Or, according to this guy, the officials!

hmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Corruption in Football
By James Reade

The Football Association is investigating alleged match fixing in a recent game between Norwich City and Derby County. According to the Guardian huge amounts of money was placed on the match with bookmaker Spreadex during half time. Local MP Ian Gibson, who happened to be at the match, noted that five minutes after half time, the Derby goalkeeper Roy Carroll, was sent off and Norwich scored to level the scores from the resulting penalty.

Last week, at the Nuffield-Oxford sports economics conference, work I?ve been doing with Matteo Acquilina and Edoardo Gallo on the 2004-6 Italian soccer scandal was presented. We investigate whether there is any sign in the data of systematic corruption taking place, and one area we hypothesized that referees might influence matches is via late decisions. An insightful comment suggested that actually, matches will be rigged early in proceedings, and we?re following this up.

That Roy Carroll was sent off just five minutes into the second half may suggest that the referee/officials were seeking to influence this match. However, it is not clear exactly which way the East Asians were betting in this match from the article, and if they were betting large sums on a Norwich victory, they had to contend with human error: a howling mistake by the Norwich goalkeeper later in the game handed victory to 10-man Derby anyway.

Of course, they may just have been betting on a sending off in the match. Even in this case though, it would have been a spectacularly contrived event to get a goalkeeper sent off for a professional foul. It would require somehow getting the play into such an area of the field, with suitably few players around (rules require no other players are between the attacking player and goal). Could the referee and linesmen really have managed this? At least one Derby defender would probably also have needed to have been in on the scam, and potentially a Norwich midfielder too (in order to know where to place the pass).

I?m not suggesting there?s no corruption in soccer, despite the findings in my paper with Matteo and Edo. However, I need to be persuaded that realistically a goalkeeper red card can be attributed to corruption. At best, the referee was looking to send someone off, and Roy Carroll gave him that excuse?

User Posted Link

Posted By: Stoopish, Oct 17, 10:29:40