Wednesday 15 October 2014

The Brand Is Everything; Pay Homage To The Brand


Football, like financial capitalism, is systemically corrupt.

If the populace cease to accept the validity of these corrupt mechanisms, then each will collapse under the weight of their own absurdity.

Hence the critical importance of protecting the brand - that fake measure of value.

1) La Liga president Javier Tebas detected matchfixing at a 3rd Division match in Spain on the weekend prior to the international break.

Tebas: "We detected the problem and communicated it to the responsible authority, but they chose to hide it... because they don't want to recognise that this problem exists, even in the lower division."

So matchfixing took place, was profited upon by the insiders and few are any the wiser.

2) One of my colleagues reported two Premier League matches to a body that allegedly looks into matchfixing. 
Fulsome evidence including recordings, betting patterns linked to private accounts, incriminatory emails and a variety of other evidence exists on these two matches (both involving Fulham when Roy Hodgson was their manager).
Reading were relegated as a direct result of one of these events.
My colleague was told to approach local police which was hardly feasible when one particular policeman refereed both of the fixed matches!
So we went elsewhere.

3) The Swedish Central Bank has just presented the 2014 Nobel Prize for Economics to Jean Tirole, a man whose gross stupidity could only be overwhelmed by the value of this stupidity to the financial system that he attempts to support.

One should read William K Black's evisceration of this backing of the capitalist brand http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/10/hold-wallet-swedish-central-bank-prize-rewards-clever.html#more-8725

Black: "So the obvious question is how Tirole, in authoring his book on corporate finance theory and as the exemplar of “clever” approaches to financial regulation missed the [2008] crisis, missed the causes of the crisis, missed the causes of past crises, and advanced ideas on financial regulation that would not have prevented our banking crises?"

Ah! Branding again...

4) It has been exposed today that Arsenal charge their fans 10 times more than Barcelona and FC Bayern Munchen for season tickets.
Barcelona have won 6 La Liga titles and 3 Champions Leagues in last decade.
FC Bayern have won 6 Bundesliga and 1 Champions League in last ten years.
Arsenal have won the FA Cup. 
Once.

Surely it is the Catalans and Bavarians who should be charging 10 times more?

In a desperate attempt to protect the brand, media releases were rushed out informing all fans of the Gunners that Theo Walcott will return for Arsenal U21's and may even play at the weekend versus Hull City.

Well, that's alright then - we've had to remortgage the house to fund the season tickets but at least Theo's back (with his £100,000 per week wages)...

The primary irony here is that John Colquhoun, Theo Walcott's agent, also had a very close affiliation with the two fixed matches involving Fulham that we mention above.

In Germany, corrupt referee Hoyzer was imprisoned; Italy targeted criminalities with calciopoli producing 3 prison sentences, numerous life bans and the relegation of Juve; Tebas is taking on matchfixing in La Liga including Levante versus Real Zaragoza which saw Deportivo La Coruna demoted in same criminalised fashion as Reading...
... but in Britain, people are just laughing all the way to the bank. 

                                                       

Sunday 5 October 2014

Football Goes Peaky Blinders


Peaky Blinders is the only decent drama that the BBC has produced in decades.

Combining the war criminalities and state terrorism of Winston Churchill and the Irish Office, police brutality, communist takeovers of the Unions, the fixing of horseracing (both on-course and off), the schisms of the IRA in the Irish Civil War and the role of gypsies on the peripheries of society, the show is pure theatre...
... just like top flight football.

Much of football is no longer sport but theatre and there are many in the game who are happy that this triumph of spectacle over integrity has been achieved.
And there are arguments from the moneyheads that this theatre is greater than integrity if it enhances the brand.

But spectacle has darker sides - the linking of agreed match outcomes to multi-billion pound betting markets and the winning of titles.

Take two recent games...

Leicester City's 5-3 win over Manchester United was pure spectacle. But the result was in the market pre-match via insider trading by an individual on the field of play. This match was fixed despite the drama.

Juventus 3 Roma 2 was a hell of a watch but Juve won via two penalties that simply were not penalties as neither occurred in the area and the second one wasn't even a foul.

Rudi Garcia (the Roma manager who was sent to the stands for mimicking the playing of a violin after the first fake penalty): "It's a shame that the penalty boxes are 19 yards here. Perhaps it's time to help the referees work out when it's a goal or a penalty. This is the 21st Century, a foul is outside or it's inside [the area], simple. You can have replays at pitchside."

Francesco Totti: "For years the same old incidents keep happening. I don't know if we were beaten by referees, but we certainly were not beaten by Juventus tonight... Juventus should have their own league as by hook or by crook they always win."

But video technology will create integrity and, for different reasons, the criminal on the field of play at Leicester and the Old Lady of Turin do not want integrity...
... they want matchfixing.

Friday 3 October 2014

Doing A Little Deal Down The Moss


The English Premier League, as well as only using 13 referees for the vast majority of games and allowing the maximum possible period for underground betting activities, also selects these same referees as 4th Official meaning the primary level of PGMOL Select Group (sic) operators get two matches per weekend.

Take that tubby trickster of tutelage, Jon Moss.



This referee is not deemed good enough to officiate at FIFA and UEFA matches and yet has been referee at 4 televised EPL games this season and 4th Official at a further two televised events.
His officiating, at the very least, can be regarded as bizarre - failure to send off Tim Howard on three separate occasions in Everton v Chelsea, aiding and abetting Mark Clattenburg giving Arsenal two goals preceded by fouls and denying Man City a penalty at the Emirates, an early sending off in Swansea v Southampton and a match-changing sending off in Arsenal v Palace, plus gifting Stoke a fake equaliser versus Hull...

And in a strange selection, Moss is 4th Official tomorrow at Liverpool v West Brom just 6 days after he refereed West Brom v Burnley (he is also 4th Official for Chelsea v Arsenal, his third Gunners' appointment of the season).

Every single Moss event has been accompanied by suspicious betting patterns that positively correlated with decisions made in the match.

And being a close accomplice of professional gambler and insider trader John Colquhoun, you would think that these structures might have been acted upon by the EPL


Good job that these hyperrealities don't equate with matchfixing.

Oh, hang on...

A Whole Week Of Betting On The Underground


In order to limit corruption and to make it easier to monitor any suspicious betting patterns on games, the German Bundesliga only announces match officials on the day of the game.
Serie A announces weekend officials on the Friday.
UEFA releases Champions League officials two days prior to the rounds of matches.

The English Premier League disguised as the PGMOL appoints referees on the Monday at 16:00 hours making detection of any global betting fraud a much harder task (I'm employed as a consultant by a betting detection agency and I can assure you that this is the case).

But surely EPL referees aren't involved in matchfixing and corruption.

Oh, hang on...

13 - Unlucky For Some


English Premier League referees should be selected from a wide group of individuals.
They are not.

There are only 17 currently active PGMOL Select Group (sic) referees officiating at EPL games.
And, of these, 4 refs have only had one game apiece this season.
So 13 referees have covered 94% of EPL games whereas in the German Bundesliga, 23 referees are used in an 18 team league.

13 referees is too small a group and is far more prone to corruption.

Additionally, one individual selects every single appointment.
Just imagine what would happen if a bookmaker or an insider trader were to gain control of this one man in the most liquid betting market on the planet.

Oh, hang on...