These are desperate times for the sport on the island with a staggering 67% of top-flight players admitting that games are rigged. New regulations have been introduced, but will they solve the problem?

It was the second of six bomb attacks and the one closest to home. The dynamite, packed into a pipe, exploded in the small hours just before dawn. There was no warning, no call. When the blast came it did what its perpetrators had intended it to do: it ripped off a large chunk of the back of the two–storey building that is the headquarters of the Association of Cyprus Referees.

Charalambos Skapoullis remembers the moment well. Avoiding the autumnal heat, he was already up and training on one of the Nicosia pitches when the call came through at 5.30am. “When I got here there were broken windows, shattered panes, smashed glass everywhere,” he recalls. “I looked around and thought: ‘This isn’t funny.’ It’s got to the point where this has to be the most dangerous place in the world to be a referee.”

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Three months later another explosive device erupted outside a modest house in the seaside town of Limassol. The force of the blast was such that 60-year-old Maro Mousko was catapulted from her bed on the second floor. The bomb was not intended for her – it was meant for her absent son, Thomas, also a league referee. Within weeks, the car belonging to the wife of another referee was torched and days before that Leontios Trattos, Cyprus’ most high-profile referee, awoke to the news that his vehicle, parked in the basement of his apartment building in Nicosia, had also been destroyed in what would be the second such attack against him. Referees, fearing for their lives, decided to vote with their feet: for a week they boycotted domestic matches and football fields altogether.

No one has been arrested for planting these bombs. A group, calling itself “Armed Gate Niners Urban Guerillas” emerged to claim responsibility, declaring the attacks “the beginning of an armed fight against rotten, contemporary Cypriot football”.

Even now, 18 months later, Skapoullis, a stocky man with sinewy arms and a stern demeanour, winces when talk turns to the attacks. So, too, does Spyros Neofitides, the president of the Pancyprian Footballers Association, who has found himself dealing with death threats against foreign players and in recent weeks has exhorted the local police to clean up the game.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Apoel Nicosia fans after the final whistle of the Champions League first leg quarter-final against Real Madrid at the GSP Stadium in 2012. Photograph: Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty Images

After all this is Cyprus, the tiny island nation where almost everyone knows everyone and where, like most former British colonies, football is treated with the reverence of a national sport. Violence usually has strayed no further than the odd clash between fans of Apoel and Omonia, the biggest Greek Cypriot clubs whose rivalry dates to the civil war that wracked Greece in the late 1940s. If the men in the middle have never been exactly sacrosanct this sort of treatment is unprecedented.

The Cyprus Referees Association lies outside Nicosia, the island’s divided capital, amidst rolling fields of land donated by the state. At certain times of the year, those fields are replete with bundles of perfectly stacked hay. It is an idyllic setting for an institution so integrally connected to a sport with huge social ramifications, beloved by politicians, businessmen and the church.

In a country viewed as football crazy, almost no slice of life does not somehow fall within the orbit of the beautiful game. And yet, football had elicited a war, a war that Skapoullis is quick to say remains very much unresolved.

“All these incidents but still nobody has been punished” he sighs, the early evening light throwing shadows across his desk. “If you are a referee, an elite referee, you worry because you just don’t know when it’s going to be your turn.”

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While the world has been fixated on wrongdoing elsewhere – with Fifa seeing bribes unearthed, arrests made and a president dethroned in 2015 – another less publicised drama has been smouldering away in the eastern Mediterranean. And, just as at Fifa, one of Europe’s most enthusiastic football nations has been confronted with some uncomfortable questions: how did Cyprus’s beautiful game come to have one of the worst reputations for match-fixing? How did it come to be blemished by betting syndicates in countries as far away as Malaysia? How did it come to be so corruptible and corrupted?

If anyone was under any illusion that professional football here was crime-free, the attacks on the referees and persistent allegations of rigging have ensured that they had to think again.

After the blasts came Marios Panayi. When the international referee decided to blow his whistle, he blew it hard. He called press conferences that laid bare the dark inner workings of the game: penalty kicks that should never be awarded; fouls that should never be called; yellow cards that should never be given; players who should never be sent off. He named names, handed over documents and provided evidence in the form of recorded conversations that allegedly exposed the tangled web of corruption underpinning Cyprus’s football league. And he claimed that matches were fixed on the orders of senior officials at the Cyprus Football Association.

“I did it hoping they [authorities] wouldn’t close their eyes,” said Panayi, who has since been struck off the Association’s register and forced to depart for Britain. “Referees can use any trick in the book. It can be a minor or major decision depending on the match and whether it is televised or not. Where there aren’t cameras, they can do big things.”

The referee’s revelations were a thunderbolt. Sports officials were at a loss: was Panayi courageous or simply crazy? Those who believed he was brave saw in him a man of principle and vigour. Those who believed he was crazy, a man of manipulation and untrammelled ambition.

But Panayi also won backing from unexpected quarters. The Belgian-based anti-match fixing organisation, Federbet, praised his courage. So did Nikos Kartakoullis, the erstwhile head of the Cyprus Sports Organisation, the island’s supreme sports authority.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Referee Marios Panayi laid bare the dark inner workings of the game. Photograph: Yves Herman / Reuters/Reuters

“What he did was very brave,” says Kartakoullis, a widely respected figure who now teaches sport management at the University of Cyprus. “There is corruption in every sphere of life in Cyprus, it’s a problem not only of sport but of the whole of Cypriot society.”

