Bozkurt foundthat match-fixing is an especially dangerous crime because of its high revenues and “excessively low” sentences and detection rates. Thus, she argued, it’s entangled in much larger, more sinister, criminal webs: Organizations are using match-fixing to launder money from drug and human trafficking, her paper asserted.
Though she gave no specific examples, Bozkurt said that the link between football and crime was especially strong in Eastern Europe and the Balkans .
Indeed, Bozkurt’s paper comes just weeks after a chilling BBC investigation uncovered deep criminal ties in Bulgaria’s football clubs. OCCRP also looked at these ties in its series “Game of Control” published in 2010. In it, OCCRP profiled a Macedonian match fixer who explained how matches were fixed.
“No fewer than 15 football club bosses have been murdered in Bulgaria’s top football league in the last decade alone,” said reporter Margot Dunne in a BBC Crossing Continents episode related to the investigation.
In her paper, Bozkurt was adamant that this corruption is systemic, and said that no one entity could hope to stem the tide on its own. She provided a few specific solutions for governments and stakeholders.
For sports organizations themselves, Bozkurt recommended a zero-tolerance policy on internal and external corruption, and a system for scrutinizing sub-contracting companies involved in the scheduling of “friendly matches.”
She further recommended the creation of a specialized unit to combat match-fixing. This unit would be advised of all irregular gambling patterns and would cooperate with betting operators and sports organizations to investigate and prosecute violations.
