Too big to jail: Match-fixing,institutional failure and the shifting of responsibility

Introduction

As match-fixing in sports has surfaced as a global problem, many attempts have been made to address this issue under the cliched title of protecting ‘the integrity of sports’ (Carpenter, 2012; Chappelet, 2015; Villeneuve and Diaconu, 2011). For instance, sports organisations and governments have developed various solutions that are generally classified into three types of countermeasures: education, sanctions and betting pattern monitoring (Aquilina and Chetcuti, 2014; Tak et al., 2016). Irrespective of their effectiveness, however, those measures arguably target individual actors such as athletes, coaches, referees and illegal bookies, implying that match-fixing is a matter of individual ethical or moral failure. Similarly, despite its contribution to our understanding of match-fixing, academic literature available to date is broadly grounded on what can be regarded as common ethical standards, rather than questioning the very structure from which match-fixing arises (e.g. Blackshaw, 2013; Bozkurt, 2012; Carpenter, 2012; Cheloukhine, 2013; Forrest, 2012; Gokhale, 2009; Harvey, 2015; Hill, 2009a, 2009b, 2015; Masters, 2015).

To this extent, it is important to recognise that match-fixing occurs within certain institutional contexts. Moreover, these contexts are predominantly created by the business of sports betting because it officially relocates sports within an artificial market that can place as much monetary value on losing as winning (Forrest, 2013; Nowy and Breuer, 2016; Rodenberg et al., 2016). Even though matches are actually manipulated by individual actors on the spot, it is institutionalised sports betting that initially permits and structurally enables the potential for match-fixing. Therefore, in order to understand the issue of match-fixing and the mechanism of blame attribution, the institutional arrangements around sports gambling should also be taken into consideration.

New institutionalist approaches in political science offer a useful theoretical lens through which to view match-fixing because they point to the importance of rules and practices in shaping behaviour and socio-political outcomes (Hall and Taylor, 1996; Lowndes and Roberts, 2013). From this perspective, sports betting not only exists as software on countless global websites where bets can be placed; it also exists as hardware consisting of disparate cultural institutions (sports and gambling), operating through various rules including: government sanctions, advertising regulations, codes of conduct and penalties for contravention (Lowndes and Roberts, 2013). The resultant institutional design, therefore, has consequences (March and Olsen, 1989; Offe, 2006), whether intended, positive ones such as increased tax revenues or unintended, negative ones such as match-fixing. This paper examines how the institutional design of sports betting not only precipitates match-fixing but how and why match-fixing becomes framed as a problem of individual morality.

To capture the distinctive features of sports betting’s institutional design, the South Korean professional football-betting regime is strategically juxtaposed with the South Korean motorboat race betting regime since they provide polarised institutional designs and consequences. Given the unique nature of gambling on athletes as autonomous human agents, I first highlight an inherent governing trade-off between pursuing: (1) managerial efficiency to insulate players from outside influence; and (2) ethical legitimacy to render the business of sports betting socially desirable. In turn, I analyse how the conflicting considerations are reconciled in the contrasting types of sports betting.

Using a qualitative multi-method approach (Schmidt, 2006), including contextualisation, document analysis and semi-structured interviews with athletes and officials in the football and motorboat racing industries, this study reveals that the Korean football-betting regime engenders match-fixing by sacrificing managerial efficiency for ethical legitimacy, while also shifting the institutional responsibility for match-fixing onto individuals. Consequently, I suggest that the answer to the question ‘Who is to blame for failure?’ is not something functionally determined; rather, it is determined politically and justified by the institution per se. In this sense, this study is ultimately about institutional power that renders individual ethical failure a much greater crime than institutional failure, only because the institution of sports betting is ‘too big to fail’, and thus ‘too big to jail’ (Offe, 2006; Pontell et al., 2014; Tillman, 2013).

To begin, I review the enduring historical relationship between sports and gambling, as well as the attendant challenges it poses to contemporary sports governance. In turn, I explain the new institutionalist approaches in political science as a theoretical framework. After outlining the context for the cases under analysis and the methodology, the institution of sports betting is analysed with particular attention to its capacity to handle the challenges and its determination of responsibility. Finally, I conclude by discussing the legitimating capacity of the institution of sports betting.

