By Paul Nicholson
February 26 – The first weekend of football in Spain’s leagues after the dramatic arrests of 32 suspected matchfixers last week has seen a welcome return to normality in the Spanish football betting markets. LaLiga head of integrity Alfredo Lorenzo, said that the “from the intelligence we have on Segunda B and the Third Division, it is completely flat.”
February 21 – Sports specialist insurance broker Hart Special Risks, based in Genoa, Italy, have become a supporting partner of the Tackling Matchfixing conference, March 9-10. They join Sportradar and the Asian Football Confederation as a Supporting Sponsor. The Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee are sponsoring the conference dinner at Chelsea Football Club’s Stamford Bridge stadium on March 9.
February 20 – The scourge of matchfixing has reared its ugly head in Spain yet again with a spate of arrests relating to alleged rigging in the country’s lower leagues.
February 19 – The Early Bird registration price of £395 for the Tackling Matchfixing conference, March 9/10 at the Chelsea harbour Hotel in Chelsea, London, closes today.
By Paul Nicholson
February 19 – UEFA Disciplinary Inspectors have received anonymous death threats after re-opening a match-fixing probe into Albanian club KF Skënderbeu.
February 16 – The Tackling Matchfixing conference, March 9/10 in Chelsea, London, has added three new speakers to its speaker line-up.
By Andrew Warshaw
February 15 – Several years after the incident first hit the headlines, Spanish prosecutors have dramatically reopened a case against 41 individuals, including 36 players, over alleged matchfixing relating to a top-flight survival decider between Levante and Real Zaragoza.
February 15 – The Bulgarian Football Union (BFU) which has long been battling criminal matchfixing gangs operating within its leagues, has unveiled a new education strategy that will see 32 workshops per season covering referees, BFU officials and all players in the country’s top two tiers.
February 14 – The Early Bird conference registration rate for the Tackling Matchfixing conference, March 9/10, at the Chelsea Harbour Hotel, London, closes Monday 19 February.
February 12 – Emanuel Macedo de Medeiros does not mince his worlds when it comes to issues of sports integrity. More needs to be done, it needs to be done now and these are non-negotiable conditions. For de Medeiros, tackling matchfixing is very firmly in the middle of that mix of integrity issues globally that have to be addressed.
February 8 – Two former members of the Under-21 Maltese national team have been declared guilty of match-fixing after a Maltese court of appeal overturned the original judgment that had cleared them.
February 8 – LaLiga’s Integrity and Security director Alfredo Lorenzo Mena has confirmed he will be speaking at the Tackling Matchfixing conference in London, March 9-10. He will join a panel examining what Europe’s biggest leagues are doing to combat and defend themselves against match fixers.
February 6 – Crime-busting police forces in Malaysia have been directed to flush out matchfixing among players, coaches and the management of league teams.
February 2 – The ESSA, the 26-member bookmaker betting integrity group, has announced 266 cases of suspicious betting being reported to relevant authorities in 2017, with 114 of them in the last quarter. Football made up 45 of the reported alerts.
By Paul Nicholson
January 30 – Greek football is in chaos and the crisis in the top professional tiers is not showing any signs of improvement. This is despite a FIFA normalisation committee led by Portuguese Vitor Melo Pereira and the parachuting in last week of UEFA director of national associations Zoran Laković. Rather than finding solutions, his trip in fact just rubber stamped the ‘new’ status quo.