The perils of blowing the whistle: match-fixing in Scotland and Australia, 1920s to 2015

Two family stories shed some light on changes in the character and causes of corruption in football in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. My grandfather was a central figure in an alleged match-fixing episode in Association football in Scotland in the third decade of the twentieth century, while I was a peripheral figure in one in Australia in the last. I came across another one while researching the story of the Croatian soccer clubs in Victoria in the post-Second World War years. I also observed very closely an attempt to fix a series of matches by introducing a number of players into a team on behalf of overseas betting interests in the twenty-first century. Reflecting on these cases is a way of trying to understand how the forms and the drivers of match-fixing have changed in the twenty-first century. The three earlier episodes seem very old fashioned in the context of globalization, the commodification of sport, international gambling syndicates, and systematic corruption at the heart of the world game.