Sports and gambling: The nexus and the challenge

By the late 18th century, gambling coexisted with a range of modern sports (Guttmann, 1986). For instance, in cricket, golf, pedestrianism and pugilism, rules were elaborated to ensure equal opportunity and the eradication of cheating for the sake of betting (Anderson, 2007; Forrest and Simmons, 2003; McNamee, 2013; Munting, 1996; Vamplew, 2007). However, the emergent capitalist social norms excluded gambling as a menace to the virtues of the protestant work ethic, while embracing sports for their potential merits as a means of self-development, healthy lifestyles and character building (Clapson, 1992; McDaniel et al., 2004). Moreover, as gambling interests increasingly influenced the integrity of game outcomes (Cabot and Faiss, 2002; Nathan, 2003), event promoters faced a dilemma: whether to continue to secure revenues from gambling or to disconnect themselves from gambling and pioneer their own market (McDaniel et al., 2004). Some well established and viable sports, such as football in the UK and baseball in the US, tried to detach from gambling, while horseracing maintained a close relationship (Adelman, 1986; Clapson, 1992; McKelvey, 2004; Munting, 1996; Taylor, 2005).

However, sports tend to remain independent of the ‘sin product’ only when it does not threaten their well-being (McDaniel et al., 2004). Whenever sports organisations are in financial difficulty, they may willingly reunite with gambling. Moreover, since the last quarter of the 20th century, many local and national governments around the world have legalised or tried to legalise sports betting with the aim of raising state revenue (Cosgrave and Klassen, 2001; Goodman, 1995; Hoye, 2006; Rodenberg, 2012; Seelig and Seelig, 1998). Likewise, sports betting firms try to obtain legitimate licenses and provide sponsorships to sports organisations in order to secure stable financial resources as well as a competitive edge (Doyle, 2008; Häberling, 2012). Today, these collective interests around sports betting constitute what can be called a ‘sports-betting complex’, a self-regulatory regime, consisting of major, often interrelated stakeholders (Tak et al., 2016).

This contemporary reunion between sports and gambling recreates the same challenges faced by the modern event promoters noted earlier. First, associating sports with potentially harmful commodities such as alcohol, tobacco and gambling presents an ethical challenge in and of itself (McDaniel et al., 2004; Villeneuve and Diaconu, 2011). Second, match-fixing scandals, which are on the rise, require a more efficient management of sports players. Accordingly, today’s sports-betting complex tries to contend with the challenge of simultaneously maintaining public support for the partnership and regulating its side-effects.

However, a major problem is that securing ethical legitimacy and managerial efficiency constitutes a trade-off in terms of how each is pursued. For example, the International Cricket Council and Major League Soccer in the US banned using cell phones in dressing rooms (MailOnline, 2011; Tannenwald, 2013). While this simple measure increases managerial efficiency by protecting players from outside influence, the tighter such measures become, the more sports matches appear as though they are mainly organised for the purpose of gambling, signalling also the sport’s close institutional association with betting. By contrast, applying softer countermeasures (such as a code of conduct) might maintain ethical legitimacy but decrease the managerial efficiency of controlling players, raising the likelihood of match-fixing. This paper explores how the trade-offs between the two considerations are contested within the institutional design of the sports-betting complex. The following section maps the theoretical landscape within which sports betting is located so that it can be examined as a socio-cultural institution.

Institutions, institutional design and institutional power

A basic premise underpinning institutional thinking is that some given, predetermined contexts that embody a certain degree of rigidity provide a regular, predictable and stable foundation for human life (Huntington, 1968; Offe, 2006). For instance, it is through political institutions that we can exercise our fundamental rights such as freedom of speech, and it is through economic institutions that we can engage in transactions with a total stranger, while limiting the possibility of fraud (March and Olsen, 2006; Offe, 2006). By virtue of institutions, individuals can make strategic decisions, avoid trial and error, and even perform a range of social roles (Berger and Luckmann, 1966; March and Olsen, 1989).

