1204: Chris Dalby | The Criminal Infrastructure Beneath Modern Sports

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Today's episode is about a side of football, yeah, soccer, that I had no idea existed.

Human trafficking, match fixing, billion-dollar gambling scams.

This is not the beautiful game you thought you knew.

Imagine being lured from Sierra Leone or Central Asia with the promise of a pro contract in Europe, only to have your passport confiscated and end up locked in what is basically a prison camp.

Or picture players being pressured by by Russian or Chinese syndicates to throw matches, not even to lose, but to pick up a yellow card because somewhere offshore, there's a bunch of money riding on that moment.

We'll dig into how illegal betting has ballooned into a $1.7 trillion shadow economy, how crypto and gambling sponsors plaster themselves across jerseys the world over while laundering staggering amounts of money, and how even events like the World Cup are leveraged to launder the image and reputation of sometimes absolutely terrible authoritarian regimes.

Crime and sports journalist Chris Dalby joins me for this one live from Lisbon, home of the Pastel de Nata and apparently human trafficking in football.

Chris, thanks for joining me.

This is a weird sort of mix of topics because, well, actually, it was quite serendipitous in the first place that we met.

I got introduced to you through a previous guest, Nathan Southern, who covers all kinds of fascinating crypto scams, human trafficking in Asia.

And minutes before we talked, I had watched this video about sports gambling.

And I said, do you know anything about that?

And you were like, actually, that's my beat, sports and crime.

And I thought to myself, of course, there's a guy that covers sports and crime mixed together, which is kind of a weird beat, huh?

You'd be surprised how relevant it is to people.

Even your most hardcore sports fans who think sports and crime is, oh, the ref cheated me or cheated my team.

When you actually dig a little deeper, they've all heard of something.

A little nugget.

one player on their team, one coach in a rival team, something.

Everybody who's a hardcore sports fan has engaged with how organized crime is moving into sports in really worrying ways and have been for a long time.

My wife, Jen, who you met earlier, she is convinced that all big sports are rigged, which I don't necessarily agree with.

But after I read a bunch of your articles, I was like, okay,

maybe soccer, maybe, right?

And then it was, as I kept watching your videos and reading your articles on your website, which I'll link in the show notes, I was like, okay, definitely soccer.

And then I was like, but why not other other sports then?

Because look, maybe with the exception, again, of soccer football, the higher the league, like NBA, the scandal would be maybe too much because the thing is too profitable.

But then as you kind of like chunk down to these smaller leagues that are a little bit more isolated in different places, you're like, actually, the profit from rigging matches and things like that, it starts to eclipse merch for a LeBron jersey or whatever.

Let me flip that on its head.

Sure.

You absolutely have match fixing and especially what's called spot fixing at the NBA level.

There's a case being prosecuted right now, the NBA level, in the Premier League in the UK for soccer.

But the lower down the leagues you go, you get these players who are making absolutely good money, but for whom still, I'm going to pay you $20,000, $50,000, not to fix the result of the match because that's way too difficult for a single player, but to rig a specific point of the match.

I want you to get under 10 points in that match and then get subbed out with an injury.

Or I want you, if it's soccer, to get a yellow card before the 20th minute and get one of your friends to get it before the 40th minute.

That's it.

That's all you have to do.

People are betting, like, I bet he gets a yellow card before the first 40 minutes or whatever.

Sports books are offering what are called spot bets.

And it's ridiculous.

You can bet on any eventuality of LeBron's going to get four fouls that game or Jordan Harbinger is going to get sent off with a red card.

Or there's going to be more than four goals or less than four goals.

You can manipulate any of that.

As a non-gambler, though, I was like, I didn't even understand that, right?

Because I'm like, oh, you just bet that the Mavs are going to win or lose.

I didn't realize that you can bet on this person's gonna get this much playtime and then get injured in the second half or whatever specific weird thing and it's alarming these are on both legal and illegal betting sites okay but you can see on one like fourth division soccer match in England there'll be a like $200,000 bet in total on a player getting a yellow card for that match or it'll be a series of bets right parsed out of eight matches that team over eight matches is going to get X number of yellow cards to make that happen you don't need to control a lot of people two Two, three players, maybe a ref if it's a number of goals, or a ref if it's a penalty that he's going to give at a certain time.

The only way to identify those are looking at betting odds, right?

So you've got these betting companies, these integrity companies that are just monitoring all bets.

And when they see something absolutely aberrant, they'll flag it.

And the sports book will stop taking bets on that match.

So there are companies that look at bets and go, this doesn't make sense.

You're now digging into one of the biggest controversies in world sport.

The way that betting data is given, given, so a federation, the MBA or the MLB, will sell their data to a data company.

You've got Sport Radar, Genius Sports, a couple of others.

Those companies will then sell that data to the betting companies.

But they're also going to sell the integrity services.

So it's a little bit ironic that the company that's selling the betting data is then in charge of monitoring that same data.

That's like we've investigated ourselves and we found that we've done nothing wrong, kind of.

It's more like we've sort of developed the disease and we're also selling the cure.

Yeah, like I have an ice pack for that wound on your face.

What?

I don't don't have a wound on my face.

And then wham,

right in the kisser.

Yeah, this is really surprising, but also, I mean, hashtag business, hashtag capitalism, right?

If you're going to create something like this, it makes sense that they would create these air quotes solutions.

But I want to dive into some of the juicier topics because it actually gets dark really fast.

It's not just about, and we'll get back to gambling, but it's not just about betting on yellow cards and red cards.

I was surprised that there was actual human trafficking in sports.

Is this especially European?

Because I've never heard of this in the United States, but who knows?

It's more in Europe than anywhere else, but

sports is one of the main vectors for human trafficking.

Let me give you a story.

Yeah.

Three years ago, Nigerian kid, 15-year-old, great football player, posts highlights of his career on Instagram and TikTok, and he gets called by a football agent.

He gets a message on Instagram saying, hey, you're the next Messi, you're the next Ronaldo.

Wow.

Let me take you to Europe.

I'll make you rich.

He signs with the agent.

The agent says, no problem at all.

I've already got the club lined up for you, but you need to pay me just for the passports, for the visa, for the admin.

It's about 8,000 euros, something which a Nigerian family usually cannot afford.

Kid flies out, he's 15.

That's illegal already.

Why is that illegal?

So FIFA regulation, so FIFA is the governing body for football, stipulates that under 18, there are very limited circumstances in which a player of that age can be transferred, and certainly not intercontinentally, and certainly not that far away from his home.

I see.

And anyway, if you're signing a player at that age, he better be an international level player.

An average player from northern Nigeria doesn't qualify.

He is parked in southern Serbia at a dead-end dead-end football academy and forced to pay $1,500 every month.

Oof.

How is he getting that money, though?

That, his family, his community,

believing that he's going to make it.

Oh, so they're just scamming this kid and his entire extended network.

And tens of thousands of others.

After two years, on his 17th birthday or just after, Jerry rebels, says, I'm not paying any more.

I'm out.

The agent beats the shit out of him.

Oh, man.

The kid posts on Instagram, cut lit, blood all over his clothes, explaining the whole thing.

Because he did that, he got attention.

He had half a million followers on Instagram.

He got sent home and he's okay.

There are tens of thousands of kids, not okay, all over Europe, increasingly in the Middle East, increasingly in Asia, and in the U.S.

This might sound kind of ridiculous, but it sounds like they're in a soccer prison camp.

