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

Session Submission Type: Pre-arranged Panel

Abstract

Similar to other economic sectors, the sports sector is prone to crime, specifically white-collar and organized crime. However, a number of factors render sports more vulnerable to certain types of fraud than other contexts, and rather criminogenic when it comes to sports-specific criminal and unethical activities. This panel discusses some of the ways in which crime can reach sports, and how this important social and societal sector can be impacted by crime. The first presentation addresses vulnerabilities in the legal and regulatory framework for football trafficking – i.e. trafficking of persons through the exploitation of the football transfer system – through the use of relevant literature and documentation on the topic as well as an analysis of legal and regulatory texts. The second presentation discusses one of the largest fraud scandals in football history as the central subject of an in-depth single case study: the Belgian Zheyun Ye case. This study is based on a mixed-methods design including the study of court documents and semi-structured interviews with a number of (in)directly involved actors to evaluate the harms that were experienced by individuals and organizations during and in the aftermath of this case. The third presentation, through semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis, and using the taxonomic model of Mitchell, Crosset and Barr (1999), sheds light on the effectiveness of UEFA's "zero tolerance" policy in inducing compliance in football players in Portugal, at the level of match-fixing practices. Lastly, the fourth presentation examines the relevance of criminology and forensic sciences approaches with regard to the detection of match-fixing. The study, which is based on the analysis of four fixed matches, further elaborates the – often too simplistic – rational choice perspective on match-fixing, by integrating the concept of crime script. These crime scripts make it possible to disentangle the multiple scenes that integrate the offence.

Subtopic

• Topic 2: Types of Offending / Organized Crime

Chair

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

Individual Presentations

• Legal and regulatory vulnerabilities as an inadvertent facilitator of football trafficking - Louis Vandercruysse, Ghent University; Tom Vander Beken, Professor and director of the Institute for International Research on Criminal Policy (IRCP), Ghent University; An Vermeersch, Ghent University; Annick Willem, Ghent University

• Entangled in a fraudulent system: An in-depth analysis of a large-scale football scandal - Lucie Vanwersch, UGhent; Wim Hardyns, Professor, Institute for International Research on Criminal Policy, Department of Criminology, Criminal Law and Social Law, Ghent University

• Zero tolerance or null effectiveness?: Public policies and sports rules to fight match-fixing - César de Cima, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Centro de Estudos Internacionais (CEI-Iscte) e Centro de Investigação e Estudos de Sociologia (CIES-Iscte); Marcelo Moriconi, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Centro de Estudos Internacionais (CEI-Iscte)

• Combining Criminology and Forensic Science to Detect Match-Fixing - Fiona Langlois, University of Lausanne (UNIL); Stefano Caneppele, University of Lausanne