Ahsan Ali Syed, a one-time bidder for Blackburn Rovers, is experiencing trouble at his Spanish club Racing Santander amid ongoing claims of massive corruption elsewhere in his business empire. The report linked here from Bloomberg is a good update while the knock-on effects for a New Zealand business tycoon are dealt with in the story […]

By Nick Harris SJA Internet Sports Writer of the Year 31 May 2011 . When Sepp Blatter took to the stage in Zurich on Monday, Fifa’s president declared: ‘Crisis, what is a crisis?’ In a display widely reported as “arrogant” and “contemptuous” (and which can be viewed in full here), the 75-year-old Swiss, the head […]

By Alex Miller at SportAccord, London 6 April 2011 Britain’s sports minister Hugh Robertson has urged the Welsh FA not to let politics deprive Gareth Bale of his ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’ to represent Great Britain at next year’s Olympics. Earlier this year, the Football Association of Wales spelt out that they will oppose […]

By Sportingintelligence 15 February 2011 . Match-fixing and betting-related corruption have been cited in recent years by various senior sports figures as the biggest threat to sport in the near future. Michel Platini, the head of Uefa, has said so numerous times now, including in this interview from November 2010, when he said: “To fix […]

By Nick Harris 4 February 2011 The three Pakistan cricketers at the centre of the ‘spot-fix’ scandal arising from the fourth Test against England at Lord’s last summer are to face criminal charges, the Crown Prosecution Service has announced today. Separately, Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir will discover on Saturday the verdicts from […]

By Nick Harris SPECIAL REPORT 3 January 2011 This is the story of an investigation into tennis integrity; of a mysterious betting coup at Wimbledon in the summer of 2009; of the protestations of innocence by Wayne Odesnik (the player who lost that match); of the different stories that Odesnik told about his physical condition […]

By Nick Harris 18 November 2010 The battle for the right to stage the 2018 World Cup is wide open today as a race already full of twists and turns – with more to come – enters its final fortnight. After an investigation by Fifa’s ethics committee in the wake of reports of corruption by […]

By Nick Harris 20 October 2010 Two members of Fifa’s Executive Committee, Amos Adamu of Nigeria and Tahiti’s Reynald Temarii, have been suspended today following alleged deals to sell their 2018 and 2022 Word Cup hosting votes, as exposed by the Sunday Times last weekend. Four other Fifa officials who were implicated in the ST reports – […]

By Nick Harris 19 October 2010 Fifa’s ethics committee, chaired by Switzerland’s Claudio Sulser, will convene on Wednesday for a meeting that will consider whether to sack two Fifa Executive Committe (ExCo) members – Amos Adamu of Nigeria, and Tahiti’s Reynald Temarii  – implicated in alleged deals to sell their 2018 and 2022 Word Cup hosting votes, […]

By Nick Harris 21 September 2010 David Douglas, the former high-ranking Metropolitan Police officer who investigated match-fixing allegations against the world No1 snooker player John Higgins, has spoken in detail for the first time about why he concluded Higgins never intended to fix any match. Higgins was banned earlier this month for six months, and […]