Hi,
just to remember what also goes on in this interesting betting world of ours it is always good to read some educated opinions of the state of affairs. Here is Declan Hill.
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"The Battle for the Soul of Sport
June 11th, 2010
On the first day of the World Cup, here is the transcript of my presentation before the Council of Europe. It is not about the World Cup, rather it is about something more important – the future of sport as we know it.
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Testimony of Declan Hill, May 3, 2010
EPAS, The Council of Europe, Strasbourg
Mesdames et monsieurs, je vous remercie de l’invitation. C’est véritablement un honneur de faire une présentation pour vous aujourd’hui. En fait, c’est beaucoup plus important que simplement un honneur personnel. C’est très, très important. Parce que nous sommes engagé dans une guerre pour l’âme du sport. Pour dire vrai, nous ne sommes pas engagés dans une guerre. Mais l’ennemi est déjà ici. Et comme un cancer, il risque de détruire le sport Européen.
Ladies and Gentlemen, there has always been fixing and corruption in sport. Our friends from the Greek delegation can take us to the site of the ancient Olympics, built in 776 B.C. Outside that stadium were a whole collection of statues and shrines to the Gods. They were built with the fines levied on athletes and coaches who were caught cheating or fixing at the games. So corruption has had a long history in sport, back at least two-thousand eight-hundred years and that type of corruption will be with us for as long we continue to hold competitive sports. It is simply a part of human nature.
However, we of this generation – are facing something almost entirely new. It is a new form of match-fixing as if someone has taken fixing and injected it with steroids. It is an utterly modern phenomenon and it will destroy sport as we know it. We have spoken already this morning about governance in sport and youth in sport, but this new form of corruption will, like a Tsunami, sweep aside all these other issues and leave our sport dead and destroyed.
Those are big words and even bigger claims, and many of you may be sitting there thinking, ‘Who is this man and how can he make such wild allegations?’ It all sounds so extraordinary to a European, so I am going to spend the rest of my time here this morning going through the facts which lead me to make those claims. Many of these facts may be unknown to you, they will seem absolutely unbelievable to European ears, but I want to assure you that they are all absolutely true and that we are facing a very, very serious threat to all forms of European sports today.
I am, as our friend Sebastian was kind enough to say, an investigative journalist and have had the good fortune to win a number of national and international awards for my work. The research for the book was done over five years and featured interviews with over two-hundred and twenty people inside the sports world – players, referees, coaches, sports officials, policemen, prosecutors, bookmakers, professional gamblers and, most importantly, the fixers themselves. I spoke with match-fixers around the world about their means and methods. A group of Asian fixers brought me into meetings between them and coaches and players when they helped fix matches at the last World Cup. During these meetings I wore secret recording devices. However, it was not only this type of research that is the basis for my findings. It is also based on my doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford. To gain my degree I compiled and then analysed a whole range of statistical databases on fixed matches vs. non-fixed matches and players who were approached to fix games who either accepted or did not accept. So I speak this morning, partly as an investigator, partly as an academic.
If we take the entire sports gambling world at 100%, most of the forms that we are familiar with are relatively small. Las Vegas, for example, only has a small share of the total market, so let us add in the illegal sports gambling market of North America. This market is run by the LCN, or La Cosa Nostra, American organized crime. Let us add in the offshore gambling sites in Costa Rica and the Caribbean. Actually, let us also add in the big British gambling companies like Ladbrokes, William Hill and Betfair. We will even throw in the European sports national lotteries, run mostly by governments, that are comparative midgets in terms of sports gambling, but the only way of legally gambling on sports in many European countries. Combine all of those vastly different organizations and all their billions of Euro that they make in gross turn-over. Combine all of them into large pot and you only have 30-40% of the total world sports gambling market.
The rest is the Asian market. It is huge. It dwarfs the European and North American markets. And most of it is illegal, run by the equivalent of Al Capone. This is a vast, powerful market. Because much of it is illegal it is difficult to give an accurate estimate of its total size, but the American journal Foreign Policy tried to do that in 2006 when it estimated the total size of the Asian gambling market at $450 billion, for comparison, the size of the entire Asian pharmaceutical industry is roughly $100 billion..."
*** cut. Read the whole story from his blog if you got interested. You should be, it is our money he is talking about.
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