When Owners (And Fake Owners) Fix Their Own Teams
Match-fixing is not just the domain of coaches and players alone. In Costa Rica and Australia, fixers have moved into the boardroom. And often, they didn't even wait for the ink to dry.
This might seem incredibly naive, but there’s something particularly jarring when a fix is organized, not by a player, or a referee, but the owner of a football team.
Costa Rica has dealt with two such cases in quick succession.
The latest scandal erupted at second-division Asociación Deportiva Municipal Turrialba. On February 10, 2025, ten Turrialba players were summoned to the team’s new clubhouse. Club president, José Rolando Pereira, was waiting for them with two Mexican staff members appointed only a day earlier, sporting director Ernesto de la Torre and head coach Enrique Valencia. The trio promised each player $300 if they agreed to lose that evening’s league match against Cariari by a specific pre-arranged score.
This ham-fisted attempt at bribery immediately backfired. Those present rebuffed the bribe and left outraged. Bryan Cordero, Turrialba’s captain and goalkeeper, activated the confidential “Red Button” application – a secure reporting app run by the global players’ union, FIFPro.
“What we have declared is the truth... I did the right thing, I feel at peace. I was left without a job, I was fired, but I do have peace,” Cordero told the press.
Turrialba played the game as planned against Cariari and lost 2-1. Two days later, Pereira, de la Torre, and Valencia made a rather desperate attempt to hide their crime. Turrialba’s players were called into another meeting where the trio claimed that the bribe offer “had only been a test of trust,” which the squad had supposedly passed by refusing it.
This didn’t work, the fix had already been reported and Cordero was fired from the team soon after.
On July 8, 2025, the Costa Rica football federation (FCPF) banned the three men from footballing activities for five years.
What was the prior case?
In late 2023, FIFA’s betting fraud detection systems flagged suspicious patterns in the matches of another Costa Rican second-division side, Puerto Golfito FC. An FCPF investigation found that the club’s three main officials, including its president, majority shareholder, and sporting director, had conspired to fix matches throughout the season.
Again, the report came from within the club as players and staff were aware of the crime.
“We received a complaint from some players and people from the Golfito FC team, and we had to act and file a complaint with the FIFA Integrity Officer,” explained Sergio Hidalgo, president of the Liga de Ascenso.
The punishment was harsher: Puerto Golfito FC was kicked out of the league for a decade, and the three men involved were banned from football for the same length of time.
How common is this scheme?
Scratch under the surface of many leagues and you’ll hear a chorus of fan complaints about allegedly crooked owners. But actual prosecutable cases are quite rare. Some include the 2023-2024 purge in Chinese football, which jailed some of the country’s most prominent football executives, or the 2015 Catania case in Italy, where a team owner threw five games to avoid relegation to the third division.
However, a developing story from Australia appears to provide more wood for the fire.
In June 2025, Queensland police launched an investigation into allegations that players at Gold Coast United (a club in Australia’s second-tier National Premier League) were approached by individuals claiming to be Chinese investors. These alleged investors pretended to want to buy the club but instead sought to fix matches for betting purposes.
These approaches came to light when a crucial league match – Gold Coast United versus Moreton Bay – was abruptly called off due to integrity concerns. Club officials had been made aware that representatives of a Chinese company had attempted to recruit players to manipulate on-field events. It is unclear what exact scenario the fixers were pushing for – whether they wanted the team to deliberately lose, players to incur intentional yellow cards, or other in-game actions – but it was clear their goal was to rig outcomes for betting profits. Once again, the targeted players rejected the illicit overtures and instead alerted authorities.
But the story wasn’t finished yet.
Investigators later obtained a covert recording of a meeting between a purported investor and a player, which provided chilling insight into the scheme. In the recording, the fixer bluntly tells the player, “We’ll show you how to do it,” as he outlines how to execute the match-fix. The player, who had wisely documented the encounter and kept notes of who he met and when, turned this evidence over to police.
This Gold Coast case reveals a less common modus operandi: match-fixers attempting to embed themselves within a club’s hierarchy by pretending to inject money.