Abstract
The title to Declan Hill’s 2013 book The Insider’s Guide to Match-fixing in Football is potentially misleading. It is not, however, maliciously intended. Nor can Hill be faulted for his marketing acumen.
Hill himself is not inside the match-fixing network, nor does he purport to have fixed a game on his own terms. However, through a synthesis of what he calls “the ‘neglected art’ of actually talking to criminals” (p. 19) and some analytic statistics, Hill provides important empirical and theoretical insight into the mechanisms, motivations and, hopefully, preventative measures central to match-fixing in modern international football. As such Hill provides an important empirical contribution to the academic work on the socio-legal and deviancy issues in sport and society more generally. Specifically, the value of this work resonates in the specific characteristics of football as a case study for corruption. I will speak of this in more detail later; however, it is worth noting that football as a global phenomenon, with a commonly agreed upon set of rules and definitions that are maintained between cultures and contexts, provides a fascinating context in which to understand match-fixing as a “universal deviancy” (p. 10).
This book is different from Hill’s previous work, most notably The Fix (2008), in that he presents an academically and empirically grounded exploration into the conditions of match-fixing. In opposition to his previous journalistic attempts to raise awareness of match-fixing in the public consciousness, The Insider’s Guide is a conscious effort to explain why fixing happens. This requires a stringent delineation of concepts and definitions; a thoughtful engagement with sociological and criminological theory; and a rigorous employment of qualitative and quantitative research methods, most of which Hill succeeds in accomplishing. However, this is not to say that the content of The Insider’s Guide is difficult to access or particularly onerous. Indeed, Hill maintains that this is “an academic book for non-academics” (p. x), a claim that I will address shortly.
Hill’s central thesis is that rational choice, rather than culture, is one of the primary motivations for corruption in football. It is important to note here that Hill is employing a narrow conception of culture in terms of ethnic or national culture rather than the broader notion of culture employed by cultural studies scholars (i.e. culture as that which gives meaning to life, experience and action). Hence, he is arguing that corruption depends on a set of specific circumstances that are largely independent of a specific cultural formation, such as in this case Malaysian or Singaporean culture. Specifically, Hill demonstrates how the “main dynamic that drives [match-]fixing is the interaction of … two markets. The first is the legal sports market, which pays its actors [players and referees] poorly for doing their jobs well. The second is the illegal gambling market, which is willing to pay those same actors very well, for doing their jobs poorly” (p. 243). The perceived corruption level of a given professional soccer league, and a host of individual and context-specific variables further mediate this dynamic. For example, during the 1995 Singaporean and Malaysian match-fixing crisis the perceived level of corruption in the league and its administrators was high, which contributed to the decision to fix on the level of players and referees. Important mediating variables include the time of the season, the relative ability of the teams, the age and role of the potentially corrupted actor, and the composition of the fixing networks. Hill also demarcates between arrangement fixing and gambling fixing, provides a detailed account of fixing strategies from all actors in the fixing network, debunks prevalent myths about coercion as the dominant means by which matches are fixed, and perhaps most importantly uses his analysis to detail a number of more or less viable policies that could be implemented to deter corruption across a number of sports and sports leagues.
There were a number of policy recommendations that I found to be particularly interesting. Examples include those addressing player preparation. Hall advocates for educational programs, equality of pay, anonymous whistleblower hotlines and—most interesting and controversially—a benefit program in which players are incentivized to: not fix, for fear of losing increasing benefits, and to turn in corrupt associates for benefit package rewards. Other policy recommendations dealt with tournament incentives. Suggestions include structuring tournament and season play to increase the relative worth placed on each game; eliminate disparity in the desire to win between teams; and minimize the number of unnecessary matches. Other notable recommendations include protection of whistle blowers and public entrapment campaigns.
Hill draws these conclusions from the analysis of a breadth of data, including interviews with football officials, police officers, journalists, referees, coaches, players and corruptors; newspaper articles; covertly taped telephone conversations; judicial confessions; police confessions from the 1995 Malaysian and Singaporean corruption investigations; court transcripts; and match reports from fixed and non-fixed matches. From this data set he creates a number of coded databases from which to run simple statistical and qualitative analyses and predictions. For instance, he creates models demonstrating the ability to predict the characteristics of a fixed game based on a number of observable features. However, it is worth noting a significant caveat in this analysis. Namely, his data is derived from fixed matches that we know, with a greater or lesser extent of certainty, to be fixed. Thus, Hill’s analysis is only really predictive of the sample from which he can realistically draw. Importantly, this sample is limited by its selection methods (i.e. it became publically recognized as match-fixing). In other words, he can only base his statistics on those games that we know were fixed. Therefore, he has a limited inferential claim for predicting matches that are not uncovered. The issue is that these models may not give us any insight into the structure of fixing that remains under the public or administrational raider.
Hill also makes the claim that The Insider’s Guide is an academic book for non-academics: “hopefully, there are no places in the text that someone, without a specific background in sociology, criminology or statistics cannot understand what is going on” (p. x). He achieves this goal. Despite the seemed complexity of the data analysis and theoretical methods I have described, The Insider’s Guide is undoubtedly an accessible book. He lays his arguments and progressions out neatly, and has a skill for providing complex ideas simply. In this respect, I believe this book would provide a fantastic companion text to an undergraduate course in the areas of sport-law, sports-analytics, sports-administration or the sociology, corruption and/or criminology of sport. However, this minimalism does mean he occasionally loses some nuance with regards to theoretical and methodological implementation. Indeed, those readers who are well-versed in sociology, criminology and/or statistics may find the simple applications frustrating at times. However, if one can get over the occasional short-treatment of concepts and methods dear to his or her own areas of expertise, then the ease in which foreign notions are introduced surely makes it worthwhile.
I believe the readers of this journal would like this book for two further reasons. The first is that, as Hill propones, football presents a fascinating case for the study of match-fixing as a form of “universal deviancy” (p. 10). What Hill is arguing here is that match-fixing is one of the few actions that is considered equally as deviant across cultures and history (consider for instance how drug-taking, various sexual practices and slavery fluctuate with regards to cultural acceptance and legality). For those of us interested in the socio-legal aspects of sport, and might I add the socio-legal aspects of society more generally, it is clear that the legal parameters guiding behavior are entirely dynamic and fluctuate considerably as a result of different cultural norms (we can think of concussion-related issues in the NFL, and state legalizations of marijuana as current examples of this trend). Therefore, an in-depth look into an act that is considered deviant across societies and history provides a fascinating insight into how deviant behavior might persist in the face of sustained negative social judgment.
Secondly, regardless of your interest in soccer-football, Hill provides a comprehensive model for the mechanisms through which a sports match is fixed. This includes an identification of the contexts, the actors, the relationships, the bribes and those vulnerable to influence. In this respect Hill provides an account that can be variously tuned to add transparency to almost any professional sporting competition. For example, I for one was fascinated by his description of the genius ways that corruptors position athletes so that it is difficult to decline fixing offers, even without the threat of coercion. This is an insight that could inform understandings of deviant behavior in a number of sports. This is a valuable book in the field of corruption in sport, aspects of which will come to inform the administration of sports leagues in the near future.