The dump appeared on PwnForums over the weekend of 25-26 April, six short weeks before the FIFA World Cup kicks off on 11 June.

The actor behind the post goes by “fuckiewuckie.” He credited ShinyHunters, the notorious breach collective whose administrators were arrested in France in June 2025. H

Foot Mercato named Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar, Heung-min Son, Kang-in Lee, Sadio Mane, Aymeric Laporte, Marcelo Brozovic, Mehdi Taremi and FIFA President Gianni Infantino as appearing in the trove.

What is actually in the files?

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Within 48 hours of the Muddy Waters and Callisto Research short-seller reports that wiped over 22% off Sportradar’s share price, at least eleven American law firms announced securities fraud investigations into the company.

Sportradar CEO Carsten Koerl responded with an open letter on LinkedIn calling the reports “entirely false, poorly researched, deliberately taken out of context.”

Amid this noise, it is important to remember that no formal complaint has yet been filed against Sportradar. No government regulator has publicly opened an investigation.

But some legal machinery is now in motion, and understanding what it is, how it works, and what it is likely to produce is important for anyone following this story.

For readers who have not yet seen it, our article, The Sportradar Scandal, in 10 Key Takeaways sets out the full substance of the short-seller allegations.

1. What is a “securities fraud investigation,” and why did eleven of them appear overnight?

The phrase sounds official. It is not.

None of the eleven announcements come from the Securities and Exchange Commission, from the Department of Justice, from any state gambling regulator, or from any arm of any government anywhere.

They come from private plaintiffs’ law firms, securities class action specialists, that monitor the NASDAQ and NYSE for large single-day stock drops. When a stock falls sharply enough to suggest significant shareholder losses, these firms issue press releases announcing “investigations” and soliciting affected investors.

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The reports, from Callisto Research and Muddy Waters Capital, landed like a bombshell for a company that has spent two decades cultivating an image as the guardian of clean sport.

Sportradar provides data, odds and betting infrastructure to roughly 800 gambling operators worldwide, and sells “integrity services” to more than 400 sporting bodies, including FIFA, the NBA and the NHL.

Its technology monitors suspicious betting patterns and has contributed to over 70 criminal convictions and 750 sporting sanctions for match-fixing, according to its own marketing materials.

When a football match in the Cypriot second division triggers an alert on Asian betting markets, it is typically Sportradar’s Universal Fraud Detection System that flags it.

But according to the short-sellers, Sportradar’s business has aspects that directly contradict what the company says in public.

What short-sellers allegedly found

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Within 48 hours, 32 individuals had been formally charged. Within a week, four were in pretrial detention and 47 disciplinary proceedings had been launched against players, referees, and clubs.

Two days after the raids, the Czech national team walked out at the Letná Stadium in Prague to face the Republic of Ireland in a World Cup play-off semi-final. They won on penalties. A week after that, they beat Denmark on penalties too.

For the first time since 2006, Czechia was heading to a World Cup, while its domestic football system imploded beneath it.

And yet the conditions that led to these arrests largely remains in place. This scandal erupted because of the astounding work of the Czech FA’s (FAČR) integrity team, led by Kamil Javůrek, for the last three years.

The Operation: Fifty Doors, Thirty-Two Charges

What exactly happened on the morning of 24 March?

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The decision lifts all restrictions on Belarusian or Russian athletes, except for standard anti-doping controls and background checks. World Aquatics President Husain Al Musallam said that “pools and open water remain places where athletes from all nations can come together in peaceful competition.”

The timing was inconvenient. Ukraine was supposed to face Russia in a Water Polo World Cup Division 2 seventh-place match the same day in Malta.

The Ukrainian water polo team refused to play in protest, resulting in a 5-0 default win for Russia.

The World Aquatics decision provoked immediate outrage from Ukrainian athletes, but it was not a surprise.

Russia’s gradual reinstatement into world sport is the logical terminus of a process running since at least the autumn of 2024, driven by legal architecture, voting mathematics, institutional self-interest, and money — most of it Russian — embedded in international sport governance.

Over 350 Ukrainian citizens have been killed or injured by Russian missile and drone strikes from April 1-9.

1. Sanctions didn’t hold for long

The earliest concessions came within months of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. By spring 2023, fencing, judo, wrestling, canoeing and taekwondo had all opened their doors to Russian and Belarusian athletes under neutral status: no flag, no anthem, individual events only.

Tennis never closed its doors to individual players at all.

The framing was consistent across those early decisions: athletes should not be punished for the decisions of governments. That argument, deployed loudly and early, established a frame of reference that would prove almost impossible to dislodge.

Neutral athlete status is a recognised instrument in international sport, with precedent stretching back decades, and its adoption was defensible on the principle that individual athletes should not be categorically barred from competition solely on the basis of nationality.

