The Brazilian judiciary has officially charged 16 people, including seven professional soccer players who play in the first and second divisions, with fixing matches on behalf of an online betting gang. The judges accepted the prosecutor’s complaint after both the Brazilian Football Federation and the government requested a thorough investigation, which the federal police have already carried out. Among those accused are players from Santos, Fluminense and Internacional. The scandal, which threatens to shake the very foundations of Brazilian football, had its first act in November last year with midfielder Romário, a 20-year-old player from Vila Nova de Goiás, a second-rate side, as the protagonist.
Romário nervously waited on the bench in the game against Sport. Shortly before, he had accepted a bribe of thousands of reais to impose a fine, according to the prosecutor’s complaint. The footballer had received part of the money, but there was a problem: he was not summoned by the coach. In desperation, he hastily tried to convince a colleague from the team, but there was no way. The rumors that began to spread in the dressing room at the time raised suspicions about the club’s president, Hugo Jorge Bravo, who happened to be a police officer and began to investigate himself. Three weeks later, Romário left the team due to “serious indiscipline”. It was the beginning of a scandal that has reached dangerous proportions.
Prosecutors allege in their complaint that the betting group usually offered players between 50,000 and 100,000 reais to make very specific moves in the games, such as a certain number of fouls, yellow cards, corner kicks or even just trying to lose his own team. If everything went as planned, bettors on betting sites made huge profits. The investigations have uncovered at least 23 of these criminal acts in games; There are 13 Suspicious Encounters, all from last season. Among those involved are players from clubs such as Santos, Fluminense, Internacional Juventude, Cuiabá, Cruzeiro, Athletico Paranaense, and Internacional, but the list could go on.
One of the most well-known suspects is Santos defender Eduardo Bauermann, who is being charged at least 50,000 reais for receiving a yellow card in the last game against Avaí in 2022, according to the investigation. The player was released by the club on Tuesday. Athletico Paranaense winger Pedrinho, Cruzeiro midfielder Richard and Fluminense striker Vitor Mendes suffered the same fate.
As an example of the crude system, another player, Fernando Neto, currently at São Bernardo, had a conversation with a player when the latter told him that he had done everything to be banned from the game, as they had agreed, so the statement of one of the exchanges. Detected and filtered by WhatsApp. “Look at the fouls I committed. The only thing left was to attack the referee (…) I tried everything and that son of a bitch didn’t send me off,” he lamented. I told Bruno Lopes, one of the players, who prosecutors say was the leader of the gang, which includes eight other suspects.
In these cases, the bettors were not easy to please. Some players have reported threats. In the case of Bauermann, two players (who would have lost 800,000 reais because the player did not commit the promised fouls) came up with the possibility of killing him. On one of them, police found two firearms and 23 pieces of ammunition without a permit.
The Brazilian Football Association has asked the President of the Government and the Ministry of Justice for the federal police to take over and centralize the investigation and ruled out that this would have any impact on the games. “There is no way to suspend the current competition,” he said in a statement, noting that for the time being the investigation relates to games from last season and that the current one is not tainted.
The players involved were threatened with a two-year ban under the Code of Sports Court. In criminal law, they can be accused of criminal offenses such as gang crime, money laundering and corruption in the sports sector, which in addition to fines also provide for imprisonment of two to eight years.
The scandal has reignited debate about sports betting companies, which have been legal in Brazil since 2018 and have grown exponentially with no clear regulation because they operate from abroad. According to a count by the newspaper O Globo, they move almost 150 billion reais a year in Brazil, but hardly pay any taxes. The Chamber of Deputies is preparing a commission of inquiry into sports manipulation and the government is preparing legislation to get this thriving sector to start paying taxes.
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