Kartakoullis learned the hard way. Passionate about football from a young age he can still vividly recall discovering the depravity that lurked in the game. “For many, football was the answer to the traumatic experience of the [1974] Turkish invasion,” he says recollecting the military campaign that led to the division of the island. “Like a lot of refugees who ended up in camps I grew up playing it. I can still remember the moment when I scored and I was so happy because we had won and everyone started saying: ‘Why are you celebrating? There’s nothing to celebrate, that game was fixed.’ And I was devastated, so disappointed that I said: ‘One day you will study this, you will get to the root of this terrible thing.’”

Panayi, who started refereeing when he was 13, reckons that of Cyprus’s 300 referees not more than 10% are “truly clean”. Those who followed orders to fix games inevitably saw their careers fast tracked, with many going on to officiate European matches where earnings were three times higher than those on Cyprus. “I had to speak, I had to talk about these things, so that finally the authorities would take action,” he said.

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Among the evidence given to police were recorded conversations he claimed proved the culpability of senior officials at the CFA. Two senior members of the Cyprus referees’ association, including its head, Michalis Argyrou, were duly detained on match-fixing suspicions – and released after denying wrongdoing.

“We read the accusations of Mr Panayi with pleasure,” Francesco Baranca, Federbet’s secretary general wrote in an email. “We consider Cyprus one of the dirtiest leagues in the world. We also consider Cyprus as a sort of ‘school’ of match fixing with a lot of players exporting the virus when they move to another league.”

It was so bad, he said, that bookmakers had long since stopped offering odds on top-tier games. “From one year to the next nothing changes,” he added in a telephone interview. “In places like Cyprus it is no longer a football competition but more an exercise in match fixing and I would say that, definitely, referees are part of the problem.”

Spyros Neofitides agrees with that assessment. His focus over the past year, almost exclusively, has been to raise awareness – not least sensitising footballers who fear loss of jobs or salary if they report incidents – and the 40-year-old Greek Cypriot is the first to concede that, invariably, it is money that lies at the root of the league’s ills. Cyprus’s financial meltdown in 2012 didn’t help. In the run-up to the banking crisis, players were often forced to wait months to be paid – so much so that FifPro, the international football players’ union, counselled members against signing contracts with Cypriot teams. Clubs with budgets of €25m suddenly had to cope with as little as €1.5m as they struggled with bankruptcy and debt.

“After the financial crisis we had a big problem with money,” Neofitides says. “A lot of businesses saw football as an opportunity to gain money through illegal betting. There are 350 players in the first division, another 280 in the second and for many clubs match fixing became a way of boosting funds. Players were often told games had to be fixed to pay salaries.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Players in the Cypriot league were often told games had to be fixed to pay salaries, according to Spyros Neofitides. Photograph: Yiannis Kourtoglou / Alamy Stock/Alamy Stock Photo

Last year the union launched a two-month pilot program that allowed players to report cases where they suspected rigging. Findings exposed the problem’s staggering scale: 71% of players in the second division and 67% in the first division admitted that games were rigged. Most attributed the phenomenon to illegal betting, with 23% saying they had been approached about matching fixing, either by the committees of clubs or during half-time when the only people who had access to changing rooms were club owners.

Neofitides said research based on a 20-point questionnaire – drawn up by FifPro and the University of Manchester and disseminated by the PanCyprian Footballers Association – will support those claims when it, too, is released later this year. “I’ve seen the results already and I can say that 80% of the 220 first division players who answered the questionnaire admit they are aware of the problem,” he says. “The thing is they are afraid to speak openly which is why it is now so important that the red button app is made available on mobile phones so they can report suspicions of match fixing with guaranteed anonymity.”

The House of Football stands at 10 Achaion Street, off a dual carriageway in Nicosia. It is here, on the third floor of a building inaugurated by Sepp Blatter and Michael Platini in June 2007, that Anthoulis Mylonas, the Cyprus Football Association’s general manager, holds court.

Rotund, genial with a ready smile, Mylonas is quick to deny the accusations. On the basis of the allegations, he says, the police not only confiscated the association’s hard discs, books and ledgers but conducted a 10-month, in-depth inquiry leaving no stone unturned along the way. “I went personally to police headquarters,” explains the lawyer seated behind a desk surrounded by walls covered with championship cups and plaques. “No accusation against this office, or any employee, could be substantiated. In fact I would say we are the only organisation in Cyprus to be given a certificate from the state [proving] that we are clean. It’s all in the past. It belongs to history.”

For many, though, Mylonas’s protestations fall on deaf ears. The island may now have made a comeback since its near economic collapse but, say insiders, professional football is still prone to the dark arts.

In recent weeks, the Football Association, under pressure from the justice ministry, has flexed its muscles by enforcing tough new regulations, with penalties of up to €10,000 and eventual loss of CFA funding for any club perceived by Uefa to be involved in manipulation of games. The measures came into force at the start of the new season on 22 August but Neofitides, for one, is far from hopeful the skulduggery will end there.

Players, he laments, are still vulnerable to the punitive effects of the crisis – late payments in particular – and are rarely around long enough to really want to make a difference. “It begins and ends with education, changing mindsets,” he says. “Unfortunately around 70% of our players are foreign who are often in and out in a year and that makes changing attitudes very difficult.” This year there had been instances of foreign players receiving death threats and even being forced to flee the island.

After the bombs, after the death threats and inconclusive police investigation, what was needed was blue-sky thinking. And that, says Neofitides, should begin with a plan and specialised police department to deal with the problem. “We have to start with an action plan, a hot line that players can use and means like the red button app that will allow them to report fixing without worrying about [retribution]. We need to have the money to get a real campaign off the ground, with seminars, leaflets, locker room visits.”

And it all needs to be done very soon to save the integrity of the beautiful game – and before more violence erupts – in Cyprus.