SOURCE: www.timesonline.co.uk

European football’s governing body is investigating 15 matches from this season’s Champions League, UEFA Cup and Euro 2008 competitions after suspicions that international gambling syndicates were trying to profit by rigging the results of games.

The fixtures concerned are believed to involve mainly southern and eastern European teams playing in the preliminary rounds of the game’s most elite tournaments, with the bets having been placed mostly in Asia.

Michel Platini, the UEFA president, met with representatives of Europol, the pan-European police organisation who deal with organised crime, in Brussels last week to discuss how to improve early-warning systems that pick up unusual betting patterns around matches.

He told The Sunday Times yesterday: “It’s a big problem for us. We have known that for a long time and it could become very bad for football, and for all sport, in the future.”

Platini described the sort of scenario UEFA is facing: “We know that in Hong Kong, Singapore or elsewhere in Asia you might have a single bet of $10m on a match ending 4-4.

It’s coming to the end of the match, it’s 2-2 and there are four penalties, and it finishes 4-4. We knew about these cases because we do have an early-warning system in place. We do know that some teams were approached by people.”