Czechia football has been rocked by a match-fixing scandal two days out from the crunch World Cup playoff against Ireland.<\/p>\n
In what\u2019s being described as the \u201clargest police crackdown in the history of Czech football”, dozens of arrests have been made during dawn raids.<\/p>\n
The Czechia FA’s preparations for the visit of Ireland have been disrupted after their chairman David Trunda sent a message to the members of the executive committee for a “SOS and red phone mode” meeting today.<\/p>\n
They state: “Since 6am, a huge intervention of perhaps the largest scale in the history of Czech football has been underway.<\/p>\n
\u201cEuropol and Interpol are involved in the action. All is in coordination with the Uefa anti match-fixing unit.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to media outlet Isport, the three-year investigation concerns alleged betting corruption in club matches from youth to first-team level.<\/p>\n
The probe is said to concentrate primarily on the area of Moravia, part of the eastern Brno region near the Slovak border.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Ethics Committee will begin proceedings today with more than 40 players, officials, referees and clubs, including clubs in the top competition up to the fourth league plus youth leagues,” according to the Czechia FA.<\/p>\n
In some cases, the accusations extend beyond wagering bets to influencing the outcome of matches. The findings relate to matches from 2023.<\/p>\n
Trunda said that the Czechia FA “is the initiator in this case”.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We have been cooperating with law enforcement agencies from the beginning, providing maximum cooperation,” he continued.<\/p>\n
“It is very important to say that we have been working for a long time to uncover unfair practices in cooperation with the police of the Czech Republic, but also within the framework of internal procedures of our processes.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will do everything to ensure that the betting mafia disappears from the Czech sports environment and the organisers are finished once and for all. There is not a place for all these activities in the sports environment and Czech football.”<\/p>\n
At the same time, he emphasised that no one from the Czech football management is involved in the corruption affair.<\/p>\n
Integrity officer Kamil Jav\u016frek commented on the current events. \u201cWe cannot give many details at the moment, the intervention is still ongoing. Cooperation with the police was long-term. In addition to the police investigation, we conducted an internal investigation in cooperation with Uefa throughout. I dare say that the cooperation was successful.\u201d<\/p>\n
A flood of bets from the Asian market created suspicion.<\/p>\n
The chairman of the Ethics Commission, Martin Holub, explained that cases of match-fixing and bribery are being investigated. “The primary source is betting, but there are also several cases of purely sports corruption,” Holub revealed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Czechia football has been rocked by a match-fixing scandal two days out from the crunch World Cup playoff…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":362750,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1113,42,2539,5782,43,5783,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-362749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-fai","tag-headlines","tag-league-of-ireland","tag-local-soccer","tag-news","tag-premiership","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=362749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362749\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/362750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=362749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=362749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=362749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}