Entangled in a fraudulent system: An in-depth analysis of a large-scale football scandal

• In Event: Crime in sports: manifestations of organized crime and white collar crime in the sport sector

Abstract

The sports sector is, as many other economic sectors, vulnerable to different types of financial and social fraud. However, the cultural and social nature of sports, and the specificities of each discipline, bear additional dangers for the occurrence of fraud that can be often linked to the manipulation of sports competitions for betting or other purposes. In this research, we take one of the largest fraud scandals in the history of football as the central subject of an in-depth single case study: the Belgian Zheyun Ye case. This well-documented football scandal is centered around the acquired influence of a Chinese ‘businessman’ over professional national football clubs in the years 2004-2006 for the purpose of fixing matches, betting on the outcomes of these manipulated matches, and hiding the proceeds of these crimes from the Belgian fiscal authorities. To these ends, at least two organised criminal networks were devised with the main goal of using the local relationships of those involved to access a great number of football players in different teams. Using a mixed-methods design based on the study of court documents and semi-structured interviews with a number of (in)directly involved actors in this case, we study the harms that were experienced by individuals and organizations during and in the aftermath of this case. To organize and structure the harms caused by this scandal in a systematic manner, we rely on Greenfield and Paoli’s harm assessment framework (2013). This framework allows researchers to categorize the harms of crime according to their potential impact on individuals’ or organizations’ functional integrity, material interests, reputation, and privacy. Our results show the diverse and widespread nature of the harms that this scandal brought to individuals, entities from the sports sector, government entities, and the social environment in and around football.

Authors

• Lucie Vanwersch, UGhent

• Wim Hardyns, Professor, Institute for International Research on Criminal Policy, Department of Criminology, Criminal Law and Social Law, Ghent University