New institutional theorists explain that institutions shape the behaviour of actors through three interrelated modes of constraint: formal rules, informal practices and ideas (Lowndes and Roberts, 2013; Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Thelen and Steinmo, 1992). First, there are rules stipulated in formal regulations such as laws, terms of reference and contracts (Lowndes and Roberts, 2013). As a formalised logic, these rules define possible and desirable actions, as well as the sanctions for deviant actions (Ostrom, 2005). Second, informal practices provide scripts and templates for appropriate behaviour in specific settings, so individuals are naturally socialised into the roles imposed by the institutions in which they reside (March and Olsen, 2006). Third, woven into the formal and informal rules are tacit ideas of ‘what is normal’ (Offe, 2006: 15). Such ideas function as an underlying logic of institutions and/or as an ethos to be inculcated into individuals, such as ‘honesty and competitiveness in business’ and ‘impersonal neutrality in bureaucracy’ (Offe, 2006: 16).

Due to the structuring capacity of institutions, policy actors try to attach their interests and ideas to institutions (Lowndes and Roberts, 2013). However, such interventions are hardly guaranteed because they ‘always work with materials inherited from and… unalterably shaped by the past’ (Goodin, 1996: 30). The residuals of the past, such as old practices and power relations, are projected onto the present choices, creating the phenomenon of path dependency (Krasner, 1984; Pierson, 2000a). That is, institutions do not come into being as a result of a purposive, rational, consequential design process in a vacuum; rather, they are designed indeterminately, patching together the artifacts of the past, current institutional environments and power relations (Goodin, 1996; Pierson, 2000a).

Although it is difficult to capture the features of institutional designs in perpetual transformations, two static models (hierarchy and network) can be used heuristically to provide a brief picture of how particular contexts shape actions and activate ideas (Bevir, 2012). The rules, practices and ideas of each institutional model collectively set up the model’s operating logic such as its ‘norms’ (authority or trust), ‘tools of coordination’ (rules and commands or diplomacy), ‘degrees of accountability’ (high or low) and culture (subordination or reciprocity) (Bevir, 2012: 17). Applied to sports betting, we can see the significance of institutional design by imagining the sports-betting complex (which generally operates as a network model) functioning as a hierarchy instead. Indeed, what if English Premier League (EPL) football offered odds on the matches they provide and took bets from punters? What if private betting firms such as Ladbrokes founded their own football league instead of using the EPL? From an institutionalist perspective, this might suggest that football and horseracing have different meanings in society, not because of the inherent nature of the events, but because of their respective institutional designs – their respective norms, tools of coordination and degrees of accountability. In other words, whether an event that includes the placing of bets is more likely to be seen as a sporting event or as a betting event is a consequence of its institutional design: that is, the way the event is combined with betting.

Given the influence institutions have on ‘the generation, distribution, exercise and control of social power’, institutional design is also a matter of channelling this social power with respect to: when, to whom and how much (Offe, 2006: 9). Indeed, institutional design not only determines who is included and excluded, but allocates resources, responsibility, credit and blame, thereby advantaging some actors and ideas at the expense of others (Goodin, 1996; Lowndes and Roberts, 2013; Offe, 2006; Sam, 2005). More importantly, the structuring effects on individuals and distributional capacities of institutions reinforce and legitimise themselves in a cyclical manner (Offe, 2006). As a consequence, rules, practices and ideas that are not necessarily self-evident (e.g. heterosexuality, monogamy and the private property system) become taken for granted within certain institutional contexts (e.g. modern capitalism and patriarchal nation states), and institutions can acquire a certain degree of objectivity that is almost considered ‘natural’, contributing to the stability of social life (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). It is this theoretical background against which I illustrate how, the way sports are combined with betting establishes priorities, determines responsibility and exerts the power of self-perpetuation.