They're either in soccer prison camps, depending on how organized it is.

Here in Portugal, two years ago, one of the main football owners of the league was running one of these illegal camps with 140 kids in it.

Are they getting training or are they just like being milked for the money?

They're being milked.

Wow.

They're being milked.

Occasionally, they'll do like a friendly match.

There's there's a hope that one of them might make it and he can sell it but usually they don't and these kids were from kazakhstan costa rica congo ending up in a camp near porto in the u.s it's soccer increasingly but it's basketball kids from africa being promised nba trials it's baseball dominican republic venezuelan kids being promised careers in the mlb and they're being milked and no one pays attention to it because sport has this magic reputation and also because it's kind of i'm trying to think as a prosecutor here maybe i'll use my law degree for a minute how do i prove hey these kids are not just at an overpriced, expensive, probably a poor decision to send your kid to baseball camp?

How is this actual human trafficking?

Well, they promised him that he would get a career in baseball.

Okay, but then you willingly paid for him to go there and he can't leave.

Okay, well, we'll go and look.

Of course, these kids can leave, but they don't want to.

They're getting trained.

Does anybody want to leave?

And they're all like, well, they said they'd, you know, beat my ass or end my career or hurt my family if I said anything.

So I'm just going to practice baseball in the corner until these cops go away.

I mean, it's just really hard to prove that this is happening unless somebody escapes.

And then the narrative is they were disgruntled because they weren't talented enough to make it.

So now they're pissed off at us and they're making all this crap up.

No, and usually they're illegal immigrants.

And they're here illegally.

If they report it, they're going to get deported anyway.

Right, right.

But there's even more worry than that.

These kids, if they make it, the few of them who do make it into professional sports, usually at a very low level.

are then perfect targets for match fixing.

So then they're going to be leaned on to say, hey, we need you to take a dive in the fifth round or take a card in the 40th minute.

I see.

Okay, so before we move on to the match fixing, because I'm interested in that as well, of course, how many kids people are being trafficked annually?

Do you have any idea how many sort of are...

There's a bit of a soften thrown around that it's 10,000 to 20,000.

You'll see that in UN reports.

I think that's a bit generous.

I think it's in the thousands of children a year.

Still, though, it's so weird.

It sounds like a low number, but it's also think about how many kids that is.

And they're just being scammed.

And it's not just them that's being scammed, right?

It's their families are being.

So if you're taking 10 grand, 15 grand from a Nigerian kid's family, that's like multiple people's life savings, potentially.

We had a case in northern Cameroon where an imam, like if his Muslim country, the kid was a talented football player.

He couldn't afford to pay what the agent was asking.

The Imam did like a collection in the community.

The kid took the money, gave it to the agent.

The agent disappeared.

And the Imam took his life.

His own life?

No, the religious leader who'd made the call.

He took his own life.

Wow.

That's horrible.

And I would imagine that has happened on multiple occasions.

Or, you know, you've at least ruined these families.

Oh, my goodness.

The weird thing is in Europe, nobody talks about it.

Everybody knows about it, but you ask the leagues, they're like, it's not our problem.

These kids are not playing for our league.

FIFA's like, they're not in our system.

You go to West African countries where I've been a lot, most recently to Senegal.

It's an open knowledge.

I went to a conference and spoke to a room full of players.

Half of them had been contacted.

Many of them had been trafficked and come back to the country.

One mother of a player came up to me and said, oh, don't expose this.

Why?

Because my kid got trafficked, but if we've got enough money, I'll send him again.

Why would she send him again?

I don't know because the dream of having a child making it and being able to, not even being a Messi or Ronaldo, but making a salary that for Senegal will it's generational wealth.

And even some of the kids I interviewed in Paris were telling me, well, it's better to be homeless here than to live back home in Senegal.

I'm not saying whether they're right or wrong, it's their right or not.

Yeah, imagine making that choice consciously.

Like, okay, this didn't work out, and I live on the floor of a on a mattress in a, in a barn in Slovakia, but it's still better than living in wherever they came from.

That's really awful.

Okay, so back to match fixing.

These people are prime targets for match fixing because they need money, their families need money, they were promised money and aren't getting it.

And now they're being paid.

I don't know, what does a Division five footballer make in Europe?

It's an average wage.

Okay.

Division four, division five, you're talking a few thousand dollars a month.

It's nowhere near a professional football at the top level, but it's not enough to be dissuaded.

On top of that, your agent often has your passport.

He can often end your career.

So there's added pressure for you not to be deported, for your dream to make it, and you know you're one of the precious few who did make it into a professional team.

Oh, so yeah, you're already in the top 0.1%.

Why screw it up now?

And your agent is also the one helping the crime syndicates ask you to do

that fix the match.

How does match fixing work?

Just telling you to not score could be a thing.

Telling you to score more, if that's what they're all trying to do, so you can't do that.

Where's the leverage?

Imagine the relationship between a drug trafficker and his next client.

First, it's a hit.

You need to do it.

We'll pay you a good amount of money.

Once you've done it, once they've got you, because of course, if they denounce you, your career is finished and it never goes back up.

The agents can disappear.

They usually don't live in the country where you're operating in.

And they're certainly not going to climb the ladder, follow the money back to Asia.

So the players are often the last link in the chain and the only link in the chain to fall if the fix is found.

I see.

On top of that, match fixing is not a crime in most countries.

Really?

It's not a crime in the U.S.

Federally, match fixing is not an offense.

The gambling part and the bribing part.

Bribery is an offense, but only if there's an actual demonstrable bribery act.

Nevada and New Jersey, obviously states with a rich sporting background, have specific statutes against the manipulation of sports competition.

But since the money doesn't usually stay in the U.S.

and goes abroad, it's not being followed.

So if I'm a professional pickleball player or something like that, you can say I'll give you five grand to lose this match and that's not illegal?

Not as its own offense.

That is correct.

If I could ensure that I paid you money, I bribed you, that's the offense.

The fixing of the match in itself, no.

So if I just fix the match because I am doing you a favor, that's not illegal.

The MLB, there's plenty of cases of players like being found guilty of altering a match.

They're often banned for life.

From legal, they're banned for multiple years.

They're fined.

But that's within the power of the league or their teams.

It's not criminal.

It's not criminal.

Wow.

And so you mentioned the money goes to Asia.

So is this like a Chinese crime syndicate or something like like that?

So China has a very nice defense about this.

Gambling of any kind is illegal in China.

They crack down on Mahjong halls in China.

So betting of any kind is illegal in China.

But the triads have moved to Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand.

You may have heard of these scam compounds.

Yeah, we did a show about that with Nathan who introduced us.

Nathan does that very well.

Those compounds are connected to, they're essentially scam cities.

You can go there and set up your criminal operation, whatever it might be.

So often it's romance scams or fraud scams, but running an illegal betting syndicate, absolutely come in.

Multiple sponsors of top European soccer teams, including champions of the Premier League in England, so some of the most of the wealthiest sports properties in the world have had shirt sponsors that are linked to these scam compacts.

Yeah, I have questions about that.

And we'll get to those because I noticed that gambling is illegal in some of these jurisdictions, but the team that plays for that area, they're sponsored by a gambling company.

And I'm just kind of like, okay, technically, that's probably legal, but it's a little little bit like, I mean, prostitution's illegal in California, and it would be really weird if a brothel sponsored your local sports team.

Wouldn't be surprised if we're going there, to be honest.

