Football Clubs and Financial Crimes in Greece

As the more popular sport in the world, football is a huge industry that is growing globally. According to Deloitte (2014), it is estimated that the turnover of the Big Five football leagues1 only will exceed €11.5 billion in the 2014-2015 period. In addition to offering a legally neutral setting for schmoozing with respectable and risk-taking elites, the huge turnover in the football industry makes it extremely attractive to illicit entrepreneurs, and to corruption, tax evasion, and gaming malpractices which threaten the actual and perceived integrity of the sport (see, for example, the bribery allegations against football’s governing body, FIFA; Moore and Scannell, 2015). These practices and activities are very often associated with sinister, criminal ‘organisations’ that are external to the world and industry of football, and supposedly ‘invade’ it in order to exploit it as much as possible. In media coverage, academic, and other literature, football match-fixing is often associated with hierarchical ‘organised criminal organisations’ with an international reach. For example, Ralf Mutschke, FIFA’s head of security, suggests that “organised crime recently switched from drug trafficking to match-fixing” and that “the business of match manipulation [is] irresistibly attractive to international organised crime” (Mutschke, 2013: ix-x).