A Villain's Guide to the Beautiful Game

I arrogantly hope that this article is akin to football as Machiavelli's 'The Prince' was to Renaissance politics.

As the new football season approaches, with it speculation of new players, overpriced replica kits, the unsavoury sometimes shadowy club owners rub their hands with glee. If you are one of them, many fans will wrongly assume that you are laundering only your reputation; that you are willing to lose millions to do so. That is too kind. Your new asset will not just help you wash your dirty money; it will make more of it too.

The first step is purchasing a club. Some national associations do what is laughingly referred to as due diligence on new owners, but this is unlikely to interfere with your plans. Having a criminal record can stop you from acquiring a club, but this article assumes you made your money in a place where the law was flexible and the courts accommodating; I am sure such inconvenient details can be scrubbed from your record.

It is a great time to enter the football racket; Banks are less generous and sentimental about loans. Tax officials are less lenient too, as Rangers discovered. But hard times mean clubs are desperate and going cheap. Set up a holding company in a discreet jurisdiction, as many owners do, and you have a money-laundering and embezzlement machine at the ready. The authorities are unlikely to bother you.

Start with ticket revenues: Exaggerating the attendance at matches lets you run some of the dirty takings from your previous career through the turnstiles, turning them into legitimate income. Or conversely, understate attendances if you need some petty cash, you can siphon off the gate receipts.

The market in players, between clubs and across national borders, is a golden opportunity. In the past scams were simple: bent coaches would take bungs to buy a player with the chairman’s wallet. Now the tricks are more complex and include the owner. Transfers involve huge and largely subjective sums, with agents or other intermediaries involved, payments pass through multiple hands and jurisdictions: perfect for concealing the origin and direction of the cash. If you sell a player to a friendly club that will publicly overstate the true price, then you can supplement the real fee with a couple of million ill-gotten euros of your own. Thus the money is now clean and in your club’s accounts. Pull the trick in reverse, inflating the value of a player you are buying, and you gain a usefully overvalued asset on your balance-sheet, which will help your club to borrow.

Transfers can also help you privatise club revenues and defraud minority shareholders. With the help of a co-operative agent, the fees, commissions and even parts of players’ salaries can find their way back to you and away from the taxman. The safest conduct would be to encourage a close personal friend into becoming an agent. This is easily arranged as the regulations which govern transfer deals are not difficult to circumvent.

Another great trick, unfortunately banned by some national football associations, is third-party ownership. When a player is not owned by a club but by a shadowy outside consortium, you can secretly invest in players whom you then rent to your own club, keeping the proceeds. Or you can even sell your club’s star man to a front company for a depressed fee, then sell him on at full price, again pocketing the profits. Naturally you will award the club’s construction and out-source catering contracts to your own firms, but that is fairly small fry; don't even bother hiding it.

Everyone blames match fixing on Asian or Balkan gangsters but the surest fix is always an inside job. The man who pays the players’ wages is in the ultimate position to corrupt them. After all, you are the one who decides who is picked or dropped, or who goes on the transfer list or doesn’t. That gives you plenty of leverage to influence players’ behaviour.

Purchase a club in Eastern Europe (stay clear of Russia and Bulgaria where club owners are murdered alarmingly regularly); not only are they cheaper, but in most of these countries an owner can get away with paying his staff poorly or erratically, making them more susceptible to coercion. However if your players are horrified at the idea of losing on purpose, simply conspire to bet on in-game details; the timing of a throw in or the first foul perhaps. Distance yourself from the actually gambling by selling the information to third parties; mafia or eastern betting syndicates is usually the best bet.

This short article only provides the basics; I encourage you to get creative! For example Željko Ražnatović (better known as Arkan the Serbian paramilitary leader), is rumoured to have used his football club to traffic arms and drugs. Hence remember that even the most scandalous money making scheme has a place in football; the sky's the limit!

But most of all, remember to enjoy the beautiful game x