Tag Archives: sports corruption

From the World Cup to the Olympics: Why Are International Sporting Events So Corrupt?

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The recently-concluded FIFA World Cup in Qatar has served as yet another reminder of the corruption that seems to accompany the awarding of hosting rights for major international sporting events. According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), in 2010 representatives of Qatar bribed three South American FIFA officials to win the run-off vote against the United States to host the 2022 World Cup. And this came after two members of the FIFA selection committee had already been barred from voting after they had been caught agreeing to sell their votes. This was not an isolated incident. The DOJ also alleged that Russia bribed FIFA officials to host the 2018 World Cup, and indeed more than half of those FIFA officials involved in the 2018 and 2022 host country votes—including FIFA’s then-president Sepp Blatter—have been accused of improper behavior. Nor has this sort of behavior been limited to FIFA. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has had numerous similar scandals. The IOC has launched an investigation into nine members who were bribed to vote for granting Brazil the hosting rights for the 2016 Olympic Games; Sérgio Cabral, the former governor of Rio de Janeiro, admitted to paying $2 million to the former president of the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) to buy votes to select Rio as the 2016 Olympic host city, and the head of Brazil’s Olympic committee, Carols Nuzman, was sentenced to over 30 years in prison as a result. And when Russia secured the 2014 Winter Olympics bid, it did so with the assistance of the then-vice president of the Olympic Council of Asia, Gafur Rakhimov, an organized crime leader and heroin kingpin.

Why is the process of selecting host cities and countries for major international sporting events so constantly captured by bribery and corruption? There are several inter-related reasons for this ongoing problem:

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Risky Wagers: How Lack of Oversight Increases the Odds of Corruption in Sports Gambling

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Thanks to the internet, sports gambling—once limited to smoky back rooms and local bookies—has rapidly expanded, and this expansion has fueled growing concerns over the integrity of professional sports. Sports gambling has long been intertwined with sports-related corruption, but the sheer number of gambling transactions made possible by the advent of online betting (through both legal and illegal websites) substantially increases the likelihood that bribery or match-fixing will be used to ensure a “winning bet.”

National regulatory approaches have not kept up with the heighted risks. The United States, for example, continues to rely on outdated regulatory regimes and ill-defined responsibilities shared between state regulators, federal regulators, and professional sports leagues. As more and more states move to legalize sports gambling, the US is in urgent need of a centralized authority that possesses the necessary incentives and requisite capabilities to properly regulate this burgeoning industry.

To see why reform is needed, consider each of the three main actors (or sets of actors) that have some responsibility to deal with the integrity threats posed by online sports gambling in the U.S.: state governments, the federal government, and the professional leagues: Continue reading →

Major League Soccer: A Prime Target for Organized Crime Groups?

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Sports corruption, though not a new problem, has been an ever-increasing source of concern and attention in both the sporting world and the anticorruption community. In the United States, much of the attention regarding this issue has focused on corruption scandals in the most popular U.S. sports, such as college football, college basketball, and professional basketball. But other less high-profile sports may be even more at risk of corruption. Indeed, in surveying the landscape of sports in America, the league that stands out as very high-risk for corruption is Major League Soccer (MLS).

This may seem surprising. Although soccer is considered to be the most corrupt sport in the world, there have not, to my knowledge, been any reports of significant corruption in MLS to date. Indeed, back in 2015 MLS commissioner Don Garber declared that MLS is “one hundred thousand percent” clean. But just because corruption hasn’t (yet) been uncovered doesn’t mean it isn’t there, or that it won’t arise in the future. My concerns for corruption in the MLS arises from my observation that MLS has several of the risk factors that investigations of sports corruption in other contexts have identified. Three such risk factors in particular stand out:

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eSports: A Playground for Corruption?

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Video game tournaments—sometimes referred to as “eSports”—are relatively new but increasingly popular. In these tournaments, players compete for cash prizes. In certain U.S. states it is now legal to place bets on eSports tournaments, though in other states such betting is prohibited. The growing popularity of eSports and the rise of eSports betting unfortunately gives rise to the risks of the same sorts of corruption that we have seen in traditional sports, such as gamblers (including organized criminal betting syndicates) bribing players to fix matches. And this is not purely hypothetical: Recently the FBI obtained evidence that criminal betting syndicates were bribing a group of players to throw matches in certain eSports competitions.

Responding effectively to bribery-related corruption in eSports is complicated by the fact that, unlike traditional sporting leagues, eSports do not have a central governing body. Rather, each game publisher controls its own tournaments, and many tournament operators have not taken the steps necessary to implement effective mechanisms for identifying betting-related match-fixing activities and levying punishment on bad actors. In 2016, a group of eSports stakeholders tried to address this issue by establishing a nonprofit association called the Esports Integrity Commission (ESIC), which is tasked with investigating and disciplining individuals involved in corrupt eSports activities. But ESIC only has authority over competitions organized by its members, and players sanctioned for match-fixing activities within an ESIC member tournament can still compete in non-ESIC member competitions.