The problem was not the neutral status itself. But the conditions attached to neutral participation were not stable. They were treated by Russian sports officials and their federation allies as a starting position rather than a limit.

From late 2024 onward, each condition was gradually stripped away.

In November 2025, World Aquatics permitted neutral Russian athletes to compete in relay and team artistic swimming events, a quiet but consequential breach of the team-event firewall.

28 Russian neutral athletes competed at the Short Course World Championships in Budapest, finishing second on the medal table with six golds and a world record in the men’s 4x100 medley relay.

In April 2025, fencing permitted neutral Russian teams to compete. In May, judo restored the use of the Belarusian flag.

Then in September 2025, the most significant single vote of the period came at the International Paralympic Committee’s General Assembly in Seoul. Member organisations voted against a motion to partially suspend Russia by 91 votes to 77, with 8 abstentions, and against maintaining Belarus’s partial suspension by 103 votes to 63, with 10 abstentions.

On September 28, 2025, the day the IPC restored Russia to full membership, Russia made its third-largest bombing campaign against Ukraine to date.

The body of a young girl was pulled from the rubble of her home in Kyiv. She was 12.

Both nations were fully restored to IPC membership.

Then, full legal backing for removing these sanctions accelerated things.

In December 2025, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) issued operative decisions in CAS 2025/A/11915 and CAS 2025/A/11931, finding that the International Ski Federation's blanket ban was discriminatory under its own statutes.

On the night of December 1, 2025, Russia launched a ballistic missile at Dnipro City in Ukraine. 4 people were killed, 40 more were wounded, 11 of them critically.

The next day, CAS decided a blanket ban against Russian athletes in skiing was discriminatory.

The IOC recommended Russian and Belarusian youth athletes compete under full national symbols at the Dakar Youth Olympics.

FIDE voted 61 to 51 to lift all chess sanctions.

By February 2026, 20 Russian and Belarusian neutral athletes competed at the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. At the Paralympics that followed, Russia competed under its own flag, winning eight golds. Ukraine boycotted both ceremonies.

By February 2026, at the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, 20 Russian and Belarusian neutral athletes competed across eight sports. At the Paralympics that followed, Russia competed under its own flag — per the IPC’s September decision — winning eight golds. Ukraine boycotted both ceremonies.

2. Why Russia was always going to win this

Russia’s progressive return to world sport was ensured by the structural power Russia has built, over decades.

The most important mechanism was personnel placement. Research by Play the Game, analysing all 40 Olympic International Federations, found that in addition to three federation presidents, Russia and Belarus together held four vice-presidencies, one secretary generalship and 20 board positions across those federations as of 2022. A peer-reviewed study by Krieger et al., published in the Asian Journal of Sport History & Culture in June 2023, confirmed this was an explicit government strategy.

Russian nationals were placed in federation leadership positions, with the specific goal of insulating Russian sport from future political pressure. It worked.

The federations where Russia had the deepest leadership stakes moved fastest toward readmission.

Marius Vizer had made Vladimir Putin the IJF's honorary president in 2008. #

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the IJF suspended Putin from that role on February 27, 2022. Vizer himself resisted the original ban, was re-elected unopposed for a sixth term in June 2025, and in November 2025, engineered Russia's full reinstatement by executive committee action, without a membership vote.

On November 27, 2025, the same day the IJF reinstated Russia, five Ukrainian soldiers groups were captured near the village of Zelenyi Hai.

After a brief interrogation, they were executed.

At FIDE, former Russian deputy prime minister Arkady Dvorkovich steered the December 2025 vote to lift chess sanctions through a process that EUobserver both reported as procedurally compromised.

The day before the online General Assembly, FIDE circulated a seven-page memorandum to delegates arguing that continued exclusion of Russian and Belarusian teams would be "discriminatory and disproportionate" and warning of legal risk. It was presented as an independent legal opinion. FIDE did not disclose that its author, Claude Ramoni, had represented the suspended Russian Olympic Committee in multiple CAS proceedings since at least 2019.

3. Fencing as case study

Fencing was the starkest case. Alisher Usmanov has run the FIE since 2008, financing the federation through his International Charitable Foundation for the Future of Fencing to the tune of at least $98.5 million over 13 years. A single 2020 donation of CHF 5 million accounting for 93 percent of the federation’s entire income that year.

In practical terms, international fencing has become a financial dependency of a sanctioned Russian oligarch.

When EU sanctions were imposed on Usmanov in February 2022, he stepped back and installed Greek three-time Olympian Emmanuel Katsiadakis as interim president.

In November 2024, in Tashkent, Usmanov’s home city, he was re-elected to the position. Usmanov then self-suspended his powers again four days after his own re-election, returning the chair to Katsiadakis. The purpose, as one observer told The Sports Examiner, was “to prevent anyone from leading the sport” other than Usmanov.

