The phenomenon of match-fixing in football

Abstract

One aspect of the security of sport, which is rarely considered by the organizers of sports events, concerns the different manifestations of match-fixing. The match-fixing of the result of a sports event or any component of it contradicts the established norms and values of the sporting competition, drawn up at the end of the XIX century by Baron Pierre de Coubertin and known as Olympism. Today, match-fixing is one of the phenomena in modern sport. Advertising, publicity, profit largely regulate relations in professional sport, and in full force, this applies to football as the most popular sport in the world. If we look at what has been said so far through the prism of Bulgarian football, it is enough to look at the Bulgarian football championships, whose official sponsor is an online betting company at sporting events and the first football league is named after this company. This same company has sponsorship relations with more than 10 football clubs, and to them we can add the volleyball and basketball federations, as well as some of the brightest representatives of these federations. Noticing this trend of business entering the sport, we set out to explore the opinion of players and their coaches about the manifestation of the phenomenon of match-fixing in Bulgarian football. The results of the survey show the existence of match-fixing at both professional and amateur level and allow us to indicate some steps to prevent such non-sporting techniques from winning.