A professional soccer player from China has had enough of all the match-fixing going on. In an interview with The South China Morning Post, the player provided insight into the severity of this problem.
The Pandemic Exacerbated the Issue
The player, who preferred to remain anonymous, said that the pandemic provided ample opportunities for coaches and managers to sell out. As games were played in empty stadiums, a lot of higher-ups could get away with fraud.
The player told journalists that the players were also engaging in fraud and regularly betting on their teams to lose when they knew that the game had been fixed.
The Morning Post’s source further said that this problem was especially prevalent in the second-tier games in China. While some were motivated by monetary gain, others sought to secure promotion or avoid relegation.
At one point, the anonymous player, who is still competing professionally, was even able to tell which games his team was going to sell. He said that the training sessions when the team was trying to actually win would see them play 11 vs 11 games. Additionally, the team would have set piece training, meetings and would analyze game footage.
On the contrary, once the team had agreed to lose a game, the athletes would be playing 15 vs 15 games, on half-size pitches. The coaches would also join in, making him feel like he was back in school.
A lot of the players were seeing what I was seeing, and then they would just bet on us to lose.
Dozens of Soccer Pros Were Banned Recently
The player’s reveal comes two weeks after the ban of a whopping 43 players and officials. The Chinese Football Association issued lifetime bans to these individuals, all of whom were accused of engaging in corruption and the fixing of games.
According to the authorities’ investigation, 120 matches were implicated in fraud, involving some 128 suspects and 41 teams.
The banned players included the South Korean star Sun Jun-ho, who later alleged that the Chinese authorities had forced him to confess to accepting bribes by threatening to hurt his family.
Some fans were skeptical of the charges, suggesting that China might be sacrificing smaller teams because of its national team’s abysmal performance at recent tournaments.