Katsiadakis lasted until April 2025. He resigned, officially citing health reasons. Multiple FIE insiders told the New Voice of Ukraine and The Inquisitor Magazine that the real reason was his refusal to write a letter to President Trump requesting that Usmanov’s sanctions be lifted ahead of the LA 2028 Olympics.

He was replaced by Egypt’s Abdelmoneim El Husseiny. By that point, the FIE had already gutted its neutrality verification process, replacing independent background checks with athlete self-declarations, a move condemned in an open letter signed by 447 fencers from 40 countries, published by Global Athlete on July 17, 2025.

The federation that had been built on Usmanov’s money was never going to hold the line against Russia’s return.

On January 23, 2026, the FIE removed Estonia as host of the 2026 European Fencing Championships for refusing to grant visas to Russian and Belarusian athletes.

On January 23, 2026, the same day as the FIE punished Estonia for not granting visas to Russian athletes, Russia launched over 100 drones and ballistic missiles at Ukraine. At least six people were killed and 45 more were injured.

Russia has spent years cultivating alliances with Central Asian, Middle Eastern and African federations, many of which received development funding from Russian-aligned presidents. Usmanov’s own re-election result illustrated it: support came from Israel, Palestine, the Philippines, South Africa: a genuinely global coalition built over 15 years of financial investment.

The IPC vote in Seoul made the same arithmetic visible on the biggest stage: the coalition that voted to maintain sanctions was substantial. It was still outnumbered. The nations living closest to Russia’s war are a minority of the global sporting electorate.

4. CAS Rulings Help Russia

The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) is not an instrument of Russian policy. The logic of its rulings has been consistent: blanket nationality-based exclusions violate anti-discrimination provisions in federations’ own statutes.

But Russia has deployed this argument strategically, filing challenges against FIS, the International Biathlon Union, the International Luge Federation and others in coordinated succession. The luge case was the precedent-setter.

CAS case 2025/A/11479, decided on October 31, 2025, found that “the complete exclusion of Russian athletes was not a proportionate measure.”

The December 2025 FIS ruling went further. CAS cases 2025/A/11915 and 2025/A/11931, found that “the FIS Statutes require the FIS to be politically neutral and that the FIS Council did not provide sufficient legal justification for the exclusion of Russian and Belarusian athletes and para-athletes.”

This overturned a democratic membership vote in favour of continuing the ban, making clear that even procedurally legitimate federation decisions could be voided by CAS on anti-discrimination grounds.

For those that had genuinely wanted to hold the line, the FIS ruling functioned as a final warning: your ban may not hold.

5. The holdouts

Three major federations have maintained meaningful restrictions as of April 2026. Understanding why they held matters as much as understanding why others folded.

World Athletics under Sebastian Coe has maintained the most absolute position: no neutral status, no individual exceptions, nothing. Coe first articulated the grounds in March 2023, citing “the death and destruction we have seen in Ukraine over the past year, including the deaths of some 185 athletes.” By July 2024, when Coe met President Zelenskyy in Kyiv, World Athletics reported the toll had exceeded 400 athletes and coaches killed.

Coe controls a federation with strong financial independence from Russian sources, a membership concentrated in nations with high political sensitivity to the conflict, and a legal argument CAS has not yet fully tested: World Athletics’ rules include specific provisions allowing exclusion on the basis of systematic doping non-compliance, not solely nationality, which provides a distinct legal basis from those overturned in the luge and FIS cases.

FIFA and UEFA have maintained Russia’s exclusion from the 2026 World Cup and all competitive football, though the picture is complicated. In a February 2026 interview, FIFA President Gianni Infantino said the ban “has not achieved anything, it has just created more frustration and hatred” That comment was read widely as the opening of a negotiation rather than a statement of settled policy.

The International Biathlon Union has maintained its ban and is currently defending a CAS challenge filed by Russian athletes in December 2025. Biathlon’s membership is dominated by Nordic and central European nations for whom the political stakes of readmission are highest, and the sport has limited financial exposure to Russian money.

But the IBU’s legal position after the FIS ruling is precarious. The IBU has acknowledged the challenge in its official communications without signalling confidence in the outcome.

On the night of April 13-14, 2026, hours before this article was published, Russia launched 133 missiles and drones at Ukraine.

When he became president of Congo-Brazzaville's football federation in 2018, he brought those skills with him. They led to sadly predictably results.

Mayolas has been sentenced to life imprisonment, in absentia. Interpol is hot on his heels France's financial intelligence unit is unpicking the wreckage.

Corrupt football federation presidents are a dime a dozen these days, but the Mayolas case is the most dramatic criminal prosecution of a sitting football chief we’ve seen for a while.

So who exactly is he, and how did he get this far?

