RedNation Interviews Declan Hill

By Steve Bottjer RedNation

RedNation recently had the chance to catch up with Dr. Hill to discuss the state of match fixing in 2012 and to get his thoughts on developments in his field of expertise since The Fix was published.

RedNation Online: The Fix was first published in September, 2008 and the last time I spoke to you was June of 2010. I guess an obvious first question is: have things improved at all since your book was published?

Declan Hill: Oh gosh, yes. I mean unbelievably so. When it came out, I think maybe 50% of people said “This is a problem and we have to deal with it” and the other 50% said “Who is this guy?” and “This is complete crap”, etc. And what has happened is that the second critical 50% has just evaporated like snow in May, mostly because of the Organized Crime Task Force in Bochum, Germany. I had taught a couple of their detectives in Vienna at a corruption school and, when the book came out, they were like we know him and he is okay. And they launched an investigation and it basically revealed that not only had I told the truth, I had actually been moderate in what I had written compared to what was actually going on. They discovered over 250 games that had been fixed in nine different countries, including the European Championships, World Cup qualifiers, all the way down to a game featuring 16 year olds in Germany.

Full Story