Latest Score in Cyprus Soccer: Blown-Up Cars 6, Referees 0 By SAM BORDENAPRIL 9, 2015
NICOSIA, Cyprus — In retrospect, the low point was probably the sixth car bombing.
Because when it happened last month — when yet another Cypriot soccer league referee found his car a burned wreck — the overriding public sentiment on this Mediterranean island seemed to fluctuate between amusement and weary acceptance.
“People were laughing,” Andreas Michaelides, who coached the Cyprus national team from 1991 to 1996 and now serves in the country’s legislature, said. “They should be crying, not laughing.”
One bombing targeted a referee’s wife. Another attack, at the home of a referee’s mother, led to a boycott by officials that forced the postponement of a week’s worth of games in January.
“O.K., blowing up cars — we do it often, unfortunately,” Michaelides said. “It is one of our sports in Cyprus, almost. But usually it was for financial reasons. ‘You owe me money, you don’t pay’ — that kind of thing. For football? You don’t do these things for football.”
Yet bombs targeting referees suspected of corruption are only a sliver of a much larger morass that has enveloped professional soccer in Cyprus. While most global fans think of European soccer as being in the glossy, high-end mold of England’s Premier League or Germany’s Bundesliga, the reality in many European countries, particularly in the eastern part of the continent, is far more grim.
Club bankruptcies, fan violence, conflicts of interest, unpaid players and accusations of match-fixing are regular occurrences in leagues from Albania to Turkey (where a team bus was recently shot up by gunmen), but the Cypriot league is among the worst offenders.
In 2013, FIFPro, the global players’ union, issued a release to its members warning them against signing contracts with Cypriot teams because clubs there routinely failed to honor them. And Federbet, a European company that tracks betting patterns in soccer, revealed that its evaluations of matches in Cyprus in 2014 indicated that more than half of the games showed signs of having been manipulated.
“I cannot say Cyprus football is very healthy,” Prodromos Petrides, the chairman of one of the island’s most successful clubs, Apoel Nicosia, said in an interview at his office. “I am very sad to say that every day I am talking to my friends, my colleagues in the club, my family — we are passing through a big corruption everywhere in Cyprus. The government, the financials, the ministries — everywhere that money is involved, there is risk.”
The Cypriot league’s problems are simultaneously simple and complex, but money is the root of many of its ills. There is little regulation when a new owner takes over a team, so when the European financial crisis buckled the economy in recent years, many clubs were overwhelmed by the fallout from risky decisions made in better times.
As recently as 2014, according to research conducted by Cyprus’s players’ union, the collective debt of the clubs in the island’s top two divisions totaled roughly 60 million euros, or about $65 million.
“There was a lot of money in Cyprus football about five, six, seven years ago,” said Spyros Neofitides, the president of the players’ union. “Now it feels like there is none.”
That shortfall is evident in how teams treat players, as well as in the match-fixing allegations that linger over Cypriot soccer like a smoky fog. New financial regulations from European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, have ensured that more players’ salaries are being paid, according to Neofitides — three years ago, 77 percent of professional players in Cyprus said they were not paid on time — but there are still many examples of instances in which clubs use improper, if not illegal, methods to deal with money troubles.
Three years ago, Neofitides recalled, a Venezuelan playing for Olympiakos Nicosia, César Alberto Castro Pérez, reported being confronted at his home by two musclebound men who threatened him with guns and demanded that he sign a document terminating his contract and renouncing any claims on unpaid earnings.
“He called me right afterward, told me what happened and told me that the gorillas even had his old contract so that they could compare the signatures,” Neofitides said. “Now, come on — how would they have gotten his old contract?”
Last year, Neofitides said, a player on another club, Limassol, claimed to have had a similar experience; he said he was confronted by two men who said they would plant drugs in his car and call the police if he did not agree to a pay cut.
Even the more stable clubs in Cyprus have found trouble. Apoel is perhaps Cyprus’s best-known club globally, a result of its recent appearances in the UEFA Champions League. (It made a stirring run to the quarterfinals in 2012.)
Playing in the Champions League infused Apoel with much-needed cash — Petrides, the team’s chairman, said the club received about $14 million, or $4 million more than its total annual budget, for its most recent appearance — but the reputation of the Cypriot league, in addition to the ongoing economic crisis, has made it difficult to find income from outside sources. (The car bombings have not helped, either.)
“In other countries, the big teams are getting sponsorships from insurance companies, telecommunications companies, airlines and banks,” Petrides said. “In Cyprus, our banks — they’re not giving anyone money. Our insurance companies are like our banks. And our national airline went out of business. What can we do?”
Criticisms of the league’s governance run the gamut, but match-fixing is the most significant and persistent concern. With money so scarce, it seems everyone has a story in which they were, or someone they knew was, offered cash in exchange for ensuring a game’s result.
Not surprisingly, most players and executives are reluctant to go on the record, but the brazen nature of some stories is staggering. One player recalled a bus ride to a game last year during which the president of his team boarded the bus and informed the players that they would be losing the first half that day and then winning the second half. Several of the players texted their friends to let them know they should bet accordingly.
“But when the player came down to my office and I asked him to make an official statement,” Neofitides said, “he said no.” In a survey of about 400 professionals conducted by the players’ association, nearly a quarter said they expected to be approached about fixing a match from someone connected to their own club.
But it is not just the players who are suspected. Part of the reason there has been less-than-expected sympathy for officials who have had their cars torched is the possibility that certain referees may be altering outcomes, too.
Marios Panayi used to be a top referee in Cyprus, and he joined FIFA’s international list in 2010. But last December, Panayi spoke out against what he said was institutional corruption in Cyprus’s officiating ranks, giving documents to the police that he claimed showed a longtime officiating executive routinely directed referees toward particular results in exchange for favorable match assignments and promotions.
An investigation into the executive’s actions continues, but in the meantime Panayi has become a lightning rod among soccer fans. Some praise him for his courage; others question his motivations and his truthfulness.
“There are about 300 referees in Cyprus,” Panayi said during an interview at a cafe here. “In my opinion, about 10 percent of them are clean. Ten percent, maximum.”
Panayi added that he believed the most recent incident involving a car being burned — this one was more of an arson than a bombing — was designed to send him a message. He said he had no plans to stop gathering information. “Many people have come to me after I spoke out,” he said.
Michaelides, the former coach, admitted that it could be difficult to be optimistic. Still, a proposed law would allow the police to wiretap telephone conversations, which could make it easier to identify match-fixers. The inability of the police to do that now is often cited in the lack of enforcement here, but so too is motivation.
Sometimes it can be difficult to keep track of everyone’s intentions. A few weeks ago, after months of public criticism, the police arrested two men they said had orchestrated two of the bombings. The men are members of a fan group that had previously claimed responsibility for the attacks.
The group’s explanation for setting the bombs? According to their own statement, they did so as a means of protest against corruption.
The men were subsequently released without being charged.
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