Football and motorboat race betting in South Korea

In this article, two sporting events with strong links to betting serve as the main cases: (1) South Korean football betting because of its 2011 match-fixing scandal; and (2) South Korean motorboat race betting as a comparative counterpart due to its contrasting institutional design and match-fixing incident in 2012. At present, South Korea has four legitimate sports-related gambling businesses: horseracing, cycle racing, motorboat racing and sports betting. While horseracing, governed by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, has the highest total sales (about US$6.7 billion ¹ in 2015), other activities, within the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST), generate about US$2 billion (cycle racing), US$0.6 billion (motorboat racing) and US$3 billion (sports betting) in sales respectively (National Gambling Control Commission, 2016). Cycle racing, motorboat racing and sports betting are in fact managed by one quasi-government organisation, called the Korea Sports Promotion Foundation (KSPF), established to operate the National Sports Promotion Fund. Most revenues from the three betting enterprises go into this fund, to be allocated to overall sports promotion (around US$1 billion in 2015).

Motorboat racing was launched in 2002 to make the most of the 1988 Olympic boat racing course and to increase the National Sports Promotion Fund (Kim, 2009). Both the racing events and bookmaking are organised in a hierarchical structure aligned with the KSPF (Noh, 2003). The events are regularly held on Wednesdays and Thursdays from February to December with 15 races on each event day. In every race, six boat racers compete on a 300-metre course in either a 1200 or 1800-metre event. Bets are offered at the racecourse in Seoul and off-course branches across the nation (Noh, 2003).

In 2012, there was a race-fixing incident identified in motorboat racing. A top-class racer was accused and later found guilty of informing two racing punters of the predicted results of 17 races in which he was to compete, in return for receiving US$245,000 (The Korea Times, 2012a). The Uijeongbu District Prosecutor’s office announced that the racer had smuggled a mobile phone through the boat maintenance garage next to the camp before entering the camp, and used it to send text messages to the racing punters outside (Uijeongbu District Prosecutor’s Office, 2012). In the end, the racer was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment with a US$245,000 fine (Uijeongbu District Court, 2012), and the KSPF reinforced its policy against corruption.

The Korean sports betting industry was initiated in 2001 as a means of funding new football stadia for the 2002 FIFA World Cup (Park, 2009). As of this writing, football, basketball, baseball, volleyball, golf and ssireum (Korean traditional combat sport) are being used as betting events. Unlike motorboat racing, the KSPF contracts out the business to a sole private operator, ‘TOTO’, that offers bets on both domestic and international sporting events. Revenues are collected by the KSPF and 10% of it is allocated to the domestic event organisers. Since football is one of the most popular betting products, the Korean Football Association (KFA) (the national football governing body) received around US$30m in 2015. The Korean professional football league (K-League) shares half of the proceeds, which are redistributed to K-League clubs (KFA, 2016). Under the regulations of the National Sports Promotion Act, these stakeholders constitute a network for the supply of sports betting products and for the distribution of revenues.

The football-betting regime constitutes an important site for academic inquiry given that, in the 2011 K-League match-fixing scandal, the fixers placed most of their bets with the then subcontractor, ‘Sports TOTO’ (Seo and Han, 2012). Despite the fact that the sole licensed operator could not explain the irregular betting patterns on the fixed matches, and that more than 50 players were found guilty of participating in the fixing schemes (Ryu, 2011), the legitimacy of the gambling business and of the football-betting regime was not questioned (Kim and Kim, 2012). While prosecutors proceeded with a comprehensive investigation targeting K-League players and illegal bookmakers, the regime responded with proposals for a wide range of remedies, successfully drawing attention away from any aspects of the institutional failure (Tak et al., 2016).

Methodology

For the institutional analysis of the ‘deep, non-observable structures’ of contemporary sports betting (Marsh and Furlong, 2002: 37), this study employed a qualitative multi-method approach (Schmidt, 2006) consisting of: (1) contextualisation; (2) document analysis; and (3) semi-structured interviews with athletes and officials in the football and motorboat racing industries. Data were gathered twice from the organisations involved in the motorboat racing and football betting, including the MCST, the KFA, K-League, K-League clubs, KSPF and TOTO: first, in September, November and December of 2013, and subsequently in February and March of 2015.

