Welcome back to the podcast. Today, we'll be covering the seedy world of sports corruption,

and in particular, match fixing. This is really the lucrative underbelly of sports.

Criminals rig the games and then place bets on the outcome, which of course they've secured in advance.

My guest wrote the widely acclaimed The Fix, Soccer and Organized Crime, and the Insider's Guide to Match Fixing in Football.

Declan Hill, thank you for joining me.

Thanks for having me on, Alexandra.

We first met when I was serving on FIFA's failed independent governance committee,

and you were a sane and incredibly knowledgeable voice as I tried to navigate that swamp of shoddy

governance. But your real expertise lies in match fixing. It wasn't until I heard you speak on that

subject in Baltimore last year that I realized the vast sums that are involved in

match rigging. As extensive as the FIFA scandal has proven to be, their corruption doesn't

really come close to the dollars involved in rigging the outcome of soccer games. Can you just

start at the beginning and tell us what a fixed match looks like? Is it just a matter of one player

on the field deliberately throwing the game? Can it be spotted by somebody in the audience?

Let me ask yourself and all the listeners to this podcast to take a leap of intellectual imagination,

because what I'm about to describe is so spell-binding in terms of the credibility of modern day sport that it really is

breathtaking.

And if yourself or anyone who's listening to our podcast in the next 20 minutes, half an hour

of this episode thinks that I'm exaggerating or doubts my credibility, I ask them please

to go on the internet and check everything

there.

This is the most dangerous threat to the credibility of modern sport, not just the world game

...