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The basic story is widely known. During the AFCON final on January 18, Senegal left the field due to what they feel was bias towards Morocco before returning and winning the trophy. CAF ruled this was grounds to grant the title to Morocco, annd Senegal has appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

The basics: the walkoff, the title being stripped, Senegal’s CAS appeal have been widely covered. What has not been covered with equal rigour is everything around them: the hidden internal instruction that nearly threw the match out entirely, the fans still sitting in a Moroccan prison, the betting firms that paid out twice because they had no other option, and a host nation whose showcase tournament has left a legacy more complicated than its stadiums deserved.

The Sports and Crime Briefing goes through seven points that may have been missed.

1. The same institution gave two completely opposite verdicts

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What they found, spread across twenty animals entered in one of Oman’s premier camel pageants, was a catalogue of interventions that read like a consultation at a Beverly Hills cosmetic clinic.

Hyaluronic acid had been injected into the lips for maximum pendulous effect. Silicone wax had been packed into the humps to give them a volume and symmetry that nature had declined to provide. Botox had been administered to the face to relax the muscles into an expression of permanent, serene superiority. Hormonal compounds had been deployed to sculpt musculature. All twenty camels were disqualified. Their owners faced heavy fines and multi-year bans from future competitions.

The Oman Camel Racing Federation, acting under the auspices of the broader Camel Club, responded that “we are keen to halt all acts of tampering and deception in the beautification of camels.” Similar statements have been issued for the better part of a decade and have have limited impact.

So what exactly is a camel beauty contest?

To outside observers, camel pageantry can seem like an elaborate joke. It is not. In the Gulf states, camels represent cultural heritage, social prestige, and serious money. A prize-winning camel is a statement of lineage and potential wealth. The modern competition economy has taken that tradition and turbocharged it.

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Those minders were officials sent by the Revolutionary Guard to watch the players and control who they spoke to. The police made sure the conversations happened without them present.

Five players accepted asylum offers that evening. Two more followed the next day at Sydney Airport while the rest of the squad changed planes. One player said yes at first, then changed her mind and flew back with the team.

The squad had arrived for the AFC Women’s Asian Cup. In their opening match against South Korea, they stood silent when the Iranian anthem played.

State television in Tehran reacted the same day, calling the team “wartime traitors.”

Under the 2013 Islamic Penal Code, that label can bring the death penalty.

But sport and religion have a long and complex history in Iran, with athletes often paying the price for transgression.

The deal the state offered

After the 1979 Revolution, the Islamic Republic did not abolish sport so much as take possession of it.

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The meeting happened in Lausanne in 2015, at the height of what Professor Mike McNamee describes as “the perfect storm”.​

FIFAgate had just exposed systemic corruption at football’s highest levels, with dawn raids and mass arrests.

Russian state-sponsored doping was unravelling, exposing an industrial-scale system of chemically enhanced athletes.

Cycling was still reeling from Lance Armstrong’s confession.

The sporting world was in crisis, and it had perilously few professionals trained to fix it.​​

McNamee, then a full professor at Swansea University, had spent two decades building sports ethics as an academic field.

But there wasn’t an obvious career path. Undergraduates would be excited about sports ethics, a handful would pursue doctorates, but there was no middle ground. No pathway to convert interest into professional expertise. No engine to train the integrity officers that sport desperately needed.​​

McNamee had been thinking about this gap for years. Speaking to the Sports and Crime Briefing, he said he felt he had “one more move” in him—one shot at creating a master’s program that could bridge the chasm between theory and practice.​

The timing felt right. UK Sport, which McNamee knew well, was becoming aware of ethical issues beyond just anti-doping: match-fixing, gender equity, safeguarding, abuse, athletes’ rights. The European Commission was receptive. The sector, however reluctantly, was beginning to accept it needed help.​​

McNamee assembled a consortium of European universities bringing together different experts in philosophy, applied ethics (Charles University; Czech Republic), sports management and governance (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany), sports law (Pompeu Fabra University, Spain) and Olympic studies (University of Peloponnese, Greece), and took the idea to the IOC.

“It’s a no-brainer,” Bach said. He promised financial support for Olympians to attend the program within minutes, telling McNamee he just needed to figure out which budget to pull from, ultimately settling on the IOC Solidarity Programme, the organization’s charitable foundation.

“Of course we’re going to support this,” Bach said.​ The IOC has since provided support for 1 or 2 Olympians to complete MAiSI every academic year.

Bach, freshly elected and navigating a governance reform agenda amid cascading scandals, no doubt recognised the political and institutional value of the proposal.

The IOC could be seen as helping to professionalise the response to these scandals.​

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Ten of them were minors.

The sweep has involved federal, state, and local agencies, including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. When Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen released the final figures, he revealed that 29 alleged traffickers were in custody and called the operation a triumph of planning, organisation, and safety.

