Quote:
Originally Posted by SutterBrother
In about 20 years there will be documentaries about how this was allowed for a period of time and how much it damaged both the sport, but much moreso the poor saps who lost everything.
Heavy social engineering to take everything from you.
It'll probably end when it turns out a cup winner was fraudulent. Refs, players, who can say? Huge financial stakes.
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Match fixing, at least when done by professionals, is almost always targeted at relatively low-profile games at lower league levels.
It's just so much easier and cheaper to get players to throw a game when they're not that well paid, and the match is kinda meaningless anyway. I would expect same applies to refs. Lower tier soccer is a good place for match fixing in Europe, because it has large amounts of dedicated fans, despite that lack of national attention.
That said, the massively long regular seasons in North American sports make the top tier more attractive there. A midseason weekday match between two bottom-to-mid tier teams... who really cares?
A ref giving a nonsense penalty in the 3rd with the game being close... fans will rant about it a little and move on. It would be so trivial to pull off by a ref with the self restraint to not go overboard. So I 100% expect it's already happening, and has been happening for a while.
It's however easier to get away with it in lower tiers of sports, because there's fewer super-HD cameras pointed at you and way less people enthusiastically talking about a game and analyzing it afterwards.