For Cindy and Eric, who got me back in the game
CONTENTS
KHALID BIN MOHAMMED STADIUM
SHARJAH, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES, MARCH 2011
The FIFA operatives arrived at the stadium past noon, prepared to disrupt the crime that was tearing football apart. Sharjah was a short drive up the road from Dubai, but it felt like a world away, in the unglamorous dust, a face of the United Arab Emirates that most Westerners never saw. Unlike Dubai, Sharjah didn’t look like a place where someone could get rich overnight. This made it a fitting location for the criminals who had infiltrated the game of football. Their specialty was illusion, and events in Sharjah were about to give them another lucrative ninety-minute return.
The match set for that day – March 26, 2011 – was an exhibition, or friendly, between the national teams of Kuwait and Jordan. It was the sort of game that took place hundreds of times each year around the world, with limited notice and consequence. National team coaches often looked upon these contests as little more than vigorous practice. Interested criminal groups from Southeast Asia to Eastern Europe, on the other hand, considered them the cornerstones of an extensive commercial enterprise.
Now Kuwait versus Jordan was forming into the front line in a gathering war. On one side were organized criminal syndicates, which were making hundreds of millions of dollars – if not billions, the total amount a drop in the opaque, trillion-dollar pool of football betting – by manipulating game results. On the other side were football administrators, who were beginning to accept that match-fixing was the stunning sports scandal of our time, a fundamental threat to the most popular game in the world.
FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), football’s international governing body, had received information that a collection of known criminals had arranged