How to Buy a Football Match

Carobbio and Zamperini own up. Twenty-two Serie A matches under suspicion

CREMONA – The first questionings have brought the first admissions. Footballer Filippo Carobbio and betting ring bagman Alessandro Zamperini were the first to face magistrates in the wake of the second round of arrests for match-fixing exposed by the Cremona public prosecutor’s office.

Both men, albeit with differences of nuance, admitted the events that led to their arrests. Carobbio confirmed he had taken part in match-rigging when playing at Grosseto and referred to other games fixed when he was with other clubs. Zamperini admitted to steering the outcome of the Cesena-Gubbio Coppa Italia game but denied any involvement in rigging the Lecce-Lazio Serie A game on the final match day of the 2010-2011 season. Those who were expecting the investigating magistrate Guido Salvini’s questions to be met with silence were disappointed. The bond of complicity between football’s corrupters and corruptees is already loosening.

Alessandro Zamperini was the last of the suspects to emerge during the investigations. It was he who approached Gubbio defender Simone Farina with an offer of €200,000 to lose the match against Cesena. Farina turned him down flat and reported the episode to the authorities. Yesterday, Zamperini confessed. “But he told us as little as he could”, muttered one of the investigators.

Zamperini is believed to have been acting for Hristyan Ilievski, one of the “gypsies”, who has also been arrested: “He approached me after the arrests in June and said ‘Do something because we’re in trouble’”. Zamperini was asked why he and others under investigation were staying at the same hotel as the Lecce team on the evening before the game with Lazio, a tactic that has always preceded attempts to bribe players. “Just a coincidence”, said Zamperini.

The line taken by midfielder Filippo Carobbio was less elusive. Carobbio, who is currently with Spezia, is accused of involvement in rigging five games, four when he was with Grosseto and one with Siena. He is understood to have owned up but has also begun to mention matches he fixed when he was playing with other clubs. The first revelations are thought to regard AlbinoLeffe, a club that police collaborator Wilson Perumal said had long been in the betting ring’s sights and for which other footballers in the magistrate’s files have played (Gervasoni, Acerbis, Joelson and Conteh).

A glance at the case file reveals the scale of the organisation uncovered by public prosecutor Roberto Di Martino. The organisation’s head may have been in Singapore but the tentacles reached out to championship games in Italy and other European countries, and to international fixtures. Bribing several Hungarian referees gave the ring advance knowledge of the outcomes of a South American under-20 championship match between Argentina and Bolivia, and of the Estonia-Bulgaria and Lithuania-Bolivia friendlies. In an intercepted phone call with an unknown African interlocutor, Alessandro Zamperini says he knows the result of another friendly between Belarus and Nigeria (“Belarus will win 4-0, you know”).

Yesterday, the new eruptions from the match-rigging volcano irritated the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) president, Gianni Petrucci: “The world of football talks only about money. It’s time it gave itself a code of ethics”. Giancarlo Abete, the president of the Italian football association Federcalcio, said it was too soon to predict whether the new investigations would lead to convictions while the season was under way. In the wake of inquiries by public prosecutor’s offices at Cremona and elsewhere, a total of twenty-two Serie A games are believed to be under investigation by sports justice officials.

English translation by Giles Watson

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