However, while these rescues are great news, they don’t actually answer the central question. Is the Super Bowl actually a beacon for organized crime, or was this the result of turning a massive spotlight on the Bay Area’s criminal operations?

For that, we need to consider who those arrested actually were.

On February 3, the week of the game, San Jose police arrested Ruben Guzman, 31, the assistant principal of Sunrise Middle School, after he allegedly arranged to meet someone he believed was a 13-year-old boy, acknowledged the child was underage, and offered money in exchange for sex. Guzman had been named a California Teacher of the Year finalist in 2024 and recognised by the San Francisco 49ers for his classroom work.

He was one of 11 men arrested in a parallel SJPD sting in which detectives posed as minors on social media and online forums. The men ranged in age from 24 to 72. None were traveling fans.

The geography of the wider operation tells the same story. Of the 73 victims recovered, 20 were found in San Mateo County, 17 in Contra Costa, and just seven in Santa Clara, the county that actually hosted the game.

So why this reputation about the Super Bowl as a human trafficking hotspot?

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On Sunday, February 22, Mexican special forces, acting on U.S. intelligence, killed Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, leader of the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), in rural Jalisco. By nightfall, Guadalajara was paralysed.

Buses were torched. The entire public transport network shut down. Around 1,000 people were trapped overnight inside the city zoo as cartel gunmen blocked access roads. Military helicopters circled above neighbourhoods while residents crossed the city on foot to avoid roadblocks.

In Puerto Vallarta, a tourism mecca along the coast, streets were sealed and vehicles burned. Jalisco’s governor declared a Code Red. At both Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta airports, passengers took cover as National Guard troops established defensive positions inside terminals. Southwest, Delta, United, Air Canada and WestJet suspended flights. The U.S. State Department opened a crisis hotline. Multiple governments issued travel advisories.

This came less than four months before Guadalajara is supposed to host matches within the 2026 World Cup.

How important is Guadalajara to Mexican football?

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On February 17, in the 52nd minute of a Champions League clash between Real Madrid and Benfica, Vinícius Júnior pointed at Gianluca Prestianni and accused him of using a racial slur.

The referee stopped the match and activated UEFA’s anti-racism protocol. Real Madrid walked off the pitch although agreed to return and the match continued after ten minutes.

The fallout saw Benfica coach Jose Mourinho defend Prestianni in controversial fashion, suggesting Vinícius was making up the drama. “There is something wrong because it happens in every stadium,” Mourinho said after the match. “A stadium where Vinícius plays something happens, always.”

He also implied that Benfica was not a racist club as its greatest player, Eusebio, was himself Black. Images showing Benfica fans making racist gestures at Vinícius during the game contradict his statement. After the game, French star Kylian Mbappe said Prestianni used the term mono (monkey) five times.

Mourinho has rightly been lambasted for his comments, with Kick It Out accusing him of “gaslighting” Vinícius.

This was far from his first racial firestorm.

2025 – Fenerbahçe – “Jumping like monkeys”

On February 23, 2025, Fenerbahçe had just played out a bad‑tempered 0–0 draw away to Galatasaray in the Turkish Süper Lig. With tensions flaring before the match, both clubs pushed for a foreign official. UEFA’s Slavko Vinčić, a Slovenian who had handled Champions League knockouts, was brought in as a neutral firefighter.

Afterwards, Mourinho praised Vinčić for surviving “the jungle” of an Istanbul derby and said the game would have been a “disaster” with a Turkish referee. Then he turned his fire on Galatasaray’s bench, accusing them of trying to get his 18‑year‑old winger Yusuf Akçiçek booked with theatrical reactions to a challenge. Mourinho said a Turkish referee would have shown a yellow card “after the big dive and their bench jumping around like monkeys.”

Galatasaray reacted strongly. The club accused Mourinho of “racist statements” and “immoral comments,” as well as threatening criminal proceedings.

The next day, Fenerbahçe argued that Mourinho’s words had been “deliberately taken entirely out of context and distorted in a misleading manner.”

“As any reasonable person can clearly recognize,” the club said, “the expression used by José Mourinho was solely intended to describe the excessive reaction of the opposing team’s technical staff to the referee’s decisions during the match. These remarks cannot, under any circumstances, be associated with racism.”

The TFF did not accept this defence, banned Mourinho for four matches and fined him more than €40,000 for Mourinho. However, its decision did not use the word racism, instead couching his behaviour as incitement and disorder.

Mourinho countered that racism was “not one of my bad qualities, exactly the opposite” and countersued Galatasary for defamation.

Former Chelsea players under Mourinho, Didier Drogba and Michael Essien, rallied to his defence, denying that he had ever been a racist.

2011-2012 – Real Madrid – “Terry not racist”

On October 23. 2011, Chelsea travelled to Loftus Road to face Queens Park Rangers in the Premier League. The two captains, John Terry and Anton Ferdinand, collided with each other and had a brief argument.