Wouldn't be illegal, technically.

Right.

Okay, so back to the match fixing.

So these are Chinese crime syndicates,

Russian crime syndicates, maybe as well.

One thing that I saw in an article that you wrote, Singaporeans, that I didn't really see coming, because you don't think of Singapore as like an organized crime kind of city.

For financial crime, it's rife.

Yeah.

And the Singaporeans are usually in charge of the match fixing.

So it doesn't mean that the operations are based over the money's going there, but a lot of wealthy Singaporeans do invest in both manipulation of legal betting and their own off-book illegal betting sites.

So Singapore, think of it more as like a Dubai, kind of like a control hub.

Gotcha.

Okay.

So they tell the player, you're going to throw the match or you're going to get a red card by punching someone in the face in the first half, whatever it is.

And I assume are betting on this, knowing it's going to happen, which is the unfair advantage.

So there's the profit.

How big is the industry for?

The UN brace for this one?

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said that illegal betting is worth 1.7 trillion US dollars a year.

Wow.

I would have been really surprised if you said 50 or 100 billion, not 17 times that.

The cases that we're talking about are the visible ones, the ones where everything went right in terms of enforcement, where it was a match fix in a Western European country usually.

where the authority cared enough to report it, where there was an investigation announced where someone might have been arrested or suspended.

That's a low percentage of cases.

I work with independent betting observers who are flagging matches all over the place.

The Israeli third division in football, Colombia, Mexico, Lithuanian ping-pong.

I'm not joking.

Right now, one of the hubs is Turkish women's basketball.

Wow.

Just imagine what you think professional sports is.

And worst thing, these betting companies and these data companies are listed on the stock exchange.

So they need to be showing continuous year-on-year growth.

How do you show that growth?

By offering new data in new leagues.

That's why now you're offering Mongolian second division women's football.

Yeah.

Where we're sitting now.

Portugal, the Portuguese men's league for under 23s, had 30 million Euros bet on it in the 2022-2023 season.

For those of us that don't understand the divisions, division one is what, like Manchester United versus, I don't know.

Yeah.

So division one is division one will be like the top division in the country.

Right.

Okay.

So you have the English Premier League or the Serie I in Italy.

Those are the top teams.

You don't see many match fixing cases at those leagues, but you do see them.

That's what's surprising.

These guys are making millions of dollars, and you still see a handful of cases.

And for every handful that you see, there's a bunch.

They didn't get caught.

Okay, so that's Division I.

Division two is like the teams that those teams pick from when somebody's a standout.

They pull from those like a farmer.

It doesn't necessarily work like that as in the U.S., like with the farming teams.

The U.S.

tends to just have their top divisions.

But you can get relegated.

If you lose in the Premier League, you get relegated to the second division.

The lower down you go, the more likely you are going to find match fixing because those players are operating at a level where the data is being offered for betting, where there's less supervision and the salaries are not high enough to protect them.

Yeah, I would imagine at the time where you are maybe making a minimum wage, essentially, playing professional basketball in Serbia, it's more tempting to double your salary by, or

who knows, 10X your salary by.

match fixing even just a few times.

And then below that are the people that it's essentially a part-time job that maybe pays for their travel.

I was recently in Slovakia for a conference, and they told me that there was a sixth division Slovakian game, which is village soccer at that point, right?

Villages with 300 euros.

And there were eight Brazilian players playing at this level.

I'm like, what?

Sorry.

Even for, I've been covering this for a while.

They were living in a high school gym.

And indeed, the matches were fixed.

And there was betting in Asia offered on that level.

Imagine the lowest possible soccer game you can imagine.

And there were eight Brazilian players and it was fixed.

And who was paying these guys?

The local business owner of the the village who wanted to win over his rival business in the next village over at that level so he's recruiting brazilian soccer players to come live in rural slovakia right just get a hot meal and living in a high school gym and making a few thousand euros wow that's maybe not quite illegal human trafficking but like right on the edge of weird right on the cusp yeah right i had that same question like well they came here i asked them like do these guys what happens to these guys i i asked the police chief of slovak he's like you know they leave after a while.

Sometimes we catch them, they get deported.

Sometimes they get arrested for drug trafficking.

Oh, so they're here illegally?

They're here legally, but they overstay their visas.

Right, okay.

And that's the problem.

The problem is we might be able to track some of these cases when it happens at the top division in England or France or Portugal.

Of those 140 kids that were caught in Portugal at that academy I mentioned, most of these cases, we don't know what happened.

Most of them got deported back home.

Sure.

Most of them might be somewhere else.

And you get involved in human trafficking, prostitution.

drug trafficking.

They then get asked to fix football matches.

They are abandoned without a community.

They're minors.

You can imagine what they're saying.

They're able to do anything potentially to survive.

And can be manipulated.

We're talking about kids.

Yeah.

Teenage boys.

That's sad.

That's really sad.

What about officials besides the players?

It seems like a dumb question.

Are there corrupt officials then as well?

Or is it just easier to corrupt a player?

So it depends what you want.

When you get into friendly matches, so this is a thing that happens a lot in soccer.

You have friendlies, right?

Outside of the season, a team from Portugal might play a team from Denmark at a camp in Cyprus or in Greece.

Those are catnip to organized crime.

And I want to be clear, this is organized crime.

This is not just some random little crime proof thing.

It's organized crime.

There was a match recently in Cyprus we were looking at, $180,000 bet on that match.

And we looked at the teams, top team from Denmark, top team from Greece.

The referee was the local Taverna owner.

Literally, the owner of the pub across the street was the referee.

So they don't have a better ref?

It's not a sanctioned match.

It's not controlled by anyone.

So the teams are just like, oh, we want to play a friendly thing.

Here's the referee.

They're not going to ask who it is.

The assumption is it's just a normal ref who's not, but this is a ref who was like, I'm going to make one team win.

And the fix was done through the travel company.

The travel company that organizes the friendly matches says, come for a soccer camp in Cyprus.

We'll have opponents for you.

They're the ones who are manipulating the fix.

But it's all for gambling, right?

Because I think a lot of people are wondering why bothered, but it has to be because of the gambling.

And you mentioned, what was it, $1.7 trillion?

I read that two-thirds of all bets placed on the Super Bowl, so the American Super Bowl, were illegal, basically on offshore gambling websites, platforms.

And I think that was, yeah, 228 million out of a total of 350 million wagers.

Even though what's weird is sports betting is legal.

So, why would you bet on an illegal platform?

That's, I think, what I don't necessarily understand.

Is it because you don't want to pay taxes on your winnings or you're laundering money?

If you're laundering money, if you don't want to pay taxes, the amounts you can bet are higher than you could on a legal platform.

Platform because it's regulated.

Exactly.

Yeah, okay.

And you don't want anybody tracking what you're doing.

And, or you are just an addict and you want to be able to bet as much as you want.

The punchers are usually all high-wealth individuals who are not organizing the illegal betting.

Oh, punters.

High-net worth individuals

who like to gamble, criminal organizations who want to launder money, who are going to get notified.

They're going to be in a signal group or a telegram group or a secret messaging service and being told, okay, you know, they don't know what's happening.

They'll just be told, today you're going to bet on Lithuanian ping pong.

Bet this.

They're not the ones controlling.

They're just being told what to bet.

And of course, the illegal betting syndicate is going to get a cut of that.

The house always wins, but in a reversed way.

