ulm started on the long climb that resulted in the near impossible: it rose from third to second division and then — for one short exuberant season — into the Bundesliga.
Holger Betz, 31, who was a goalkeeper for the club then, recalls the thrill of playing in front of 85,000 people.
But the fall was as spectacular as the rise. By 2001, Ulm was back in third division and insolvent, virtually bankrupted by the decision to keep on expensive players. A former senior official of the club is under investigation for failing to pay payroll charges on players’ salaries in the years after.
Since then, the club lives on €1.5 million a year and has been a typical fourth-division melting pot of would-be and former stars and a large group in the middle who are neither.
Twenty year-old players like Burak Tastan with boyish ambitions to join the German national team play side by side with former stars like Heiko Gerber, who spent 10 years in Bundesliga clubs and at 37 is winding up his career.
There are, too, those like Betz who spent virtually his entire career here. There are mid-level foreigners hoping to make it in the mythical soccer country Germany, like the fired Croatians.
Now the Croats have been sacked, no Ulm player earns more than €3,650 a month before tax. Players get €150 for just attending a match, and progressively more in the case of victory.
The average pay, said Lösch, the manager, is closer to €1,800 and some earn as little as €200. A few, like Betz, work part-time.
“Nobody here drives a Porsche,” Becker said.
Parked outside the stadium during training on Friday was an Audi Q7, a small Citroën, a Renault Twingo and a couple of bicycles.
Tastan, whose parents emigrated from Turkey and who speaks German with a Bavarian accent, drives his father’s car. He rents a tiny studio flat on the fourth floor of a high rise outside of Ulm for €390 euros a month. He won’t say what he earns but says it is enough to live on, just.
Rigging a game for money?
“Never,” he said. “I could not do that to the fans.”
Some older players are less starry eyed about their supporters. Andreas Mayer, 28, has changed club seven times. Fans, he said, are fickle. “People come when you’re successful,” he said.
Mayer has been insulted by fans, even spat upon. Earlier this season, when the club came back from a match against Stuttgart in which they drew 0-0, rows of sitting fan had blocked the home stadium challenging the players to explain themselves. The whole club had to get out of the bus and get a drubbing.
“The negative sides leave their mark,” Mayer said. “Not everything is positive in football.”
But for all the frustrations, many here have an undiminished passion for the game. They are local heroes. Local children ask them for their autographs. They are, in many ways, living their boyhood dream.
Tastan for one feels fortunate to be paid at all to do what he loves most. Maybe, he admits, some players earn the same as waiters or hair dressers. “But we get to play football all day,” he said. New York Times
