High life | 28 July 2012

Gstaad 

Purity in a sport does not mix with popularity, and defending the former is anathema to the hucksters, crooks and profiteers who make up the latter. In this I do not include the sportswriters of serious newspapers, with whom I actually sympathise. They see what’s going on, but they have to report on sport and there are, after all, libel laws to protect the guilty. In the birthplace of sport — where else but Greece — football is as rotten as anywhere on earth, except in places like Thailand, where betting comes first and sport second.

When my father ‘owned’ a premier division team during the early Seventies — AEK — the various agents and advisers of the club skimmed millions off him by bringing in South American ‘Greeks’ to be inspected and sold to the club. The law back then was only two foreigners per team, so the rest had to find Greek roots, an easy enough task for the dodgy agents peddling them to dear old innocent dad. Some had Greek-sounding names, like the Mexican Fanis, others had to find Greek grandmothers, like the Argentine Hector Errea. Most of them were incapable of kicking a soccer ball, and some even had trouble running in a straight line. But the experts deemed them on a par with Pele, and father paid. 

Football now is as corrupt as gambling, and maybe soon we’ll see the latter becoming an Olympic sport. I don’t know about today, but Greek referees in my time were easily and often bribed, as are refs and players being bribed as I write in most parts of the world, even in Europe, although here only in lower divisions. It is almost impossible to control and even more difficult to prove, but for a determined gambler, a poor referee or player in a small South American country, or an African or Far Eastern one, is a hands down prey.