Where are these illegal gambling sites headquartered?

I mean, where do they run?

So it depends.

If you wanted to set up a legal gambling website tomorrow, you can download and get access to a setup website for $15,000.

People are selling the ready-made gambling website.

You can buy the literal templates with everything set up.

I guess they're not worried about competition if they're selling you the actual coded templates.

Exactly.

If you know where to look, the data is available.

So you can can just set that up and then it's up to you to build your own network of people who are going to participate.

On top of that, it's very, very, very rare for someone to fall at that level.

So the organizers of these gambling rings almost never get worried.

I've only seen one arrest in the last year of like a top match.

So that was in China.

So why do it?

Because you can do it off-book, because you can do it in ways that will not be tracked, and because you're being given surefire wins.

The owner of the illegal ring has every intention of the fix working.

Wow.

I mean, Americans are not immune to this.

I know we're focused on Europe because we're in Europe and that's where sort of focus your work.

But it says Americans wagered approximately 5.37 billion, but only 1.4 billion was through legal regulated channels.

So the remaining 4 billion went to the black market.

That's just the United States in gambling.

And I would assume those numbers are low.

You'd assume that's a low.

That might have even been just for the Super Bowl.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I should probably have clarified that in my research.

Billions of dollars flow through underground betting markets every year.

Personally, I'd rather place my bets on something that actually pays off, like the fine products and services that support this show.

We'll be right back.

This episode is sponsored in part by Buy Optimizers.

Most people think sleep is all about how many hours you log, but the real game changer is deep sleep, where I get like five minutes per night, but whatever.

That's when your body does the heavy lifting, repairing tissue, balancing hormones, recharging your brain, that explains a lot.

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Now, back to Chris Dalby.

I worry about younger people.

Like, look, if you're an adult and you're a gambling addict, I feel for you, but I see a lot of people go, how do I stop gambling?

And I'm like, well, you know, how old are you?

And they'll be like, I'm 17.

And I'm, and I'm like, oh my gosh.

Wow.

Okay.

So you're like stealing from your parents to bet on soccer matches at age 17.

This is really bad.

And they're using a lot of illegal platforms, one, because they're underage.

And well, that's probably one of the main reasons.

And two, they don't go, huh, this gambling site that I saw advertised on my favorite porn site is not regulated.

I did a bunch of due diligence before putting my money in there.

I mean, they're just not doing that.

They're kids.

Tracking your data, stealing your credit card information.

On top of that, even legal betting platforms, and by the way, I don't oppose betting.

I do think in the next 20 years, we're going to see it as the same as we did tobacco in terms of the damage it's doing to citizenship.

I hate gambling.

I don't accept them as sponsors on the show.

So I feel free to shite all over.

Betting is a natural human impulse, like taking narcotics.

So regulating it and legalizing it, it makes sense.

However, the level to which it's reached and the penetration with younger people is absolutely awful.

Yeah.

Both legal and illegal.

I've seen adverts for illegal betting sites.

You have no idea whether it's an illegal betting site, whether it's a front that's taking you somewhere else and no one is looking at trained for that.

With young people, the problem is as well that it's made to look sexy.

It's almost pornographic in the allure, right?

It is funny you should say that because they really do know where to advertise.

I have seen betting ads on porn videos, which I was watching in preparation for this show in my professional duties for science, of course but i saw that and i thought what a weird ad and then i realized no this makes perfect sense the target demographic for degenerate gambling might also overlap quite significantly with people who use a ton of pornography which is like young or middle-aged dudes and the criminal organizations who run illegal betting overlap very handily with the criminal organizations running human trafficking for pornographic research exactly same same ownership trafficking a couple brazilian guys is nothing compared to the hundreds of romanian women that we've used to put the videos up on this website.

Yeah, it's crazy to me how much overlap there seems to be in these different segments of organized crime.

It's like where you see match fixing, you see human trafficking, and you see, of course, the gambling, which is adjacent to the pornography, which is adjacent to the crypto, which is adjacent to the money laundering.

I mean, it's all one big dirty chessboard.

Organized crime is A, the most adaptable business in the world.

That's an old language.

It also follows the path of least resistance.

And right now, as I said, match fixing, if you're catching the athlete who was in on the fix or the coach, you might go one level up.

You're never going to go all the way back.

The money can't be traced.

And there's no effort to follow the money in match fixing investigations in the US, unless you connect it to a larger racketeering problem or a larger drag trafficking problem, in which case you can build it as part of a RICO case.

But that's never happening, especially with the current administration where the RICOs are being done really pathetically.

On top of that, we see it at the top level.

Adam Rozier, the NBA player this year, or late last year, got popped for artificially pom ball in a match.

In January 2025, I think his financier, I forget the name, had placed 30 bets at a Mississippi casino, the Mississippi Sports Book on Adam Rossia underperforming.

Now, that was egregious, obviously.

That was badly done.

You place 30 bets like that.

You're going to get caught.

The guy got arrested, but he's probably going to get off with a slap on the wrist.

A small suspended sentence and a multi-thousand fine.

We see it time and time again at the top level.

And at the top level, it's not often Asian syndicates.

It's these guys are generationally wealthy.

It's they want to make their uncle rich.

They want to make their friends in their hometown rich.

So you've got a bunch of Yahoos in a famous athlete's hometown in Brazil or in the U.S.

betting on him, and he throws a match.

So those are the cases that are being reported.

And so people think that's what it is.

It's way darker than that.

Yeah, that is darker.

It's beyond lost tax dollars.

How does the dominance of illegal betting undermine, can I say, responsible gambling efforts?

Or I mean, the sports integrity implications are pretty clear, but it seems like beyond, again, beyond lost tax revenue, how does this corrupt the sport?

This is something we've been looking at a lot.

I run a website called The Sports in Crime Reason, which is, I think, the only newsletter looking at all crimes in all sports.

And it's pathetic.

Honestly, the leagues claim to have very little information about this.

All leagues have an integrity division, and the investigators at that level do great work, but they're funded a fraction of what the business end is getting, of what the marketing end is getting.

So marketing will always trump integrity in every sport that I have encountered.

And then we get into the problem of parallel sports.

In football, in basketball, in tennis, you're now beginning to get sophisticated investigators who are quite savvy as to what's going on, especially in tennis.

Tennis does amazing work at detecting match fixing.

So you actually see quite less alerts in tennis than you used to.

So now you have entire leagues being created from soccer to pickleball outside the jurisdiction of traditional federations.

In fact, there's a fear now that LeBron is going to invest in a rival NBA structure, a rival basketball structure.

Really?

There's a fear that Cristiano Ronaldo is going to do the same with soccer.

And so those leagues are also selling their betting data through the same data companies as traditional sports, but with no federation overseeing them.

Although when you think about FIFA, maybe you can only go up from there.

For sure.

FIFA is sclerotically corrupt.

Yeah.

And the World Cup in the U.S.

is going to be a farce, I think.

Oh, I want to hear about that.

So the problem for modern sports is you have a lot of people who are trying to protect their sports.

But if, for example, table tennis is very easy to manipulate because it's just two players, so you can very easily throw a match.

But it's so easy to manipulate table tennis that you have entire leagues that exist only for betting.

So this is exactly where I was going.

I saw this video that I mentioned, I think, earlier in our conversation where there's all these, I guess they're real sports, but they're kind of fake sports where it was like one of them was, it was two guys sitting at a table across from each other and the table has like walls where your feet are so that you can't go out.

