Football News: Are Most Premier League Football Matches Really Fixed?

Is thinking most Premier League football matches are fixed becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy now?

We scour every match and play incidents over and over again, slow motion, super slow motion, tectonic pace slow motion and from every angle imaginable and then decide it's a disgrace and announce the match was fixed and everything is corrupt.

In my lifetime, the game has become a business. At the elite end of football, it's a vastly lucrative business, not only from the revenue the business generates but also through commercial opportunities outside of football itself. With such vast amounts of money, there will always be people who will break or bend the rules to their advantage or exploit loopholes that allow them to conduct, orally dubious but, strictly speaking, legal activities to gain profit or advantage. It seems to me that this type of activity would occur at the elite end of the spectrum and wouldn't involve the type of match like our pantomime with Spurs. If corruption is down to the level of that match, then the game is finished.

At the micro level, the individual or small group of people will try to make money illegally as there has always been match fixing (was it Peter Swann in the early 60s?) and there has always been players gambling or accepting financial inducements or gains to move to another club etc. But these are exceptions and not the norm.

So I'd say and like a lot of other people, I say it with no proof whatsoever, that there is corruption of one sort or another across the game, but back to my original point though - anyone who wishes to indulge in systematic corruption surely wouldn't do it through the means of a highly visible, auditable technological tool that is open to scrutiny where everybody can watch matches through various media.

VAR is flawed, without doubt. Officiating standards, especially at the elite level, appear to have fallen behind the level that you would expect - not least because they can now both rely on, and be undermined by, VAR. There is, in my opinion, a diminishing in the referee's authority with the introduction of technology and the extra officials.

That said, all humans make mistakes, referees and linesmen, fourth officials and VAR operators are no exception and it really is possible for one or more of them to make genuine mistakes during matches.

As a few people have said in recent times, they are losing their love for the game, which is very sad. There is undoubtedly rule breaking and bending, but on a match by match basis it would be very rare indeed. Genuine mistakes is a more likely explanation for the amount of incorrect decisions in matches.

The match officials only get one view of incidents in real time and at one angle. Sometimes their view may even be obscured by other players, but it does not mean it's a disgrace or that the match is fixed.

Anyway, I have to stop - I'm up against Shappy tonight in the semi-final of the Football Thesis Critiquing Cup.

Written by West Derby Wanderer3 November 05 2023 09:35:33