More effective measures are therefore needed to prevent the spread of corruption in eSports. In particular, those states that permit betting on eSports tournaments should require, as a condition for betting on such matches to be lawful, that the tournament and betting operators join an authorized eSports governing board equivalent to the ESIC. Authorized governing boards should have the following responsibilities and obligations:

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The Perils of Over-Criminalizing Sports Corruption

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Although the fight against corruption has traditionally focused on corruption in government, the anticorruption community has started to pay more attention to corruption in other spheres. One particularly prominent concern is corruption in sports (see here, here, and here). The topic of sports-related corruption includes not only corruption in the major sports associations (think FIFA and the International Olympic Committee), but also the corrupt manipulation of individual sporting events in order to win bets (whether legal or illegal). Such corrupt manipulation includes match-fixing (where corrupt actors fraudulently influence the outcome of a game); spot-fixing (where wrongdoers seek to influence events within the game that do not necessarily have a significant effect on the final outcome, such as the number of minutes an athlete plays or timing the first throw-in or corner in a soccer game); and point-shaving (where perpetrators seek to hold down the margin of victory in order to avoid covering a published point spread).

Different jurisdictions approach this sort of sports corruption differently. Many countries in Europe have enacted blanket laws criminalizing match-fixing in order to uphold the integrity of sports. The United States, by contrast, takes a narrower approach: The relevant criminal laws targeting sports corruption in the U.S.—both the Federal Sports Bribery Act (the “Act”) and comparable laws at the state level—focus solely on bribery. Furthermore, the Act has historically been used to prosecute individuals involved in paying bribes or inducing others to collect bribes, but not the people (usually athletes, coaches, or officials) who receive the bribes. Although a great deal of corruption in sports involves the payment of bribes, and would therefore be covered by these laws, some types of sports corruption are unilateral: An athlete or sports official may place bets on sporting events and subsequently undertake behavior to win those bets. For this reason, some scholars have argued that the U.S. should close this loophole by criminalizing such unilateral conduct as well.

I disagree. To be sure, unilateral sports corruption is unethical, and criminalizing it would help to prevent athletes, referees, and coaches from engaging in corrupt acts that jeopardize the integrity of sports. But the benefits of criminalizing this form of misconduct are minimal and are greatly outweighed by the corresponding costs.

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The U.S. Should Enact the Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act

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As I have previously discussed on this blog, corruption is sports is a serious and systemic issue. I recommended that the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) ban Russia from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, and WADA did indeed decide to ban Russia from global sports for four years in the aftermath of Russia’s years-long state-sponsored doping program. The 2020 Olympics was postponed due to the coronavirus, and other major sports events will not be taking place for the foreseeable future, but once it is safe to hold these events again—indeed, before then—the work to combat corruption in sports must continue. Russia appealed WADA’s decision, and thus far the ban is the only consequence facing Russia and the state officials who engineered the doping program. It is unclear whether the ban will be enough for Russia to learn its lesson, or enough to deter other countries from trying to get away with similar ploys.

Fortunately, the United States has the opportunity to become a leader in fighting this kind of corruption in sports. Last fall, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act of 2019, named for Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the whistleblower who revealed the Russian state-sponsored doping scheme and who has been the target of Russian retaliation ever since. This bill would make it a crime for “any person, other than an athlete, to knowingly carry into effect, attempt to carry into effect, or conspire with any other person to carry into effect a scheme in commerce to influence by use of a prohibited substance or prohibited method any major international sports competition” in which U.S. athletes compete; the bill also permits U.S. citizens to pursue monetary compensation for deceptive competition and provides protections for whistleblowers. The bill, now pending in the U.S. Senate, has received bipartisan support, as well as the endorsement of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.

WADA, on the other hand, has raised concerns about the bill, especially the proposed law’s allegedly impermissible extraterritorial reach. This objection is unpersuasive, for several reasons:

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If the International Community Takes Corruption in Sports Seriously, Russia Should Be Banned from the 2020 Olympics

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Corruption in sports has been recognized as a serious and systemic problem (see here and here). One of the most egregious examples of sports-related corruption is Russia’s state-sponsored doping program. A 2015 report issued by an independent commission of the World Anti-Doping Agency found that this program involved athletes, coaches, trainers, doctors, and Russian institutions. Some of the most serious allegations were that members of the Russian secret service (the FSB) had pressured lab workers to cover up positive drug testing results (with one lab destroying more than 1,400 samples), top Russian sports officials submitting fake urine samples, and athletes assuming false identities, paying for destruction of positive doping results, and bribing anti-doping authorities. The former director of Russia’s anti-doping lab, Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, has provided additional explanations as to how he and others, including FSB agents, enabled doping for the country’s athletes.

In light of these revelations, WADA recommended that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) ban Russia in the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics; however the IOC permitted each sport to consider individual athletes for participation. After an additional 2016 investigation known as the McLaren report produced additional evidence regarding Russian violations, the IOC did ban Russia from the 2018 Winter Olympics, and banned several individual athletes for life, but the IOC permitted 168 Russians to compete neutrally as “Olympic Athletes from Russia.” WADA reinstated Russia’s Anti-Doping Agency as compliant with the World Anti-Doping Code in September 2018, subject to two conditions: (1) Russian anti-doping authorities must accept the McLaren report findings; and (2) Russia must make data in its Moscow laboratory available to WADA inspection.

Yet Russia has not learned its lesson:

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