And you're seated, you're seated.

So it's almost like you're, remember those old video games from the 80s where you'd play Pac-Ban opposite someone else, and it was a table you could set your beer on?

It was like that, but it was soccer, and they're just sort of kicking and moving their feet around.

And you can watch this 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

And there's probably like 30 different two-pair guys playing this.

And when they score, they don't cheer.

They're just like, uh, they just rub their eyes because they've been awake for so long or whatever it is.

And it's just there for gambling.

And then there's two-on-two soccer and it's like two kind of fat Russian dudes that just are wearing Manchester United jerseys.

And then when they're done with that, and it's like a windowless room with fluorescent lighting and you can't tell where it is or what time of day it is.

And then they just take off their jersey and put on a Madrid jersey.

They have sponsors.

That's insane to me.

So this is just for gambling.

Like they're making these sports so people can bet on them because there's not enough real sports in the world.

There's demand for it.

If they're doing it, it's because people are gambling on it.

Aren't there enough actual sports being played at any given time that you can bet on why make fake new ones that

because i guess there are times of day where and you see if you track the gambling for those sports that are 24 hours a day in the evening in the us or in the evening in the europe you'll see a spike in those sports because there's no professional sports happening in europe at that time oh my god so you see these three russian guys wearing manchester united shirts and paris saint-jama shirts and they're advertising it as three on three man united against paris saint-jama yeah and then they'll the same three guys that just take a drink change their shirts into you know lisbon versus Madrid.

And it's the same player.

Something about them just says not professional athlete.

I mean, technically they are professional athletes, but they don't quite have the physique.

Yeah, they don't look like Cristiano Ronaldo.

No.

And there's no way to crack down on that.

Because how is it illegal?

Also, where are they?

There's been an amazing investigation done by a newspaper called Joe Samar that geo-tracked these guys.

Like we know they are.

They track the warehouse.

It's in Western Russia or in Ukraine or in Poland or in Lithuania.

But why is it illegal?

Under what jurisdiction are they operating?

It's a hobby league, right?

I mean, you're allowed to play three-on-three drunk drunk soccer with your buddies, I guess.

What should be illegal is you shouldn't be offering betting data on this.

But again, who's enforcing that?

There is a pushback now against the level to which the betting industry facilitates spot fixing.

Just to bring it back to US for a second, you followed the sex toys being thrown at WNBA games in the last.

I just saw that today.

It was something about people are throwing dildos on the court, so they're thinking about running matches with no fans.

And they're making millions off it.

There's a meme coin called Green Dildo Coin that arranged for these green dildos to be thrown onto WNBA courts.

So I think it's happened nine or ten times.

And the value of the coin is soared to 15 million, like the market cap is at 15 million dollars.

And there was a trading value of $1.5 billion in the last 48 hours.

Oh, my God.

And Donald Trump Jr.

shared a meme of his dad, the president of the United States, throwing a green dildo from the top of the White House onto a WNBA court.

No, get out of here.

I swear to God.

With the top comment, America is back.

It's on brand for us right now.

What can I say?

Owners of Green Dildo Coin made more money than the WNBA players made last year.

And there are now dildo dailies on sports books where you can bet as to what game will they be throwing a dildo next and what color will it be until it was suspended, not because it's shocking, but because of insider trading.

The guy who's going to throw the dildo could just bet on himself doing it.

Sure.

Do you see the level of absurdity which we've reached?

At that point, if you buy that meme coin, you just deserve to lose your money.

I mean, there's a point at which my sympathy sort of wanes.

Of course, but what does it do to women's sports?

That's the real casualty is now they're the article I saw was they're going to have to play with no fans sometimes because they can't actually run the match.

Of course.

Yeah, now today they're doing no bag.

You can't come in with any sort of bag.

It commoditizes sport in a way that is even more twisted than it already is.

People might sneak their dildos in different ways.

I'll leave that part up to your imagination.

I don't want to give anybody any idea.

Hey, this is my shit.

I can be disgusting.

Back to these fake sports.

By the way, we'll link to that video in the show notes because it's so weird.

I mean, when you see the fake sports, you're just, it does remind me of the scam compounds in Cambodia kind of thing, because you can just, you see how tired some of these people look playing these sports.

There's a clip where the guy's playing the table soccer and he scores again and he doesn't, his reaction is just, oh, like he just does one of these and he's just rubbing his eye.

Like, this is what I look like at four o'clock in the morning when I'm stuck at an airport lounge.

You know, I'm just, oh, and that's this man's life.

And it's basically like, you can just see that he's going still better than being homeless or like, still better than living in my parents' basement, or whatever sort of, like, terrible situation this guy came out of to work as a sports slave, kind of, because they're there for hours and hours and hours and hours, I mean, playing this.

And it's getting worse.

Now we're seeing esports being taken over by match fixing.

League of Legends

has had plenty of scandals recently with Asian teams.

One in Portugal quite recently.

So it's a throwing match.

You mentioned sponsors as well.

One thing I noticed is that teams everywhere, just of any kind, are overwhelmingly overwhelmingly sponsored by crypto platforms, gambling platforms, even in California.

I mean, I lived right near, I live in Silicon Valley, and I think it's like the crypto.com arena or whatever is right near us.

And there was another one near us that I think was also FTX or something like that, some other crypto thing.

It just seems bizarre to me that even in places where gambling is actually illegal, a gambling or crypto company will sponsor these teams.

And what's the logic here?

Are they aimed at overseas markets?

Is that

so televised stuff?

This happened two weeks ago.

The champions of Italy in football, Napoli, the team from Naples, the team that had Diego Maradona back in the day, big team with a huge international following, signs a gambling sponsor, partner for this coming season.

Within 24 hours, the Italian regulators slap them down going, that brand is illegal in Italy.

You're not allowed to sponsor them in Italy.

Italian people are not allowed to access this website.

So they had to shut down the link to the gambling website on the Italian website.

But it's allowed to continue elsewhere.

So you've got the champions of Italy partnering with a brand that is illegal in their own country.

Wow.

In England, there's plenty of cases, Manchester City, partnering on their training jerseys with a brand that has not existed for more than two weeks in the UK.

It's always some weird combination of letters and numbers, 7x bet, 1x bet.

I find those very confusing.

I'm like, one win, one X win, 10x win, 7x bet.

They're all owned by like one or two companies.

Okay.

They're just rebranding all the time.

That makes so much.

Because I was just thinking, have these people not looked at the competition and realized it sounds similar?

And now I feel like a dumbass for not realizing that's the point.

So that's when it goes back to the scam compounds.

You've got companies that we know are operating or own some of these scam compounds that are running, essentially just endlessly generating new types of betting companies and finding ways to sign with the biggest sports brands in the world.

Crazy.

And so you ask, well, isn't there a know your sponsor rule?

And no, there isn't.

No.

There is no requirement.

at the moment to know your sponsor in European football.

I don't know enough in the US to know about that, but it wouldn't surprise me if there's opportunities there.

So basically, if the check clears, you can sponsor a sports team.

Until the sponsor is found to have committed a criminal act, and in which case they're quickly taken off the jersey and nobody talks about it anymore.

Ask Nathan, you drive in Vietnam, you drive in Cambodia, you will see billboards with the biggest soccer stars in the world.

Often just retired, so they can't be bothered, but you know, the Luis Suarez, the Teddy Sheringhams, people that everybody knows, and they're on billboards there.

