Football without faith is nothing so Infantino is playing with fire at World Cup | Jonathan Wilson

Swirl around Fifa’s machinations and doubts about big team and big name bias creates doubt – and that’s a dangerous game

About 25 years ago, I was in the office of a sports newspaper in Bucharest on a Saturday afternoon following the Premier League games with some local journalists. With about five minutes to go, Chelsea trailed 2-1. Somebody had backed Chelsea to lose and brandished his betting slip. Chelsea scored. A couple of minutes later, they scored again. The reporter tossed the slip away. I saw drama; the Romanians saw a fix.

This is why integrity and the perception of integrity are so important. I don’t think that game was fixed. There is no evidence whatsoever it was fixed. Given the salaries players earn and the sophistication of the early warning system for unusual betting patterns, there is little chance Premier League games are fixed. But if you grew up in the declining days of the Ceauşescu era or the wild west that followed, when match-fixing wasn’t so much an open secret as a simple fact, cynicism is the natural response.

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