MONEY LAUNDERING IN FOOTBALL 7 WAYS THAT CLUBS CAN GET AWAY WITH IT
While you’re cheering your favourite players on the pitch, the football team you support could actually be a front. For all you know, its true purpose may lie in serious organised crime. Behind the scenes, your club could be operating as a great big money laundry.
Taking illegally obtained money and making it look legitimate is known as money laundering, and, 10 years ago, the House of Lords investigated this practice along with the financing of terrorism.
It concluded: “Serious organised criminals invest in property, shares, trusts and pensions, as well as accumulating high value goods. Investment in private and commercial property, including those overseas, is attractive because it appreciates in value over time. To that list of assets, we can now add football clubs.”
None of what you will read about here refers to any specific clubs. These are all fictional examples, broadly drawn from real-world instances of criminal activity that have previously occurred in football across the globe. Several have been embellished from the outline originally provided 10 years ago by the Financial Action Task Force, an international governmental organisation aimed at combatting money laundering.
What they illustrate is how football clubs from non-league to Champions League have become targets for criminals trying to ‘wash’ dirty money.
In the intervening decade since that maiden investigation, not much has changed in terms of football’s regulation and enforcement. But the amounts of money at stake in the game are now a lot higher, making it more appealing to criminals.
Meanwhile, FIFA and its football associations do not currently have sufficient resources to tackle it. That’s not to say that every club displaying the characteristics of those described here is involved in illegality. Far from it. But football is vulnerable to being subverted by criminals, and it could be going on under your very nose right now…
1 THE MATCH-FIXERS
The individuals who leverage their influence and know the score (in every sense) so that they can gamble with dirty money and end up with a nice, clean profit
“FOOTBALL IS RIFE WITH CONFLICTS OF INTEREST. AGENTS CAN ACT ON BOTH SIDES OF A TRANSFER DEAL”
Metchock Town are struggling in the fourth tier of the non-league pyramid, but
