UEFA's president Michel Platini and general secretary of the International police (Interpol) Ronald Noble, have joined actions and signed an agreement to combat match fixing. The two will also work against stadium violence, however the priority is going to be match fixing. Interpol has agreed to send teams to this year European Championship in Poland and Ukraine.
UEFA on paper has been battling match fixing for a while, occassionally punishing only poor and small European clubs, while never even considering touching the bigger clubs, despite evidence for match fixing. UEFA isn't able to prevent match fixing among rich European clubs because of the always outstanding threat that they may quit UEFA and form their own Super League (plenty of sponsors are interested in such a league). Real Madrid, Barcelona, Man United, Man City, Chelsea, Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, Lyon, Inter, Juventus.... have all said they don't need UEFA and can form their own monster super league that everyone will obviously watch. Because of this outstanding threat hovering above UEFA's head, they aren't capable of sanctioning the rich teams for anything. Perfect example was the latest UEFA failure to sanction the Dinamo Zagreb 1-7 Lyon match which was blatantly fixed! Dinamo lead the game 1-0, while Lyon needed 6 goals to make it to the next round, which would simply never happen, but it did because the match was fixed during half time. We all know how the match ended, we all saw on our TV screen Dinamo's defenders sharing a laugh with Lyon players after the sixth and seventh goal was scored with Dinamo defenders standing around as if inviting Lyon to just score already! UEFA was very quick to "investigate" the Dinamo - Lyon match and even quicker to rule that the match was regular, nothing out of ordinary! Perhaps Interpol should investigate UEFA?
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