28 Professional Tennis Players Have Been Arrested In a Large-Scale Match Fixing Scandal
Spanish Police have arrested 83 people, including 28 professional tennis players, as part of a large-scale investigation into match-fixing, Europol have said.
The Spanish Civil Guard carried out a series of raids in coordination with the National High Court of Spain (Audiencia Nacional) and Europol on 11 houses on Thursday following an investigation into an Armenian criminal gang.
Europol confirmed that €167,000 (£151,000) was seized from the raids along with a shotgun, more than 50 electronic devices, credit cards, five luxury vehicles and numerous documents. Authorities have also frozen 42 bank accounts.
“The suspects bribed professional players to guarantee predetermined results and used the identities of thousands of citizens to bet on the pre-arranged games,” Europol said.
To get started here, no this does not include players you probably know like Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, Rafa Nadal, Andy Murray, or Serena Williams (although I wish Serena’s name would pop up so she could tell us she’s a mother again). If you clicked on the blog because of the thumbnail, you have been baited. This scandal stems from ITF futures and challenger tournaments which are essentially lower tier events for those either on the up and coming in the sport or those not good enough to get in the bigger ATP events. Talking from experience, tennis is whole lot of fun to gamble on and it’s how I got so into the sport (kind of like Big Cat with the WNBA). Even though these are lower tier events, you can absolutely still gamble on them and clearly make tons of money, as these Armenian criminals did. Because they are rarely televised and have very limited eyeballs on them, it makes match-fixing all the more easier and likely. This investigation has been going on for a few years now after officials noticed irregular betting patterns in matches that normally didn’t have a big handle.
This whole thing was led by an Armenian criminal network where they won millions of dollars/euros. 28 players are involved in the scandal which stems over 97 matches, including one player did in fact participate in the 2018 US Open. None of the names have been released yet, but I imagine we’ll find out the US Open person soon. Marc Fornell-Mestres has been revealed to be the link between the Armenian criminals and the players, which means he’s absolutely FUCKED. I don’t know who that is, but he seems to be the ring leader. If you give up one Armenian name they’re going to kill everyone you’ve ever met. Must be a real ball being that guy right now.
There’s a reason this type of stuff doesn’t happen over in America and it’s because athletes make a lot of money and it’d be too obvious if something was going on, but if you’re a random middle of the road tennis player in Europe then you are vulnerable to getting involved in something like this. I’ve always felt tennis as a whole was partially fixed, at least in smaller tournaments in the ATP. If you know the players, their head to head records, and how they play on certain courts you can spot bizarro world lines and jump on them. There’s always been something weird with it that I couldn’t explain. Regardless, it’s a lot of fun to bet on and the Australian Open is only a few weeks away. Here’s to gambling in the middle of the night!
Fingers crossed Serena is the US Open person that is involved.