Contextualisation offered a comprehensive institutional background of the two betting regimes that can enable or constrain certain actions, ideas and interests within those regimes (Gee and Jackson, 2012; Rousseau and Fried, 2001). To gain a clearer ‘underlying picture of the empirical world’ that would guide and signpost the overall tasks of this study (Blumer, 1969: 24), I familiarised myself with the context by consulting a variety of sources including: media coverage, academic literature, internet communities of football betting and motorboat race betting and the websites of the relevant organisations.

Document analysis was carried out in two separate modes given that the rules and regulations in written materials not only describe what the current forms of the betting regimes look like, but simultaneously engage in the construction of those forms, as ‘institutional software’ which necessarily embeds supportive ideas about the current forms of the two institutional designs (Atkinson and Coffey, 2004; Dryzek, 1996; Lowndes and Roberts, 2013: 53). The composition of the two sports betting regimes, their ways of operating and the relationship of the interested parties were drawn from documentary texts including: relevant laws, National Assembly proceedings, articles of association, financial reports, consulting reports, press releases and public relations material of the organisations involved.

Semi-structured interviews contributed to a deep understanding of how individual actors accepted, experienced and interpreted the rules, practices and ideas within the regimes (Lowndes and Roberts, 2013). Interviewees were purposely sampled from two groups: (1) officials who create and/or apply rules with the inculcated ethos of the institutions; and (2) event performers (players and racers) whose actions and accordant social reputations are directly governed and created by the regimes. Considering the inclination of players and racers to be loath to meet strangers and open up to share information, the recruitment of athletes was made through personal connections in both areas. A total of six participants were recruited including: one KFA manager and two former K-League players who had been found guilty of match-fixing, from ‘the football-betting regime’; and one KSPF manager and two motorboat racers, from ‘the motorboat race betting regime’. The officials from KFA and KSPF were asked to compare their respective events as a betting medium, while the four athletes were mainly asked about their life and experience as the objects of betting both inside and outside their sporting/racing venues. Prior to the interviews, all participants were made aware of the purpose of the project, the uses of interview data and their right to withdraw at any point, through an information sheet that had been approved by the Human Ethics Committee of my affiliated institution. All interviews were conducted in Korean, audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim by myself. After analysis, I translated selected excerpts for presentation.

Data, including interview transcripts, were analysed through ‘theoretically informed reflections’ on several concepts of new institutionalism presented in the previous section (Kvale, 2007: 118, Silverman, 2005). In this consciously eclectic manner, the empirical data and theoretical explanations were filtered through each other, thereby producing their own unique interpretations with respect to the institutional performance and consequences of two sports betting regimes. These interpretations are presented in the next part of this article.

Two institutional designs for sports on the gambling table

Metaphorically speaking, sports betting is akin to locating sports on a gambling table. As previously mentioned, two main issues arise from this scenario. First, unlike other types of gambling (that use inanimate objects such as cards or dice with no agency), betting on sports involves betting on autonomous human beings. Since human agency can be exploited by outside influences when human beings are placed on the gambling table, the means through which people can be insulated from outside pressure is a key concern for today’s sports-betting regime and reflects the pursuit of managerial efficiency. Second, given the public unease of combining the idealised sports with problematic, inappropriate gambling, another important governance consideration is how to render the enterprise societally acceptable, which represents the pursuit of social legitimacy. The next section shows how the managerial and ethical challenges are addressed within the two different institutional designs for sports betting: motorboat race betting and football betting.

Responsibility shift from institution to individuals

The case has been made that the exposure of football players to the dangers of match-fixing is an institutional failure engendered by the football-betting regime’s design that operates to enhance its political viability. Accepting failure, however, is also compensated by shifting the responsibility for safeguarding the integrity of sports to individual players. This section shows how the network design of the football-betting regime serves as a platform for powerful stakeholders to shift responsibility downwards, and how the traditional idea of sports ethics plays an important part in making the responsibility shift taken for granted (Lowndes and Roberts, 2013).