Official partner of 2X Bet, 29X win, whatever meme generator they use that day.

I noticed also a lot of crypto platforms are also betting platforms.

I had the, I had to crank up the VPN and look at these sites and make accounts on a few of them with a fake email address because I don't use any of this stuff.

But I noticed that a lot of it is like, I mean, crypto has always been kind of a casino in the first place.

I mean, there's, look, you can buy Bitcoin and if you held it, like a few folks I know, you did really well.

Ethereum, same thing.

But like most of green dildo coin, for example, it's just a way to gamble and launder money for most people.

NFTs, same thing.

So these crypto platforms are also betting platforms.

And it just, it's amazing how adjacent this all is to like pornography, some kind of some pornography, the human trafficking, the gambling.

There's a source, Play the Game, which I'm not exactly sure what that is, but it probably is.

It's a fantastic organization based in Scandinavia.

I see.

Thank you.

I was hoping you would know.

They found betting and crypto sponsorships.

There's 173 crypto sponsorships, 172 in nine leagues.

I don't know how many teams there are in nine leagues, but that's a lot of sponsorships if you're approaching 200.

That's just got to be the majority.

If you are a struggling team at any level in the European ecosphere, and I would imagine the American one, certainly in Africa and Latin America, betting companies will knock on your door.

And through betting companies, you allow in drug traffickers.

The number of cases now where we see of drug traffickers trying to buy European soccer teams through shady companies that seem to be crypto, that seem to be betting, and nobody's really asking as long as the check clears.

Right, because it's their, so they've used their money laundering company to also sponsor a sports team.

I work a lot with law enforcement, and I'm screaming at law enforcement, pay attention to this.

This is genuinely one of the most innovative criminal threats you've seen in years.

One or two will listen, but it's reaching a critical mass.

And I think in the next decade, you're going to see as the betting and gambling, advertising, and associated addictions spirals to crisis level, people are going to begin noticing these things.

We're saying it now.

Yeah.

I hope it reaches critical mass and receives international law enforcement attention.

Do you consult for law enforcement on this?

Yeah, I do trainings on

law enforcement on match fixing, on sports and corruption, on how to track sponsorships on how betting companies operate.

Yeah, that's good.

I'm glad somebody's doing that.

The UN says crypto sponsorships in football could be laundering up to $142 billion a year.

I can't even launder my socks correctly.

So I stick with today's sponsor.

The only things in my life that come out clean.

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Now, for the rest of my conversation with Chris Dolby.

Crypto transactions, obviously, notoriously hard to, well, depending on the type of blockchain, hard to trace.

The money laundering concern is really clear here.

I mean, UN data estimates $142 billion annually in terms of money laundering on crypto platforms.

That almost sounds low to me, but $142 billion is still a hell of a lot of money.

That is going to make this problem worse, right?

Because drug cartels need to launder money and they have a seemingly unlimited amount of money to launder.

And this is a great way to do it.

The PCC is Brazil's largest drug gang and it's one of the largest drug trafficking organizations in the world.

The PTCC is now moving into Portugal actively.

And from Portugal, they can connect with other European organizations, Albanian, Italy, Mafia.

One of the main ways they are doing it is football, soccer.

Wow.

They control football agents back home.

They control teams back home.

They buy teams here or control teams here.

They will transfer players over at like a greatly inflated cost.

So that's a money laundering vector right there.

And that's, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of euros for one player.

Do you even think of it?

And FIFA, just as long as the contract's approved, they're not worrying about, oh, this player suddenly is worth 2 million Euros, 1 million Euro.

How is he worth that much?

They don't care.

FIFA's corrupt as hell, but even that's hard to police.

How are you going to decide the economic value of every player and then say you're overpaying for them?

That you have to make that argument with every freaking trade.

Play the game that you just mentioned is pushing for an internet independent sport regulator for all sports all around the world.

It's an ambitious goal, and I support it wholeheartedly.

I've done their, I'm going to their conference in October, but it's never going to happen.

Who's going to finance that?

Sport has this mystique of we self-regulate, we sell dreams, we sell unity.

And when you see the Olympics or the World Cup, it's hard to disagree.

But underneath that, it's getting dirtier and dirtier.

Nobody wants to hire their own cops that have power over them that they don't control that could limit the amount of money that they make or something.

They're going to say, we've got this.

Don't worry.

I know I'm going to sound like a stick in the mud here, but you got player shirts, perimeter boards.

What do you call those hordes?

Hoardings.

Hoardings, TV ads.

They're all saturated with gambling brands and questionable type of stuff.

It seems like, and again, I'm picking on soccer here or football, but it seems like they're really normalizing addiction and betting maybe more than...

I'm not paying as much attention to this in the United States, but it really seems normalized.

It really seems like they kind of are just complicit with letting this happen.

It's being seen as, you know, as you said, it's your problem, right?

If you choose to bet.

I think the awareness of treating gambling addicts as patients and not as, you know, victim blaming them, of course, people should be able to resist.

But it's the same psychological triggers as drugs, as pornography, as prostitution.

You're not going to let Pornhub sponsor your soccer team.

You're not going to let a drug cartel

openly.

You're not going to let cocaine sponsor your sports team.

You're going to let the drug cartel do it because the check will clear.

But also...

There are attempts to check this, and they're always defeated.

I live in the Netherlands, which is one of the strongest countries to stop gambling.

They only legalized sports gambling a few years ago and then very quickly restricted it and then did it again this year when they saw the damage that it took.

In other countries, it's not happening.

For example, there's a convention in Europe called the Mackelin Convention, which obliges countries that sign it to have prosecutors trained in sports manipulation.

And they share information, they do great work.

There's one country in Europe, Malta, that little island in the Mediterranean.

for which gambling is a huge percentage of their revenue.

Gambling companies are headquartered there.

So they block bans on gambling companies at the European level, going, oh, well, we're a member of the EU.

We're a member of the Mackellen Convention, and we disagree with you.

In fact, it's called the Malta deadlock because gambling companies are allowed to continue operating in abusive ways, in ways that go against the law in other countries where they operate, but they're protected by a country which makes a lot of money off them.

In Australia, which I know is not necessarily relevant, in Australia, you have a situation where the federations, the football, the rugby, the cricket federations, make money on every time someone bets legally on the sports that they regulate.

Oh, wow.

Come on, Australia.

Exactly.

And it's rare, but the precedent's now been created in a major sporting destination.

How long before, you know, FIFA?

Wouldn't it surprise you if tomorrow FIFA pulled that stand?

Or the NBA?

Wouldn't surprise you.

This gambling thing's out of control.

We need to make our own gambling platform, and now this is the only one that everybody's allowed to use.

Or we all li with the official sports books, and you trade through us, and we make a cut off every debt.

I want to talk about the World Cup.

I know it's split between the U.S., Canada, Mexico.

Between the three of us, I mean, maybe less so Canada, we've got organized crime up the wazoo.

We've got drug cartels and all kinds of things that we just talked about before in the U.S.

and Mexico.

Is that going to have an effect on the World Cup?

I feel like it has to.

In terms of fixing World Cup games, almost not at all.

There, however, the integrity is very strong.

But Canada is very strong at regulating organized crime, especially in match fixing.

There are some in low division soccer.

In Canada, there's been a few match fixing alerts.

In the U.S., you now have a task force between FIFA, Gianni Infantina, who's the president of FIFA, and the White House.

