In April 201, the Canadian Soccer Association arranged a meeting to “further enhance Canada’s capacity to protect the integrity of sport and engage in international prevention efforts against match-fixing.” Those attending included representatives from international agencies such as soccer’s FIFA, Interpol and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Ontario Provincial Police, the Canada Border Services Agency and the Canadian Gaming Association. Describing the attitude of the Canadians, one attendee said, “It was extraordinary. We went around the table and most of the people said, ‘It’s a problem, but there is nothing we can do.’ It is like there is an open season for corruption in Canada.”
Match fixing is a growing problem in Canada, where lax laws and official indifference allegedly have allowed sports corruption to flourish in this age of global gambling. Even low-level Canadian soccer games with a minimum of fans are the subjects of bets made thousands of miles away, earning tens of millions of dollars for professional fixers.
Along with Albania and Malta, Canada was named in a 2016 report from Belgian-based Federbet for high levels of corruption. The sports integrity company Federbet said in 2015 European betting houses removed “en bloc matches from leagues like Albania, Cyprus, Malta, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Indonesia and Canada — the 10th least corrupt country in the world — because they clearly reflect signs of being fixed.”
The Canadian Soccer League, a small, obscure soccer league in southern Ontario, has long been suspected of match fixing. The CSL is the country’s third-ranked soccer league behind the Major League Soccer, which includes TFC and the Montreal Impact, and the North American Soccer League, home to teams in Edmonton and Ottawa.
CSL’s two divisions are made up of semi-professional teams from across southern Ontario, including Hamilton, Milton, Brantford, Scarborough, North York and Toronto. The players typically are paid a few hundred dollars a week, at most. Rarely more than a dozen people watch the matches. But the CSL is the considered one of the most corrupt leagues in terms of match fixing. Manager Pino Jazbec, based at a strip mall in Mississauga, said corruption exists, but not with every team in the league.
“It is the players who are fixing. I wish I could catch some of them and take it in front of the law and really punish them,” Jazbec said.
He added, “Everybody is making comedy when it comes to integrity. There have been allegations of fixing for years but we get no help from the Canadian Soccer Association. We do not have any gambling monitors. We do not have enough money for that kind of fancy stuff. What we try to do is film as many games as possible and scare the sh– out of the coaches and owners of the teams. If they can get the players to stop fixing that would be great. What I would like is just one person being properly investigated and charged because that would make all the others afraid.”
Match-fixing allegations in the CSL first came out in 2009 when German investigators intercepted dozens of calls between Ante Sapina, a previously convicted Croatian match-fixer living in Berlin, and his assistant who was scouting match-fixing opportunities in Canada. According to German police wiretaps, evidence at one of Sapina’s trials, the scout was only in Toronto a few days.
The scout said the CSL presented the perfect set-up. The players and owners in the CSL were poorly paid, and match fixing was not on the radar of the country’s sports authorities or police. For just $150,000, the fixers could buy their own team to manipulate. The plan included importing professional players from the Balkans who could play better than the average CLS player. The foreign players could be told when to win or lose games over inferior teams, and the fixers could profit. In fact, in the international gambling market, the total money being bet on the CSL was twice the amount of comparable European leagues.
In Germany, fixers placed bets with bookmakers in the Philippines and Malaysia using a network of “beards and runners” that hid their bet in Croatia, Slovenia and Turkey and benefited from the obscure Canadian soccer games.
According to German police, it all began on September 13, 2009, when fixers successfully convinced some players on Toronto Croatia to intentionally lose their match against Trois-Riveres. Toronto Croatia lost 4-1. According to trial records, one fixer commented, “Friend, if we don’t become rich here in Canada, then I don’t know where we could become rich.” Law enforcement officials said the problem in Canadian soccer only has become worse since then. In fact, the Ontario Provincial Police released a report that there was no due diligence for club ownership in the CSL, and “one potential target now owns a CSL team.”
Part of the problem is how in the last 15 years the internet has turned a local industry into a global market, dominated by barely regulated Asian bookmakers, who will take bets on any soccer game anywhere in the world. In Canada, the Canadian Gaming Association estimates sports gambling at $4.5 billion annually, mostly spent offshore. Globally, sports gambling is estimated at $93 billion to more than $1.5 trillion.
Patrick Jay, formerly head of gambling at the Hong Kong Jockey Club, the world’s largest regulated bookmaker, said, “We have a word for a day when the sports gambling market moves $4 billion. In Asia, we call it Thursday.”
Federbet is among the new businesses created to combat gambling corruption. In the last two years, the NBA, NFL and other major sports leagues have signed multimillion-dollar contracts with these companies to fight corruption. Federbet Secretary-General Francesco Baranca said, “We check over 400 bookmakers across the world. We can see if too much money is being bet on one team or a certain event. By doing this, we can tell with 99 per cent certainty that a game has been fixed.” Federbet and others watch the total volume of bets and money on a game to check for unusual odds movements that may indicate fixing.
According to Baranca, “The Canadian Soccer League is a disaster. Many bookmakers will not touch the league but when they do allow betting, the games are suspicious. In 2016, we still see crazy odds movements that makes us think that a lot of games are fixed.” An official of the International Centre for Sports called the CSL a “rogue league,” claiming up to 60 matches had been fixed in just one season.
Baranca said the fixing continued during the CSL season that ended on October 30. “They had two games in September that were absolutely fixed. They received a lot of bets from Russia and the market went crazy. They are still fixing games in Canada yet no one does anything. Why not?”
Canadian police finally launched some investigations into match fixing after years of pleas from international police. The Ontario Provincial Police opened but then closed a file. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police opened an investigation last February 2016 but it soon fizzled out. RCMP Corporal Urbano Ciccarelli said the force is not actively investigating the file still stays alert for new information. He said the issue is resources, and sports corruption simply is not a priority. “They’re more likely to pile on resources when you’ve got a shipment of cocaine coming in, but a fixed soccer match, well, they’re not going to throw 50 bodies at it and that’s just the reality,” Ciccarelli said.
