When Declan Hill’s account of pervasive match-fixing in international soccer hit bookstores last year, the doubters popped up like spring grass on turf. FIFA, the governing body of the so-called “beautiful game,” dismissed The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime with a rhetorical wave. European sports commentators scoffed, while even Hill’s hometown paper, the Ottawa Citizen, brushed off his first-hand accounts of a match-rigger in Asia paying off players, referees and coaches as a “slash at the game” that “proved little.”

“It was as if because I’m Canadian, I couldn’t possibly be an expert,” says Hill, a seasoned investigative journalist who now lives in Britain. “There was an enormous amount of push-back.” But at least one man in a position of influence found Hill’s exposé compelling. Michel Platini, president of the European Football Associations (UEFA), ordered a copy of The Fix and read it carefully, says Hill, then quickly announced the formation of an “integrity unit” charged with ferreting out schemes to manipulate game results to the benefit of gamblers wagering on illegal networks in Asia. In October 2008, Platini invited Hill to a summit in Geneva to discuss findings with members of the newly formed task force.

Hill was careful not to give away his sources—“Some of these people would kill me if they thought I was co-operating,” he says. But he did offer ideas as to how UEFA might fight back, most importantly by monitoring betting patterns in places like Shanghai and the Philippines. And the results weren’t long in coming. Last week, German police stunned the soccer world by announcing the arrest of 15 people as part of a sweeping investigation into match-fixing in nine European countries, at levels ranging from third-division pro to Champions League qualifying games. At least 200 matches are under suspicion, but investigators say that’s a mere fraction of the rot caused by the Asian gambling interests Hill had documented. Continue…