Horse meat: big on Chinese state telly.
“During Chinese New Year a foreign correspondent told me that when something happened domestically in China, they were told to go find an analogous situation in the country where they’re stationed. For example, if a landslide happened in China, they had to find local news about a landslide; if a bridge collapsed in China, they had to find a similar piece of news. When this similar news is broadcast on TV, people will think the problem happens globally and China isn’t alone in its suffering.
On that principle, and given that the Chinese football authorities have been wrestling with gross corruption for a while, I suppose CCTV will soon be all over this. The irony here is that Chinese football corruption is probably more soluble on the unlikely condition that the will exists to solve it because it’s all internal. The match fixing in Europe is a cross-jurisdictional nightmare which Europol doesn’t seem to want to touch. Never mind: there's always FIFA, an organization possibly even more bent than the Chinese Super League.
I suppose one advantage of the stratospheric wages on offer in the Premier League is that these blunt the appeal of bribery, though that certainly doesn’t apply lower down the food chain. It's funny to think of money being channeled through the Filipino markets on the rigged outcome of Accrington Stanley versus Port Vale, but if it ain’t now it soon will be.
To take it unseriously for a moment, bribing a Premier League football player to take a dive or fake an injury in order to affect the result of a match seems rather like bribing an elephant to have big ears.
Posted by: ajay | February 21, 2013 at 10:47 AM
It's the Lloyd's of London problem, isn't it? Something that started off comparatively small-scale and controllable by informal personal pressure finds itself, as it grows, how ineffectively these counter-measures scale...
Posted by: Richard J | February 21, 2013 at 11:59 AM