Summary: Investigative journalists Alessandro Righi and Emanuele Piano join the show from Rome, Italy to give us an in-depth look at their brilliant work for Al Jazeera People and Power series, featuring a documentary they produced last year called, The Fix, where the first raw storytelling occured in the matter of Singapore match fixing syndicates currently operating all over the world, on each continent, at virtually every level of club and international football. Long before there was a Europol press conference announcing its findings, Invisible Dog was front and center tracking down the syndicates alongside Italian and other European law enforcement officials, digging into the data they had obtained and draw some very powerful and disturbing conclusions about Dan Tan and Wilson Raj Perumal who coordinated millions of dallars in action across high numbers of matches and remained virtually undetected until either greed or mistakes finally disrupted their operation. There are massive allegations in this episode including whether the fixers own football clubs, how Dan Tan has apparently escaped detection and why the Kelong Kings might not be the biggest syndicate in the illegal and dangerous world of fixing matches. We examine the level of sophistication in the Asian betting marketplace, how the Early Warning System at FIFA is little more than PR and how the syndicates are using technology to coordinate attacks, obscure their activities and perhaps even mislead authorities who are not armed with the necesary tools, strategies and jurisdictional powers to unlock this process, placing world football on a collision course with its very own integrity. No football league or federation is now immune as we discover from former players and now the extreme threat of leagues who play their matches in the summmer and those lower division clubs who are even more under threat given the low attention they generate and the real potential of match fixing syndicates supplying their players, becoming the chief sponsor on the shirt or even buying these clubs outright. There are important allegations here, questions that must be asked of football administrators and whether we have already gone past the tipping point on match fixing. Alessandro Righi, Emanuele Piano and Invisible Dog have done some of the best work in this area and they should be heard - what you might just learn from this episode should both alert and alarm you about how terrible the situation has become worldwide.