One basic feature of the football-betting design is the difficulty of clarifying where the responsibilities lie for match-fixing. This difficulty is a result of a complex network of the football-betting regime, consisting of several institutional interconnections amongst a number of interested parties (Bevir, 2012; Black, 2008). While there are clear lines of financial and legal accountabilities (e.g. the distribution of revenues and legal penalties for match-fixing), who should be held responsible for match-fixing as a social issue remains highly ambiguous. Thus, when things go wrong, the complex network structure makes it almost impossible for ordinary people to pinpoint ‘who exactly is responsible for what’ (Hood, 2011: 81).

In this ‘no-one-in-charge world’ (Crosby and Bryson, 2005: 1), individual players are the only actors that are tangible in the public’s eye, while the key stakeholders remain behind the scene (Hood, 2011). Moreover, the ingrained ideas of the integrity of sports can be used as an ethical discourse to pin down football players to an individual level of responsibility. One example of this is found in the KFA manager’s opinion that: ‘Things like having to overcome the temptation that comes with betting’ are a ‘social obligation’ that must be understood and accepted ‘as soon as achieving the title of “football player”’ (KFA manager). Under the ethical ideas of sportsmanship, K-Leaguers are left in a laissez-faire environment, unlike their counterparts in motorboat racing. Such a considerable degree of latitude might appear to be the scope given to demonstrate the football players’ higher level of integrity. However, this is the point where institutional responsibility for the failure to insulate is shifted to individual ethical responsibility. That is, the integrity of football that fails to be defended by the institutional design now rests on the shoulders of individual players.

Indeed, when the 2011 match-fixing scandal erupted, the freedom that individual players had been endowed with immediately turned into a convincing excuse to blame them. Given their perceived freedom, players’ misdeeds are regarded as ‘deliberate human decisions’ because it is their choice (Stone, 2012: 168). The key stakeholders produced narratives or stories through the media, framing the scandal in a way that advocates the ideas of integrity (Lowndes and Roberts, 2013). Certainly, the tone of the main narratives was hostile as seen in the subheading of a news article that reads: ‘Don’t taint sportsmanship with greed’ (The Korea Times, 2012b). This kind of dramatisation of problems can not only ‘convey the speaker’s moral attitude’ (Linde, 2001: 163), but ‘mobilise anger’ (Stone, 2012: 171). One of the unintended consequences of the imputed responsibility, media publicity and the mobilised public indignation was the suicide of two players implicated in the scandal. The interview with convicted Player B alludes to how intense the pressure was.

Grossly exaggerated on the internet and the news, you know… well… there were a lot of bigger issues, in some sense… but rather than those things, [match-fixing] appeared all day… faces appeared, names appeared… It’s just that they did so just because we were sports players… so… [the suicides might have killed themselves] because it was so hard… (Convicted Player B)

To some extent, therefore, the technically diminishable problem becomes an onerous burden for individual players. From the perspective of stakeholders within the football-betting regime, on the other hand, the institutional costs incurred by the inefficient insulation are offset by the benefit of not having to structure hierarchically and by maintaining the capacity to castigate the burdensome individuals. Furthermore, even if match-fixing continues to occur, players are easily replaceable. In that sense, the shift in responsibility is a surprisingly effective strategy in today’s sports-betting governance. By shifting the institutional responsibility to individuals, the regime can escape the enduring governing dilemma between efficiency and legitimacy. Consequently, the regime not only maintains the commercial value of football itself but secures the revenues from betting, without making special efforts to insulate players as the race-betting regime does.

Discussion and conclusion: The institutional power of sports betting

‘What’s breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank?’

This article has explored the institutional design of sports betting by which match-fixing takes place, and is yet framed as an individual ethical failure. The results reveal that the football-betting regime as an institution exerts structuring effects and generates intended and unintended consequences in several ways. First, in the formation of football betting, the residues of past institutions around the sport steered it towards a network design. As a result, the network provided particular institutional contexts where past interests and ideas remain influential in managing the football-betting regime in favour of maintaining the legacy of football, but at the expense of stricter management of betting. Second, the loose network design and the institutional rules that distribute uneven resources and power also offered room for powerful stakeholders to shift responsibility from the institution to individual players. In doing so, a form of football that would have been called a type of gambling has acquired the semblance of a sport and maintained firm social legitimacy; however, this was at the cost of engendering the continuous occurrence of match-fixing. In this last section, I conclude by discussing how the football-betting regime legitimises itself through its institutional power.

