ARCHIVES: How common is match-fixing in Swedish football (May 17):
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SVT Sports' survey shows that there is a lot of match-fixing in Swedish football.
Photo: SVT / TT
A former Allsvenskan football player was suspended from all football for a year last month, after he did not report when he was asked to fix matches.
The verdict, which was the first that the Swedish Football Association handed down for such a crime, was appealed by the player to the Swedish Sports Board (Rin).
One year suspension
They have now made decisions, which will be prejudicial.
They chose, just like the football association's disciplinary committee, to suspend the player (who at the time of the crime belonged to an all-Swedish club, but now plays at a lower level) for a year.
But in the verdict, they write that his crime is worth a suspension of one year and six months.
The reason why the sentence "only" will be a one-year suspension is that the player in the police preliminary investigation (where the match-fixing attempt was revealed) received serious threats, and that the processing time of the case dragged on.
XX (the player) has stated that criminals threatened him and his family, including death threats with a gun.
According to XX, the threats must have taken place in connection with the persons demanding that he sell drugs or manipulate matches to pay off a friend's debt ", it can be read in the National Sports Board's decision, where the latter states:
"XX's threat information is not very detailed.
Seen in its context, however, the information does not appear to be incredible, and no circumstances have emerged that contradict it.
According to Rin, there is therefore no reason to not trust XX's information that he has been subjected to a serious threat ".
CLIP: This is how match fixing can go to:
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Match fixing: This is how it can go
Long discussion
That they, unlike the football association (where three people in the disciplinary committee thought he should have been suspended for only nine months due to the threats), believe that the crime is actually worth a year and a half suspension, is the level at which the player played.
"Rin further believes, in line with what the Disciplinary Committee has stated, that particularly high demands must be placed on professional players in terms of both knowledge of and compliance with the duty to report," they write.
Krister Malmsten, chairman of the Swedish Sports Committee, tells SVT Sport that the case was more difficult than the committee's average cases.
- We think equally carefully in all cases, but it naturally led to a longer discussion because we had no previous case to lean on and get guidance on how the National Sports Board has looked at things like this before.
So it led to a much longer discussion than in cases we have announced decisions in earlier, he says.