In fact, as of this week, President Donald Trump is personally in charge of that task force.

To give you an idea of how that task force is probably just a money-making engine, there was the Club World Cup recently in the U.S.

financed by Saudi Arabia, a billion dollars in prize money for the entire pool of teams that were there from around the world.

Saudi Arabia bought it, financed it, paid for the trophy.

owns the airline that took most of the teams there, owns several of the teams that were performing there.

One of the teams was, in fact, fact, the Saudi Arabian champion.

And they paid for a trophy that was millions of dollars, the value of the trophy.

They showed it off at the White House, and Trump said, Yeah, I'm keeping it.

Oh, I heard, I think you forget about this.

Yeah.

They had to rush to make like a cheaper copy that they gave to Chelsea, the winners.

And the original trophy is in the White House with a plaque that says, Gift from FIFA.

It wasn't a gift from FIFA.

Trump just went, Mine now.

Oh, my God.

The Club World Cup ceremony where Chelsea, the English team, wins the Cup.

And Trump is there.

Trump comes out, gives them the fake version because he kept the real one.

And then he just hangs out with the team.

Yes.

With the official

Club World Cup winner's shot.

You've got Trump in the second row.

He's athletic.

It's really funny.

Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, is going to use every opportunity to make money, legally within FIFA statutes.

But FIFA's a private company.

This is what people need to understand.

Sports regulators are private companies.

So they have every intention of making as much money as possible.

So the World Cup is going to be glorious for that.

In Mexico, you've got a different kind of problem.

Because organized crime actually in Mexico didn't look at football much for a long time.

Match fixing in Mexico was never a big issue until the last couple of years.

But here's an example.

The Jalisco Cantal New Generation, I published a book about them last year, where we talked about how Chiva Scuadlajara, one of the big teams in Mexico who has won multiple championships, had a Serbian coach.

They paid for a really like top-level Serbian coach, former coach of the Serbian national team.

And he arrived and the players were out of control, partying, bringing girls into the lockers.

So he suspends the top three earning players of the team going, you're done.

They brought prostitutes into the locker room.

You're suspended for X number of games.

Two days later, he gets the phone call from someone going, you're going to play them or else.

And it was from the CGNG, the Jariska Cartel New Generation, second biggest cartel in Mexico.

Not because they were fixing the games, but because those players knew them and just called them up and said, hey, can you just lean on them?

Two months later, the coach quits.

As you would.

Because he can't do his job.

So again, it's not that the matches in Mexico are going to be fixed, but there's plenty of money to be made around that, either from controlling the illegal betting or, as is happening more and more, shaking down cargo trucks.

This is a major problem now in Mexico where the cargo jackings, truck hijackings, corruption inside ports, corruption inside airports is through the roof.

It's always happened on Mexican companies.

You now have multinational companies leaving Mexico because they're being extorted to a point where their margins are being dropped.

So, what's going on?

They're shipping in a bunch of, I don't know, laptop motherboards, and then they're just half of them end up missing.

Name your industry.

I see.

There's a major port right next to Guadalajara in Jalisco where some games will be played.

And that highway between the port and Guadalajara is truckjacking central.

So we're talking actually to some companies who are sponsors of World Cup or contractors for logistics who are bringing in extra security.

And they're thinking about putting armed guys on every truck.

That's not going to be cost effective.

But the fact that we're talking about it for an event like the World Cup is aberrant.

So basically what you're saying is the World Cup suppliers are going to have to deal with truckjacking on the way to

the threat of it on the way to the World Cup.

Probably during the World Cup, there's going to be police and security everywhere.

But in the run-up to it, absolutely.

And it's really a shame.

I used to live in Guadalajara.

It's an amazing city.

It was really safe.

This is a long time ago.

This is like 25 years ago.

And so to hear people be like, yeah, it's not safe to go here, here, and here.

And it's like, what?

That place, you could sleep outside at that place 25 years ago.

I want to just dismiss one thing.

Fans who might listen to this, who are thinking about going to Mexico, you can go to Mexico and you'll have an amazing game

and safely attend the game.

Thank you for that.

However, the ways in which cartels are making money in Mexico is rapidly diversifying.

And as I mentioned, sports being a catnip to organized crime in Europe or in the U.S., same in Mexico.

You talk to Mexican police and they have a point.

They're like, why do we care about illegal betting when we've got murders and fentanyl and drug trafficking to worry about.

And yeah, fair point.

Yeah, fair point.

It's like we're stretching a little thin with the 30,000 murders that we deal with annually in this area alone.

Yeah.

Wow.

The World Cup should be quite interesting.

It's spread across three countries.

And just that's going to be.

The one after that is Spain, Portugal, and Morocco.

Wow.

Which was done to open the door to Saudi Arabia.

The next one after that is in Saudi Arabia alone.

And they do these multi-nation vessel corruption.

They artificially constructed these multi-nation transcontinental World Cups.

So each continent was accounted for.

And then Asia, Saudi Arabia could have it on its own, clear.

I see.

So explain that once again.

They've made the trifecta thing so they could cover a whole continent.

The North American one was a legitimate U.S., Canada, Mexico organic idea.

After that, the World Cup is on a rotation.

So it has to go to different continents.

Yeah, okay.

And Asia was having a turn coming up, but Europe hadn't had it.

Africa hadn't had it.

So they gave it to Spain, Portugal, and Morocco.

So those two continents were accounted for.

I see.

And then it had to go to Asia the time after that.

And Saudi Arabia, which was basically financed FIFA for the last generation, just said, no, we'll take it.

It sounds like you're saying Saudi Arabia kind of bought FIFA or paid for them to.

Allegedly.

Allegedly.

Yeah, okay.

Why do this?

Just prestige?

Is that kind of the thing?

Like, hey, we're not just a regime that lives partially in the Stone Age or whatever.

I mean, I know that sounds super offensive, and I'm sure we have Saudi listeners, and I apologize to them, but not a country known for, you know, to be super strong on modernity and human rights.

Sports is the greatest show in the world.

Yeah.

Legitimately.

I worked for the Olympic Games and the Olympic Games in China, which were very corrupt and also bought under shady circumstances.

However, when you're there at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games or you're there at the World Cup final, it does what it says on the tin.

It does bring people together.

It does generate global attention.

It does generate goodwill.

It brings people together from around the world, for sure.

It also allows troublesome regimes from around the world to say, hey, look at the shiny distraction while we jail and kill political opponents back then.

And Saudi and football, I mean, the recent Club World Cup, is evidence of that.

Is it legal?

Of course not.

Is it shady, anti-ethical?

Yes.

The team that represented the U.S.

at the Club World Cup was Inter Miami, the team that's owned by David Beckham and that plays Lionel Messi, the most famous player in the world.

Why were they picked?

They were not the MLS champions.

They had not won the MLS Cup.

They'd won like a random cup a couple of seasons ago and were grandfathered in because they wanted Messi.

So it's all just...

We're dancing to the Saudi tune in world football or Qatari.

Qatari?

Say more about that.

Saudi and Qatar are fairly big rivals when it comes to sort of power and hegemony in the Middle East, with Saudi definitely ahead.

And they both buy and control different sports organizations around the world for similar reasons.

It's PR, it's essentially acceptance of their regimes, it's showing Saudi Arabia in a different light than what it used to be while not changing their ways at home.

It distracts the global audience.

It validates them.

It's essentially reputation laundering.

Yeah, sports washing, right?

