A recent survey has revealed that almost one in three players competing in Greek football has been asked to fix a match.
The survey, which was conducted by the International Federation of Professional Football Players (FIFPro) across 12 countries in Eastern Europe with the anonymous participation of more than 3,200 players.
It revealed that in Greece, 30.3 per cent had been approached to participate in match fixing, while 47.2 per cent said they were aware of fixed matches in their division. This is an alarming, yet not surprising, statistic with many football supporters in Greece claiming that the Greek Super League in particular has been destroyed by match fixing for years, most notably since the introduction of the European Champions League in the early 1990’s.
The study also revealed that 26.2 per cent of players in Greece said they had found themselves on the receiving end of blackmail, with 69.5 per cent naming their club’s administration as the culprit, while another 11 per cent said it was their coach. A similar rate, 25.2 per cent, said they had been forced to train by themselves by their clubs, in most cases this was apparently used as a form of pressure after the clubs had asked them to agree to an end to their contract. Greece is Eastern Europe’s worst country in terms of violence against players, as 31.5 per cent said they had been victims of acts of violence, with more than half of the cases involving fans and just over 14 per cent involving club officials.
The FIFPro survey was conducted last September and October in Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Montenegro, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia and Ukraine. Greece is second only to Montenegro in the percentage of players that are not paid on time 67.5 per cent, with 13.3 per cent of them having had to wait for money owed to them for at least one year.
