Marco Casagrande, general secretary of the Finnish Football Federation, confirms to Turku Sanomat that suspicious game events are also being monitored by the federation.
The men’s soccer club playing in Kakkones is suspected of having ended up as a tool for betting criminals, reports Turku Sanomat.
An expert interviewed by Turku Sanomat Francesco Barancan according to the Finnish club’s game events and betting coefficients have been such in several games that the Italian could not come up with any other explanation than criminal activity.
– The numbers are so absurd that there is no doubt about manipulation. The matches are one hundred percent manipulated, and there is no other way to explain them, Baranca tells TS.
Baranca estimates that the criminal organization has made “certainly more than a million euros” with match manipulation related to the Finnish club. According to Baranca, some of the club’s players and background people are connected to other clubs in the Second and also the fifth league level, or Third, which makes the problem wider. The clubs are geographically from different parts of Finland.
Baranca has been researching match and result manipulation for more than a decade. Until last spring, he was the head of the Ethics Committee of the Ukrainian Football Association for seven years.
The Football Association monitors “certain clubs”
General Secretary of the Football Association Marco Casagrande confirms to Turku Sanom that suspicious game events are also being monitored by the association.
– We know that it is justified to monitor certain clubs, and they have been monitored, says Casagrande.
Turku Sanomat says that the matches of the Kakkonen club, which is the subject of fraud suspicions, have not been on the game lists of the domestic gambling company Veikkaus. However, from the point of view of match manipulations, the matter has almost no significance, as most of the questionable betting takes place, for example, on the gray market in Asia.