[The Temptation of Match-Fixing]③ A Web of Acquaintances and Blood Ties... A Hard-to-Break Chain

Ryu Hyuk, the Inspector General of the Ministry of Justice, recently recalled in an interview with this publication that the "professional basketball match-fixing case" he investigated in March 2013 while at the Uijeongbu District Prosecutors' Office was "a whole new world." This case attracted public attention as former coach Kang Dong-hee was involved. The fact that an active professional coach was deeply involved in match-fixing shocked our society greatly. It also heightened awareness that the professional sports arena was no longer safe from match-fixing.

He was first surprised by the glamour and scale of sports betting sites. Inspector Ryu accessed sports gambling sites suspected of being used by brokers to place bets in Southeast Asia (Macau), Europe (United Kingdom), and other regions to verify the content. The sites featured professional league games from around the world by sport, with various categories available for betting. Basic bets included win, lose, or draw, but there were also bets on the first scorer, first foul, first player to score 3 points, and more.

The UK's representative sports betting site 'bet365'
[Photo by site capture]

Macau Sports Betting Site [Photo by Site Capture]

Next was the organization. The groups operated with strict division of labor and moved in a highly coordinated manner. Inspector Ryu said, "At the time, the brokers involved in the case operated systematically based on sports betting sites legalized in Europe and Southeast Asia. There was a 'jeonju' who placed bets, brokers who followed him, and those brokers contacted coaches and players through acquaintances to fix matches. I recall that former coach Kang could not refuse a request from a broker who was an acquaintance and agreed to participate." Former coach Kang was prosecuted for the match-fixing case, sentenced to 10 months in prison, fined 47 million won, and served his full term.

Like former coach Kang's case, most match-fixing in South Korea is said to be organized. The networks are as intricate as those involved in drug trafficking and voice phishing crimes.

Professor Lee Ji-yong of Korea National Sport University and others stated in their 2021 paper "Case Analysis of Sports Match-Fixing Using Topic Modeling," published in the Korean Society of Sport Measurement and Evaluation, that "organized match-fixing is the most frequently occurring type of match-fixing found in many cases." All such match-fixing is deeply connected to sports betting. Professor Lee and colleagues added, "There were no cases where players or coaches attempted match-fixing without collusion with external parties."

Match-fixing organization chart. Starting with the financier who provides money for sports betting, the organization is tightly connected step-by-step through brokers, players, and even coaches.
[Graphic by Hyungmin Kim]

The legal community emphasizes that to properly eradicate match-fixing, "it is necessary to completely dismantle the broker groups." However, this is not easy. Brokers, players, and coaches are mostly connected through blood ties, regional ties, or school ties. Players and coaches find it difficult to refuse match-fixing proposals from brokers who were their teammates during school days, seniors or juniors from their hometown, or relatives. The number of brokers within the organization continues to increase. Most brokers proposing match-fixing borrow large sums of money from the 'jeonju' to engage in sports betting, fail, lose money, and fall into debt. They work as brokers under the 'jeonju' to repay their debts. To increase the success rate of sports betting, they use personal networks to approach players or coaches, offering them a certain amount of money as a bribe to fix matches, and such activities are openly conducted.

Government and sports organizations' efforts and institutional improvements to eradicate match-fixing are made annually but remain questionable. In 2014, when awareness of the match-fixing problem increased, the government designated match-fixing as one of the "four major evils of sports" along with entrance exam corruption, assault, and privatization of organizations, showing its determination to eradicate it. Subsequently, the Sports Fairness Committee and the Match-Fixing Eradication Countermeasures Committee were established and operated. In August 2020, the Sports Ethics Center was founded and is currently active. The Korea Professional Sports Association operates call centers for reporting misconduct by sport. Each sport federation and club conducts awareness education for players and makes efforts. Professional baseball and professional soccer reportedly operate their own monitoring systems to check for match-fixing.

Attorney Jang Dal-young, head of LAW&S Sports Culture Law Policy Research Institute, said, "Our current system is not inferior even compared to overseas match-fixing systems such as Interpol and the International Olympic Committee (IOC)," but emphasized, "Related organizations must operate the system well with a thorough sense of problem awareness and a strong will to catch match-fixing for it to be effective."