The year of 2011 will not be remembered for good reasons within the football world. With the ongoing saga of FIFA corruption and Mohamed Bin Hammam’s current ban from footballing affairs; Turkish, Finnish and South Korean match fixing and the illegal gambling world in the far east, football has had an unstable year.
Whilst the alleged corruption within Brazil has far less implications worldwide, the investigation into the Serie C game between Fortaleza and CRB is a worrying sign at domestic level.
The alleged incident happened on the last day of the Serie C season, and both Fortaleza and Campinense needed to win to stay up. The latter team did have a superior goal difference by three goals meaning they were favourites to stay up going into the final day.
The first signs of corruption was when the Fortaleza team decided to have a 22 minute half-time break. This was because they wanted to delay the kick-off so that the Campinense match would end before their’s did, and therefore know exactly how many goals were needed to stay up.
News came through from the Campinense match that they had won 1-0, and had seemingly survived, sending Fortaleza down. However, due to the long half-time break, Fortaleza was aware of the result by the 85th minute, at which point they were only winning 2-0.
Fortaleza players seemed to negotiate with the opposition and were allowed to score two more goals, meaning Fortaleza would stay up instead of Campinense.
The footage seems to show the CRB players let Fortaleza score the all important fourth goal, therefore sparking Campinense to complain to the CBF (Brazilian FA). They are now investigating the incident and this could lead to the demotion of Fortaleza and the reinstatement of Campinense.
Whilst this isn’t connected to the recently fixed matches for the profit of gambling syndicates, the game shows how easy fixing a result could be. Sources from inside the CBF say they are looking to hand out severe punishments if found guilty, so the recent match fixing scandals from around the world, doesn’t find its way into Brazilian football.
