NO HOLDS BARRED

 

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Labels: Eddie Goldman, gambling, No Holds Barred, sports journalism, The Athletic

On this edition of No Holds Barred, host Eddie Goldman once again spoke with investigative journalist, academic, consultant, and expert on match-fixing and corruption in international sports, Declan Hill.

He has just started a new teaching position as an associate professor in the Investigations Department at the Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences at the University of New Haven in New Haven, Connecticut. This unique position, which he calls a "professor of investigations", has him teaching a graduate course focusing on corruption in sport and what the recent legalization of sports gambling in the U.S. means for American society.

We spoke with him by phone Wednesday.

"This is an epic-changing moment in American society," he said. "It's comparable with the repeal of Prohibition, because sports gambling has effectively been illegal for over a century. And it's been driven by the trauma of the Chicago White Sox fixing the World Series of baseball in 1919. That Shoeless Joe Jackson trauma 99 years ago has cast a pall over American sports leagues since that time.

"And only this year, only in 2018, on May 14th, did finally the U.S. judicial system say, 'Hey, it's OK for people to gamble on sports.'

"So this is a massively complex question. It's massively complicated, with good stuff on both sides of the issue, bad stuff on both sides of the issue. All kinds of societal stuff, all kinds of religious stuff, all kinds of social stuff."

The debate in the U.S. over the next steps, however, have been dominated by two types of groups which only are serving their own interests, he noted. First are those with their own commercial agendas, including the gambling casinos and the relatively new group of sports gambling monitoring companies. They are trying to ensure a major stake in the legal sports gambling market in the U.S., which it is estimated will grow to hundreds of billions of dollars.

The second group, he said, are those with a "geopolitical agenda". Much of agenda in the U.S. is being pushed by the Middle Eastern monarchy of Qatar -- the same country whose government was accused of massive bribery to get the hosting rights for the FIFA World Cup in 2022. This monarchy, he said, has founded an organization "purportedly" fighting for sports integrity and which is in the forefront of the discussion on sports gambling in U.S. They also, doing what they are paid to do, seek to deflect discussion away from Qatar's role in sports corruption, he said.

While little useful debate is going on about the effects of sports gambling, it is expected that massive amounts of gambling will take place not only on the largest sports in the U.S., but, judging from how gamblers have operated around the world, on the minor leagues of professional sports as well as college and even high school sports.

"Fixing turns sport into theater," he said, and we will see more of it on all levels of sport in America.

In order to address these dangers, he made a proposal.

"It is absolutely clear what American sports needs," he said.

"It needs an Environmental Protection Agency. It needs a meat-packing inspector agency. A similar independent agency needs to be set up at a federal level to protect the integrity of sport.

"And it needs to be funded by a one percent tax on legal gambling. So every sports bet that takes place in the United States, a very small section of it, one percent, goes to setting up that agency, funding it, staffing it with good people."

We discussed the need for independent intelligent discussion on these issues, problems like sports gambling addiction and what happens when illegal bookmakers try to go legal, how sports gambling may kill off some sports, the opposition to forming an independent sports integrity agency, and much, much more.

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Labels: Declan Hill, Eddie Goldman, gambling, integrity, No Holds Barred, sports

On this edition of No Holds Barred, host Eddie Goldman spoke with investigative journalist, documentary maker, and academic Declan Hill.

His new book, "The Insider's Guide to Match-Fixing in Football", has recently been published. In it, he details the latest information on the growing scourge of match-fixing in the world's most popular sport, football (known as soccer in North America), and discussed what can be done to stop it. The lessons in this can be applied directly to the combat sports, which have their own sordid history of corruption and bad governance.

We spoke with Declan Hill by phone Tuesday.

"What we've come to in the sports world is the globalization of the sports corruption industry," he said. "So, ten years ago, Goldman and Hill would be on the line and would be talking about fixing a boxing match or would be fixing a soccer game in some place. And much of the fixing would be constrained because there wouldn't be enough capacity to get cash down on a small boxing match or a small wrestling thing or a small soccer game.

He continued, "Now, the same phenomenon which has hit the music industry or the travel industry or practically any industry that your listeners can think of, has hit what I ironically call the sports corruption industry. So you have these criminals sitting in Singapore or Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur, and they're planning fixing soccer games, ATP tennis, whatever you have, literally halfway around the world. And there's an enormous flow of money traveling around the world fixing these games."

He explained how the money being paid to fix these matches is an important part of the business plan of those sports organizations which are carrying out the fixing. He also discussed why this phenomenon of the globalization of the sports corruption industry has largely not reached North America, because of the sports "isolationism" which means that "nobody watches the sports you play" - yet. He predicted that this will change over the next five to ten years. And we discussed how all this applies to the combat sports, including boxing, wrestling, and MMA. We also discussed illegal and legal sports betting and their relation to match-fixing, the battle for better governance of sports organizations, the need for an international sports anti-corruption agency, and much more.

And towards the end of our discussion he said, "Eddie, thank you for your battle in trying to keep combat sports as clean as possible. It's very much appreciated."

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Labels: betting, boxing, combat sports, corruption, Declan Hill, Eddie Goldman, football, gambling, match-fixing, MMA, No Holds Barred, soccer, wrestling

Labels: betting, corruption, Eddie Goldman, gambling, Jacques Rogge, No Holds Barred