International soccer authorities and law enforcement officials are struggling to combat rampant game fixing by what they describe as sprawling networks of organized crime, a problem that has plagued the sport for decades but appears to have intensified recently.
Game-fixing scandals are engulfing men’s professional leagues around the world, from Turkey, whose top officials are meeting this week to determine whether the coming season will have to be delayed pending an investigation, to South Korea, where dozens of players have been indicted over the past several weeks. Authorities attribute the apparent burst of fixing cases to sophisticated criminal operations based in Singapore, Malaysia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
Yup, and FIFA have been remarkably slow in taking meaningful action (and that’s the most positive account of their actions).