TV cameras caught Terry mouthing words at Ferdinand, which lip-readers and witnesses said was “fucking black cunt.”"

The referee didn’t see it, but the fallout was seismic. Terry was charged by the police with a racially aggravated public order offence. He was stripped of the England captaincy.

During his 2012 trial, Terry accepted that he had used the words, but only repeating them “sarcastically” because he thought Ferdinand had used them first. He was acquitted by Westminster Magistrates’ Court, but the FA fined Terry £220,000 for “abusive and/or insulting words and/or behaviour.”

Jose Mourinho was not Chelsea manager at the time. But Terry was his former captain at Chelsea and Mourinho spoke to CNN two days after the FA verdict.

“He is not a racist, that’s 100 percent” Mourinho said. “Probably he had a racist comment or a ‘racist’ attitude against an opponent,” but this was “in the heat of the moment.”

“We had a squad where we had 12 African players in the squad,” Mourinho said of his Chelsea teams. “It was a fantastic squad and he had always a great relation with every one of them. Please don’t say that he is a racist.”

He claimed he had never witnessed or felt racism in any of his dressing rooms, and that he had always had African players in every team he managed.

2009 – Inter – “Not racism, ignorance”

On April 18, 2009, Inter travelled to Turin to face Juventus in the Derby d’Italia. Mario Balotelli, then 18 years old, started up front. Born in Palermo to Ghanaian parents and raised in Brescia, he was already a lightning rod in Italian football.

From the Curva Sud at Juventus’s temporary Stadio Olimpico ground came a now-infamous chant: “Non esistono neri italiani” - “there are no Black Italians.” Balotelli was repeatedly targeted with monkey noises and racist songs throughout the 1–1 draw. The incidents were serious enough that police opened an investigation, and the Italian federation later ordered Juventus to play a home match behind closed doors as punishment.

Some at Inter defended their player immediately, with captain Javier Zanetti vowing to halt future matches if this continued.

Mourinho, then the coach of Inter, took a different line.

“I don’t think it’s racism,” he told reporters two days after the game. “It’s an ignorant, stupid, infantile way to show that I don’t like this player.”

He insisted the abuse was about football, not race: “They don’t like that he is a great player, that he scores against their team, that he is difficult to mark.”

To support that argument, he pointed out that Juventus had Black players of their own, such as Malian midfielder Mohamed Sissoko. “If it’s racism, it’s racism for all,” Mourinho said, “not just for opposition players.”

Later that year, Sissoko was himself subjected to racial abuse during a Juventus match against Cagliari.

Liga Alef North, the country’s third tier, was shut down.

At the top of the corrupted table sat FC Kiryat Yam, a modest club from the city of Haifa. Despite its leading position, investigators found no proof Kiryat Yam was involved in the match-fixing fiasco.

When the league was shut down, the Israel Football Association (IFA) promoted the club to the second‑tier National League on the merits of its clean track record.

On January 26, that redemption arc collapsed.

Israeli police arrested 17 players and senior officials from Kiryat Yam after a months‑long undercover operation, alleging that a criminal organisation had used the club for three years to fix matches and launder millions of dollars through illegal betting in Israel and abroad.

So how was their involvement so badly missed?

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The fixers were former NBA players like Jalen Smith and Antonio Blakeney. They targeted mid-tier colleges like DePaul, Kennesaw State, Tulane, offering players cash bribes of $10,000-40,000, easily dwarfing the earnings these players would get from NIL (name, image and likeness).

The indictment came just 24 hours after Charlie Baker, the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), wrote a damning letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the government agency regulating the US derivatives market.

Baker demanded that the CFTC issue a full suspension of collegiate prediction markets. This is due to platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket treating matching outcomes as tradable commodities. These exchanges allow users to buy "yes/no" contracts on events like point spreads, with prices fluctuating widely based on market probability.

Why does the NCAA want to ban prediction markets?

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On 26 January, former FIFA President Sepp Blatter publicly endorsed a call for fans to boycott the World Cup in the United States. Writing on social media, Blatter stated: “For the fans, there’s only one piece of advice: stay away from the USA!”

He was adding to a furore sparked by Mark Pieth, FIFA’s former head of governance reform, who said the "abuses by immigration services" and the "marginalisation of political opponents" meant fans should avoid the US.

Despite Blatter being 89, and having been banned in disgrace amid the FIFAGate corruption scandals, his warning is unprecedented.

Blatter has significant support.

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The tournament was staged on open ground at the edge of the city. The arena was temporary, fans gathered close to the rope marking the field, their phones out recording the matches.

Balachauria, a former kabaddi player turned organiser and promoter, was walking around the edge of the arena when two men approached him near the parking area, asking to take a selfie.

