Betting scandal in World Cup host country Germany

Two major betting scandals can be reported from World Cup host country Germany. Whilst the first one is more than 30 years ago, the second one occurred just a few months before the opening match of the World Cup in Munich.

Back in 1971 there was a scandal in German first football league „Bundesliga“. One of the clubs paid rather small amounts to players of other clubs to deliberately lose matches to this club. The intention of that bribery was not the enrichment of several persons but to prevent the involved club from being relegated to second Bundesliga.

In 2005, the situation was completely different. Big Hamburger SV played third-league Paderborn in one of the first rounds of the German cup. The referee sent off one player of Hamburg and conceded two penalties to the lower class Paderborn, that thereby won 4-2 and went on to the next round.

Although many betting agencies informed German football association DFB of strange betting activities in connection with this match, DFB didn't react. It is pretty likely that DFB had hoped that shortly before the beginning of the World Cup 2006 in Germany people would not worry about this incident.

Half a year later it was revealed that not only this cup match, but more than 10 other second and third league matches had been manipulated by the same referee. His motivation was the money he received from a three-men gang of betting pros. They placed enormous sums on the matches that specific referee was responsible for and won several million Euros because of this referee's manipulations during the matches. Ironically, the referee was on the way to becoming one of the youngest first league referee ever in Germany. He sold his career for about a 100,000 Euros plus a plasma TV.

As a result of that betting scandal, DFB now announces the responsible referee for a match only two days before the match, has put up an ethical code and improved the monitoring, assessment and training of the referees.