Isn't that the term?

We did an episode about this, episode 829.

It's kind of high-profile sporting events used to reshape global narratives around controversial regimes, I guess.

You know, you even have competitors at a lesser level.

The United Arab Emirates, where Dubai is, has done it with cricket.

Cricket is a sport that's very popular in India.

We could do a whole episode about corruption in cricket.

There's now betting leagues of cricket in the United Arab Emirates.

which is a country that had, yes, some cricketing origin, but not much, but have found that cricket is a way of selling their brand when you don't necessarily have the clout to do it at the soccer level or the basketball level.

Wow.

Saudi put in, let's say, 100 million a year into FIFA's coffers.

Does that sound right?

That's a lot of leverage, I would imagine.

It's a buyout.

They did it with golf.

They've done it successfully with golf.

I forgot about that.

They started Live Golf or LIV Golf as a rival to PGA, which was legitimate.

PGA had legitimate problems with its player base, who were annoyed at the way they were being treated.

So an alternative was quickly popular, and a lot of players migrated over.

And now the two organizations are merging.

It's a very difficult and controversial merger, but it looks like LIV is going to become the brand.

Wow.

And of course, with the Saudi-loving, golf-loving president in the White House, makes their life even easier.

A lot of the money of LIV golf in the U.S.

goes to Trump properties.

Trump has brokered agreements in the White House where LIV tournaments are going to be played contractually in Trump resorts in America.

Where a lot of people sort of get tripped up, and I have to agree.

I know we want this World Cup to be on multiple continents and sort of rotate around the world, but isn't it going to be like 120 degrees or something like that in Saudi Arabia when they play?

How is that going to work?

I assume the stadium is just covered in air conditioning.

You're coming at it from an ethical perspective.

Is that my first mistake?

No, you're coming at it from the perspective of you want athletes, crowds, to enjoy an event and to put it on in a way that is enjoyable to be.

Yeah.

That's out the window.

Out the window, okay.

They will play games in the middle of the night in Qatar.

They already did.

That had not occurred to me.

You've had major sporting events in Qatar, in the Middle East, where they played games late at night, early morning.

4 a.m.

4 a.m.

marathon.

I think the marathon's going to, someone was, was, I was talking to someone who was thinking about the way the Olympics would be there, wouldn't have they?

You have to have the marathon at like 4 o'clock in the morning, 2 o'clock in the morning, which ironically would be prime time in America.

It's also probably not bad for those of us who are going to be jet-lagged if we go to these events, but for anybody else who's adjusted, it's going to be quite miserable.

And if you have events at 2 o'clock in the morning or late at night, your betting guys in America are awake.

And your betting guys in Asia are awake.

So you can say it's about the heat, but that's the separate.

It's about the games.

The soparity is TV audiences, advertising, betting markets.

It's no longer integrity of the athletes.

Lamin Yamal is one of the greatest young football players, soccer players in the world, Place of Barcelona.

He has played at the age of 17 five times more games approximately than Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo had at that age.

Oh, wow.

Now you can say he's making multi-million dollars a year, dozens of millions of dollars a year.

Why shouldn't he?

Because the human body can't take it.

Yeah, he's going to be retired.

You've got kids crashing out of 23, 24 with career-ending injuries 10 years before they should.

Because FIFA is just adding more games and more games and more games.

FIFA is at war with the Players' Union, FIFPRO, who's saying, stop.

You physically cannot do this to our players.

But more games, more betting.

Right.

More games, more money.

That's right.

Oh, wow.

I heard that the carbon footprint, I know a lot of people don't care about this, but the carbon footprint of the World Cup is

as big as some entire countries.

That's not something I've looked at.

I apologize.

It's not, but of course, just factor it in.

Now they're expanding the number of teams.

It used to be 16, then it was 24.

I think it's 36.

I think it's, I think, about 48.

At what point do you need qualifying?

Right, you just have everybody playing.

They're everybody playing.

The World Cup used to be the best of the best.

Okay, you can say that's elitist because countries with developed soccer systems are going to have the teams, you know, France and the UK and are always going to be there.

And the other teams are going to lose.

But there was a sense of accomplishment.

Now, who's going to tune in to, I apologize for listeners in those countries, but Philippines versus Paraguay?

Sure, fans in those countries are going to be at the World Cup, but what achievement is there when it's 48 teams?

However, betting audiences are going to go crazy for that.

God, that's crazy.

It really does go down to betting.

It really does.

It's betting all the way down.

It's Matushka Doll's of betting.

Crazy to me.

If we have to sum up, sport is a priority for organized crime in many ways.

The most influential way is controlling illegal betting, $1.7 trillion in illegal betting, so that well over $2 trillion if you count, legal betting, is the most important one.

Because from that, you derive a slew of parallel crimes, money laundering, human trafficking.

But at the heart of it, why I do what I do, why we have the sports and crime briefing, we've also created the first fact-checking platform for sports called Free to Play.

It's kids like Jerry.

To go back to that kid in Nigeria.

I'd just like kids who want to play football to not be trafficked, please, or to not be scammed and bankrupt their families.

And no one's looking out for them.

And that's what scares me.

When the footballing authorities, when the sports authorities say, we're about the kids, we're about helping everybody, you've proven that you're not.

So please up your game.

Chris Delby, thank you very much, man.

Super, it's just a fascinating dark side of sports.

Absolute pleasure, Jordan.

When disaster strikes, it's not your go bag or survival stash that saves you.

It's your neighbors.

Amanda Ripley joins me to reveal why most people freeze instead of panic and how our biggest threat in a crisis isn't chaos.

It's denial.

Disasters happen quite frequently and they've gotten more frequent and weather and geological disasters specifically have increased about 400% over the past 50 years.

But we've actually gotten much better at surviving them over the same time period.

So the number of deaths has dropped by about two-thirds.

In 1990, the National Hurricane Center could predict the path of a hurricane only about 24 hours in advance.

That's all you had to get out of the way, which really isn't enough, just based on the way people make decisions about evacuation and also based on the design of dense urban places.

So now the National Hurricane Center can predict the path of a hurricane with pretty good accuracy 72 hours beforehand, which is actually a pretty big difference when it comes to getting out of harm's way.

So this is a recurring nightmare for many millions of people at this point, evacuating, worrying, recovering, rebuilding, all of this.

And it's actually a massive tax on our economy.

So the bottom line is if you haven't personally experienced a disaster yet, you probably will, unfortunately.

But the upside is that the number of deaths has dropped.

Humans tend to become polite and courteous and cooperative almost to a fault in most disasters, including strangers.

Actually, your best ally are the people around you.

This episode might just change the way you think about prepping and who you should be getting to know before the next emergency.

Check out episode 1106 with Amanda Ripley.

All things Chris Dalby and Sports and Crime will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com.

Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/slash deals.

Please consider supporting those who support the show.

Also, our newsletter, Wee Bit Wiser, is a lot of fun.

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The idea is to give you something specific and practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships in under two minutes every Wednesday.

Come check it out.

It's a great companion to the show.

JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it.

Six Minute Networking over at sixminutenetworking.com as well.

I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

And this show is created in association with Podcast One.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sedlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Remember, we rise by lifting others.

The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting.

And the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

If you know somebody who's interested in soccer, betting, organized crime, match fixing, human trafficking, definitely share this episode with them.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show, maybe not the human trafficking part, so you can live what you learn.

And we'll see you next time.

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