Seconds later, one of them drew a pistol and shot him at point-blank range. Balachauria collapsed and the shooters fled on a motorcycle, firing shots into the air. Videos of their escape were captured by spectators and were soon all over social media.

Social media posts claiming responsibility for the murder were attributed to the Bambiha gang, a Punjabi crime gang. The statements said that Balachauria was murdered for aligning with a rival criminal faction, the Lawrence Bishnoi gang, and warned kabbadi players and organisers not to do the same.

Punjabi police soon identified the shooters as Aditya Kapoor and Karan Pathak, and that the hit had been relayed by crime bosses living outside India. On 17 January 2026, Punjab Police tracked down Pathak near a cricket stadium in Chandigarh. According to official police accounts, Pathak opened fire and was killed in the ensuing shootout.

But while Balachauria and Pathak were both killed in Punjab, they were merely the latest victims of a brutal killing spree around kabbadi.

Long played informally at village level, kabbadi has evolved in the last decade into a circuit of competing high-profile tournaments offering cash prizes.

Criminal outfits like the Bambiha and Bishnoi gangs view these as lucrative choke points around sponsorship, player access and protection.

Their violent takeover of the sport spans three continents.

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After scoring the goal, Amoura celebrated by mimicking a stiff, upright pose—a move that has been interpreted as mocking Michel Nkuka Mboladinga, a well-known DR Congo superfan known for standing motionless at matches. His pose is an homage to Patrice Lumumba, the former Congolese Prime Minister and independence hero assassinated in 1961.

This post is a guest piece by Karim Zidan, who runs my favourite sports newsletter, Sports Politika. I warmly encourage you to subscribe and support Karim’s work, as he continues to reveal the shady machinations that increasingly make sports a geopolitical tool.

Lumumba was a revolutionary independence leader and pan-Africanist who played a significant role in Congo’s transition from a Belgian colony to an independent state. He became Congo’s first elected prime minister but immediately faced a breakdown of order and, eventually, a coup. He was assassinated by Congolese soldiers under Belgian supervision in January 1961, with significant involvement and planning by Belgium and tacit approval from the United States, who saw him as a Cold War threat. At one point, the CIA had plotted his assassination, including schemes like poisoned toothpaste.

Despite his tragic demise, Lumumba was remembered as a standard bearer for decolonization and African liberation, as well as a cautionary tale of the sacrifices that come with challenging the Western overlords. So when Amoura, a fellow African as well as an Arab, mocked the DRC’s national hero, it was seen as disrespectful. He has since apologized, claiming he did not the understand the significance of the superfan’s pose. Nevertheless, it is a reminder of the deep political trauma running through Africa’s veins, and how that inevitably spills out on the football pitch.

When the Africa Cup of Nations was first held in 1957, it was an inherently political event. In June 1956, on the sidelines of the FIFA Congress in Lisbon, Egypt met with representatives from Sudan, South Africa, and Ethiopia to devise a plan to establish the Confederation of African Football (CAF), the governing body for football in Africa. The organization was a priority for Egypt’s charismatic military leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose “Free Officers” movement had ended Britain’s colonial rule over Egypt in 1952. Nasser viewed CAF and the subsequent AFCON tournament as a powerful propaganda tool that would help unite African nations against their colonial rulers.

In 1957, the inaugural Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) was held in Khartoum, Sudan. There was no qualification process; the tournament field consisted solely of the four founding members of the Confederation of African Football (CAF): Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, and South Africa. South Africa was disqualified after insisting on selecting an all-white squad in accordance with its apartheid policy, a decision that granted Ethiopia a bye directly to the final. As a result, only two matches were played. Egypt was crowned the first continental champion after defeating host nation Sudan 2–1 in the semi-final and Ethiopia 4–0 in the final.

Egypt’s victory carried far more than mere national pride. The country had just emerged from the Suez Canal Crisis, during which British and French forces—acting in concert with Israel—invaded Egypt in an attempt to protect their interests in the recently nationalized canal. The ensuing international backlash forced a humiliating withdrawal, dealing Britain a severe blow to its legitimacy and global standing and marking one of the final nails in the coffin of its imperial ambitions. The fact that Egypt—newly free and independent—had won the inaugural competition so closely associated with decolonization became a powerful symbol for a burgeoning African continent.

Egypt has since continued to make AFCON history. The Arab world’s most populous country has won the event a record seven times, including three consecutive wins in 2006, 2008, and 2010.

However, the country has not managed to reclaim its former glory since the 2011 Arab Spring, which was the same year that Salah first appeared on the national team. Since then, Egypt has reached the finals on two occasions (2017 and 2021). In the 2021 edition of AFCON, Salah’s team came close to winning the cup but fell short in a penalty shootout against Sadio Mané’s Senegal.

