IT LOOKS like a mismatch. On one side are the authorities who run the world’s favourite game, only occasionally aided by governments and the police. On the other, determined professional gangsters, intent on fixing matches and laundering money. Their antics—such as the arrangement, in 2010, of a fake game between Bahrain and a bogus Togolese team—can seem ingenious, even amusing. But their repertoire includes violence and blackmail as well as sophisticated betting software. Several national leagues, notably China’s, have been severely discredited by their rackets.

All Europe’s big political institutions have inveighed against sports corruption. Tax authorities, which in the past turned a blind eye to liabilities on player transfers and salaries, have belatedly begun to intervene, notably in Britain and Italy. In Finland, one of several European countries in which criminals have taken over clubs for nefarious purposes, the sports ministry has helped to develop a smartphone app that lets players report match-fixing suspicions anonymously. South Korean officials have banned scores of players after a scandal in which dozens were jailed.

Singapore has attracted criticism for what some see as a failure to crack down on gambling rings and notorious matchfixers. But a Lebanese referee was recently jailed for six months there, one of three officials convicted of accepting sexual favours from a gambling syndicate in return for rigging a game (bribing referees with prostitutes is a time-honoured tradition).

The story elsewhere is less encouraging. Football administrators say that catching criminals is the police’s job. But police forces are hampered by the difficulty of proving match-fixing and the cross-border nature of the scams: satellite broadcasting and online gambling have created lucrative and manipulable new betting markets, especially in South-East Asia, making the game a prime target for international crooks. Fuzzy jurisdiction means that forces tend to treat football crime as a “low priority”, says Chris Eaton, of the International Centre for Sport Security in Doha.

The biggest case to date centres on Bochum, Germany, where in 2011 a gang was convicted of rigging scores of matches in many countries. But this was an accidental by-product of an inquiry into the Croatian mafia. Interpol and Europol have taken an interest, but no one can compel blasé forces to act. Punishments tend to be light. Ralf Mutschke, head of security at FIFA, football’s global overseer, says match-fixing offers “low risk and high gain”.

FIFA’s critics think its global reach—broader than that of any police force—means it could do more itself. It professes “zero tolerance” for match-fixing, pays for one of several schemes designed to detect suspicious betting, and issues worldwide bans to malefactors. It has set up an online system for reporting corruption.

But other sports, such as tennis and cricket, have cracked down harder and faster. And FIFA’s plan to loosen the licensing system for football agents (a few of whom connive in money-laundering and other offences), and its equivocal stance on third-party interests in players is seen by critics as evidence of complacency.

FIFA has also been shamed by a series of bribery and embezzlement scandals relating to the choice of venues for the World Cup and its relationship with marketing agencies. Sylvia Schenk of Transparency International, a corruption watchdog, argues that “without good governance, FIFA will have no credibility to tell players and referees that they have to stick to the rules”. A much-vaunted reform has flopped. Alexandra Wrage of TRACE International, an anti-graft outfit based in Maryland, resigned from an advisory committee: when the reforms touched on “sensitive issues at the highest levels”, such as term limits and transparency about officials’ salaries, “they stalled”, she says.

The outcome, says Damian Collins, a British MP who is critical of FIFA, is that “nothing has really changed”. An internal report recently found that Sepp Blatter, the organisation’s president since 1998, had been “clumsy” in his response to evidence of a huge bribe that was destined for someone else. Mr Blatter, who denies all wrongdoing, has clung on. He is widely expected to run for a fifth term in 2015.