Europol probes Singapore crime network

[Denver Native (Carol)]

THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- A wide-ranging match-fixing investigation has uncovered more than 380 suspicious matches -- including World Cup and European Championship qualifiers and two Champions League games -- and found evidence that a Singapore-based crime group is closely involved in match-fixing.

"This is a sad day for European football," Rob Wainwright, head of the European Union police organization Europol, said Monday, referring to the sport Americans call soccer. He said the investigation uncovered "match-fixing activity on a scale we have not seen before."

The probe uncovered 8 million euros ($10.9 million) in betting profits and 2 million euros ($2.7 million) in bribes to players and officials and has already led to several prosecutions.

next - http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story/_/id/1326579/380-matches-suspect-in-european-fixing-probe?cc=5901

[slim]

Good.

Soccer snobs are the worst. Maybe this will shut them up.

[chazoe60]

I hate soccer. I gave it a try a while back, during one of the world cup tournaments. I forced myself to watch about four hours of that mind-numbingly dull sport. Here are the conclusions I came to.

1. For a sport that supposedly never takes breaks there is a shit ton of standing around, jogging, or walking. It seemed to me to be a sprint for one or two guys while the rest just mulled around waiting for their turn to run.

2. Flopping worse than any Euro-trash NBA import you could ever imagine. Holy shit they look like pussies out there flopping and some even mustered tears while clutching at fake injuries. It was pathetic and quite frankly an embarrassment to sports in general.

3. For being the best in the world the Goalies suck. Holy shit they don't stop shit. If they could manage more shots the scores would be relatively high because the Goalies are absolutely terrible, every one of them. It looked like the goalies didn't really stop anything they were just lucky that the vast majority of shots on goal were wide or high.

4. God damn that shit's boring. That was my main conclusion.

[WTE]

I had encouraged my son to play high school soccer and he said soccer players are referred to as "Foot Fairies."