...quelle surprise!
The Independent reports on the betting scandal surrounding the Accrington Stanley and Bury match from the end of last season.
'Here's a proposition for you. Make one bet on the football team you support to lose an end-of-season game where nothing is at stake in terms of relegation or promotion. You gamble, say, a year's basic pay on that outcome, and if your side lose, then you make a profit of somewhere in the region of a year-and-a-half's pay. Does that sound an attractive deal? Or a scheme that is just awfully, awfully risky, for comparatively little gain, in case your team go and win? And what might you think if you weren't a fan but a player?
'According to charges laid by the Football Association, and to sources capable of placing good estimates on basic pay levels at Accrington Stanley at the time they lost to Bury on 3 May last year, a similar dilemma was faced by at least one Accrington player who backed his team to lose that day.
'The midfielder David Mannix, 23, is a former teenage prodigy who played for Liverpool's Under-17s aged just 13, and won England youth caps. It is understood he was on a basic weekly deal of just £80 at Stanley at the time. The League Two club's small size and low crowds dictate lower basic pay levels than many clubs in the non-league game, let alone at clubs in the Football League. Contracts are heavily weighted to appearance money and bonuses, with Mannix on around £300 per actual game played back then.
But he did not play in that game. And so, when his weekly basic wage of £80 is set against the £4,000 that the FA allege he bet on his own side to lose that day, it is possible to see that he was not dealing in pin money.'
'Charges were brought by the FA against six players, five of whom wagered amounts up to £4,000. But the betting industry is now estimated to have taken up to £800,000 on the game, around 10 times the expected levels.
'Yet in a candid admission of how impotent the FA is in potential match-fixing cases, an informed source has told The Independent that the FA "is highly unlikely to charge a player with match-fixing" and will not do so in this case. Match-fixing is simply too hard to prove, to specific legal satisfaction, whereas infringements of football's own betting rules are more clear-cut and more likely to end in convictions, though the matter remains within the sport's governing body.
'Accrington were originally the favourites until backers starting piling "unusually large sums", in cash, on Bury to win. The betting was concentrated at high-street shops in the North-west, mainly around Merseyside. Bury's odds continued to come in before suspicious bookies suspended the betting.'
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