As Villeneuve and Aquilina (2016) show in their analysis of media coverage about match-fixing in the UK and Germany, the blame for match-fixing can be attributed to almost any part of the system (Hardin, 1996). For example, one moral argument (Harvey, 2015) suggests that match-fixing is unethical because it treats innocent participants as a ‘means to earn some money with the bookmaker at the expense of their desire to engage in legitimate competition’ (p. 401). However, the same idea works on ‘supra individual entities’ (Hardin, 1996: 126) such as institution–individual relations, in the sense that the institution of sports betting treats individual players as a means to earn some ‘more’ money with the bookmakers at the expense of the risk that players have to bear.

As such, one primary way of wielding institutional power is through the representation of who is culpable. For example, education programmes lecture the athletes about the need to play fair, but as is often the case with doping and obesity, the narratives define those problems as stemming from personal greed (Aubel and Ohl, 2014; Hood, 2011). Moreover, harsh disciplinary actions taken by governments and sports governing bodies and their scandalous representation bear the hallmark of what Baudrillard (1994) refers to as ‘a simulation of a scandal for generative ends’ (p. 16). Just as ‘[the American Watergate case] had to be reported as a scandal in order to conceal the fact that it was a commonplace of American political life’ (Storey, 2015: 190), the football-betting regime frames match-fixing as a scandal, thus masking the fact that match-fixing is an inescapable product of sports betting, and successfully making it appear to be an unusual moral deviation of individuals.

The necessity of blame assignment reminds us of the fact that institutions are hardly self-evident, so that they require legitimation (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). No matter how natural they may seem to some people, institutions never satisfy everyone nor can they be fair to everyone, as long as they are human creations (Offe, 2006). If an institution is considered legitimate, then it is just because the institution maintains a particular fit with its environments, and its ‘publicly defensible’ ideas (Goodin, 1996: 41) are actively working (Lowndes and Roberts, 2013).

It may be illustrative to compare two taken-for-granted institutions: banking and sports betting. Arguably, Brecht’s epigram at the opening of this section lays bare the institutional power of the banking system by deliberately overriding the unquestioning legitimacy of banking (Offe, 2006). From this perspective, the banking system can be legitimate only when it can accuse individuals of robbing a bank, because in doing so, the institution of banking can cover up its institutional deficiency of making the poor far poorer and feeding criminality, which could otherwise disclose the non-taken-for-granted legitimacy of the banking system. In the same vein, we can also raise a similar question: ‘what is committing match-fixing, compared to establishing sports betting?’ Adopting the subversive perspective of Brecht, betting on human agency – that is, sports betting – is not legitimate by itself; rather, it can also be called a crime that enables and encourages match-fixing, a crime that makes individual misdemeanour a much bigger crime in order to conceal its own.

However, institutions are basically too big to jail. For example, imprisoning bank robbers is a far more efficient way of maintaining social order than starting a revolution to reform the capitalist distribution system represented by the bank, at least until the prison is packed with bank thieves, exposing the systemic deficiency of the regime. Likewise, match-fixing becomes a matter of individual morality, not because the individual act of fixing a match per se is more immoral than the institutional approval of betting on human agency, but because accusing individuals’ misdeeds and showcasing whose fault it is may be much easier than overthrowing all the pre-existing stakeholders, their interests and the deeply entrenched ethic of integrity around sports betting, which all constitute part of the current social order that institutions are originally supposed to serve (Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Offe, 2006). In this regard, who is to blame is determined politically and legitimised by institutional power. By displaying the regular rituals of excommunicating sports players who personify the inherent deficiency of the sports-betting business, the contemporary sports-betting regimes across the globe ‘re-inject a large dose of morality’ into individuals and pre-empt challenges to the legitimacy of the institution of sports betting (Baudrillard, 1994).