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‘The only game in town?’: football match-fixing in Greece

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posted on 2015-11-13, 09:53 authored by Argyro Elisavet Manoli, Georgios A. Antonopoulos
Football match-fixing in Greece has a relatively long history, however, from the late 1990s it has been considered as a serious problem for the sport in the country. Despite the history of the phenomenon in the country, Greece has only relatively recently been identified as one of the hotspots for football match-fixing on an international level. Following the recent scandal exposure of fixed matches in Greece in 2011, also known as Koriopolis (a pun name on the Italian scandal Calciopolis and the Greek word ‘korios’ or phone-tap), detailed information about numerous matches played in the 2008/09, 2009/10 and 2010/11 seasons that attracted UEFA’s attention were brought into the public eye. Soon after, legal action was taken against individuals involved in the process, with a number of club officials facing lifelong bans from any footballrelated activity, and football clubs either relegated or excluded from European competitions and the Super League itself for their involvement in the scandal. In May 2013, the number of people facing charges exceeded 200, with some of them having already been imprisoned for their involvement in the scandal. Following the aforementioned scandal exposure, a vast amount of information regarding football match-fixing was made available to the public. The aim of the current article is to provide an account of the social organisation of football match-fixing in Greece. Our account is based on three main sources of data: the telephone conversations that were the result of wiretapping by the National Intelligence Agency in relation to the latest football match-fixing scandal (of 2011), published media sources, and interviews with informed actors from the realm of Greek football.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

Trends in Organized Crime

Volume

18

Issue

3

Pages

196 - 211

Citation

MANOLI, A.E. and ANTONOPOULOS, G.A., 2015. ‘The only game in town?’: football match-fixing in Greece. Trends in Organized Crime, 18(3), pp. 196-211.

Publisher

© Springer

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12117-014-9239-3

ISSN

1084-4791

eISSN

1936-4830

Language

  • en

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