Match-fixing: a ‘normal’ part of past sport?

Recent match-fixing research has been driven by sports management’s deep concerns that publicity given to match-fixing could damage confidence in results, leading to loss of spectators, television coverage or other sources of revenue. Discourse has been driven by words such as ‘integrity’, ‘honesty’, ‘criminal’ and ‘corruption’. These are, of course, commercial as well as moral, legal or ideological judgements, in which powerful sporting organisations have attempted to locate match-fixing as marginal, rare, illegal and wicked. This chapter focuses on the longue durée, across most societies, beginning before formal sports associations, codifications and organised and formalised betting markets emerged when match-fixing was already widely practised within sporting culture. It was relatively common across a range of class and status groups, a ‘normal’ phenomenon, in which ‘fair play’ carried very different resonances. In part, but only in part, it was linked to betting, in societies where the sporting betting market often began largely small and inter-personal, before the global expansion of the betting market. Many competitors sought to gain extra advantage to improve their chances of winning esteem, money and status in a wide range of ways that would now be redefined as match-fixing, driven by a wide range of motives.