Despite the loss, it had been Egypt’s best performance in years. In 2018, Egypt crashed out of the World Cup without winning a single match. The following year, Egypt hosted AFCON but failed to reach the quarter-final stage in a tournament plagued with scandals including accusations of sexual harassment against Salah’s teammate Amr Warda.

While Egypt is no longer as successful as it once was on the continent, countless other African countries attempted to emulate its sporting and political success at AFCON. Over the decades, countless African leaders have utilized AFCON as a tool for propaganda and self-aggrandizement. Among them was Mobutu Sese Seko, the infamous Congolese dictator whose coup ultimately led to Lumumba’s execution. Seko rechristened the DRC as Zaire and went on to establish a violent kleptocracy, amassing grotesque personal wealth at the expense of his impoverished population.

Seko was obsessed with turning Zaire into a sporting superpower. He hosted the 1974 edition of the African tournament, and spent lavishly on infrastructure to support the event and the national team. Zaire went on to win the tournament, though they performed terribly at that year’s World Cup. Seko later hosted the Rumble in the Jungle event pitting Muhammad Ali against George Foreman for the heavyweight championship. It was one of the most watched televised events at the time, breaking countless records.

Seko wasn’t the only dictator to take advantage of AFCON’s prestige. Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya hosted the event in 1982 while Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt won the event four times during his tenure in office. In 2012, Equatorial Guinea hosted the event, which served as international image-laundering exercises for one of the world’s longest-ruling dictators in Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.

The latest AFCON host, Morocco, has also courted its fair share of controversy. The country, which is ruled by an Islamic monarchy that has reigned since 1631 and claims descent from the Prophet Muhammad, has spent the heavily in preparation for the 2026 AFCON and the 2030 World Cup. That spending resulted in a series of youth-led protests demanding significant improvements to public education and healthcare, while criticizing the government’s spending on football tournaments. Following the protests, the Moroccan government introduced a set of reforms intended to enhance political participation and improve social services.

Morocco is also tied in a long-standing dispute with the Western Sahara, a desert territory annexed by Morocco following Spain’s colonial departure in 1975. The Sahrawi people, an indigenous group native to the region, continue to seek independence, which Morocco vehemently refuses. Morocco administers about 80% of the disputed territory, including resource-rich areas with phosphates and fisheries. Morocco also has a deteriorating relationship with neighbour Algeria, with the latter claiming that Morocco was mining for phosphate on land belonging to Algeria. The border between the nations has remained closed since 1994, complicating matters for Algerian football fans looking to attend the tournament.

The final nail in AFCON’s shift away from its decolonization roots came on the even of the 2025 edition of the tournament, when CAF president Patrice Motsepe announced that would now take place every four years instead of biyearly. When making the announcement Motsepe was flanked by FIFA secretary general Mattias Grafström, a subtle confirmation that the decision was heavily influenced by the European powers at FIFA and UEFA, who hated that clubs had to release some of their most prominent African players mid-season to participate in the tournament.

Africans living on the continent have rarely had the opportunity to watch their star players perform in person. The biennial Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) was one of the few occasions when that aspiration became reality. Most of Africa’s leading footballers are based in Europe, competing in some of the world’s most lucrative leagues in England, France, and Germany. Yet European football authorities deemed even this arrangement unreasonable and exerted pressure on the Confederation of African Football (CAF) to extend the tournament cycle to four years. One could argue that AFCON’s increasing subordination to European interests amounts to a re-colonization of African football.

What began as a nationalist and pan-African project has, in this view, deteriorated into a second-tier event increasingly shaped by forces beyond Africa’s control.

When referees paused the match to investigate, they found that Tokyogurl, or Warasin Naraphat to use her real name, had Discord open and screen-sharing enabled on her mobile phone. Her boyfriend, another Thai esports pro known as Cheerio, was playing the match for her.

She was disqualified, her contract terminated and received a lifetime ban from the Thailand Esports Federation (TESF).

But Tokyogurl’s way of cheating was not particularly memorable. Ringing, or using a stand-in player, is a well-documented esports cheating technique.

Instead, it was the scale of the deception: she had built an entire professional career, complete with tournament winnings, a contract with a major team, and selection to her country’s national side, all without ever playing a competitive match in person.

How did every gatekeeper, whether they be coaches, teammates, the national federation, miss or ignore every warning sign?

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The evidence, delivered to the New York State Gaming Commission (NYSGC) in 2023, identified approximately 280 trainers and owners who had purchased illicit substances from convicted veterinarian Seth Fishman, the central supplier in the largest horse-doping conspiracy ever prosecuted in the United States.

Read the full New York Focus investigation that broke this scandal here.

Despite receiving the material, the Commission did not initiate any disciplinary measure against those identified for more than two years. Trainers named in the FBI records continued to compete at New York venues, including Aqueduct, Belmont Park, Saratoga, and Yonkers Raceway, accumulating massive prize winnings during that period.

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