Practices put in place after the illegal betting affair that hit German football in 2005 helped the country’s authorities rumble Europe’s biggest match-fixing scandal, according to Germany’s football chief.
Police carried out about 50 raids in Germany, the UK, Switzerland and Austria last week, making 17 arrests in relation to a match-fixing investigation involving about 200 games.
Prosecutors believe a 200-strong criminal gang bribed players, coaches, referees and officials to fix games and then made money by betting on the results.
The news comes four years after the ‘Hoyzer scandal’, Germany’s biggest illegal betting case involving three Croatian brothers, all of them convicted, as well as Bundesliga referee Robert Hoyzer.
Hoyzer helped rig top German matches in return for cash and goods and was convicted in late 2005 to 29 months in prison.
German soccer federation (DFB) chief Theo Zwanziger said: “Imagine how the DFB would sit here if all those actions then were without stiff sentences. That would have been a miserable result for our society.
“We also set up a warning system since then that has helped us in the past years. But it has to be clear a sports federation is over-challenged when it comes to battling international crime.”
On comparisons between the cases, Zwanziger added: “For me there are fundamental differences. [In 2005] we were alone with that scandal.
“We now have something this time we did not have then,” he said of German football’s early warning system that monitors betting patterns.
