Was Last Year’s UEFA Cup Fixed?

By: The Offside | October 1st, 2008

Before this goes too far: The claims that Zenit St. Petersburg’s UEFA Cup win was bought are being made by Russian mafiosi. Hardly the most reliable types when it comes to truth telling and a faction well known for embellishing their dirty deeds for the sake of building their reputation and aura. Also worth mentioning that there hasn’t been any reports of a link between the gang and Zenit aside from residing in the same city. Nonetheless, it makes for a pretty interesting read.

The newspaper ABC said Gennadios Petrov, head of a powerful Russian underworld gang, and one of his cohorts said they used between 20 and 40 million euros to “buy” the semi-final and the final, according to a telephone conversation intercepted by Spanish police.

They aren’t saying who they bought, either that or it hasn’t been released, but the obvious parties would be the Bayern & Rangers suits. That brings up two problems though:

i. Bayern doesn’t need the money; and even if so, perhaps more valuable would be the complete restoration of their image after being embarrassingly forced into the UEFA Cup as it were (not to mention being heavy, heavy favorites).
ii. Rangers played as they’d always played: for PKs.

Would they have needed 20-40m to buy off the refs? Hardly. Nor were there any egregious refereeing faux pas that turned either result. You could point to the Bayern players for that surprising 4-0 loss, but just one round before they kicked open the floodgates in the back as well, giving up 3 to Getafe after the Spaniards had their best player sent off in the 9th minute. If you want to dig deep for the inexplicable game, I’d start there long before discussing an always difficult trip to St. Petersburg. Anyone else that could swing the game? Doesn’t seem that way.

Add if you happened to miss the game versus Real yesterday or the Super Cup against ManU, Zenit didn’t need to cheat to win last year. They’re just damn good.

So we can probably chalk this up to the bragging of some Russian gang types. Who would’ve thought?

Some Related Stories:

Category: UEFA Cup, World Football

« Champions League Matchday Two (Wednesday) LiveBlogaganza | Home | This is Why They Call Him The Messiah… »

The Offside RSS Feeds

dp

Honestly, I'd look at the Bayern game if anything, but Rangers had no chance with their style and Arshavin running wild as he did during the summer in the Euros--but even then, I can't really point at anything that would stand out to me that would indicate a fix. Zenit as a whole are just really, really good.
Jan

Well, there are currently transfer rumors linking Bayern to Zenit's Pavel Pogrebnyak and Andrey Arshavin as well as CSKA Moscow's Igor Akinfeev. Don't be surprised if those players are on the way to Munich in the winter. Deals kindly brokered and paid for by the Russian Mafia. ;-)

Anyway, I know from the time I spend with the Mafia, that this type of bragging is pretty normal. I recently made a name for myself with the local don by claiming I had brought down the bailout bill in the US congress, by buying some Republican votes and then my don one-upped me, by claiming he had started the whole credit crunch crisis in the first place.
Juliet

Bayern are one of Europe's richest clubs, with plenty of money and pretty open books, too. I'd point to the refs before Bayern, but I no longer recall if I thought the calls were inexplicably bad...
9 champion leagues

One of Spain's popular prosecuting attorney, Baltazar Garzón, is giving thought on taking this case. I read an article on it in "El Pais" which called the process "Troika operation". The prosecutor asked and recieved vast information on Guenadis Petrov, one of Russia's most popular crime organization known as "Tambobskaya" located mainly in St. Petersberg. The heavy material resides in a tapped phone conversation back in may between petrov and a colleague, Leonid Christoforov, who boasted of knowing bayern would fall 4-0.
Another phone conversation revealed petrov had paid bayern of munich 50 million but not specifying in which currency.....

Looks interesting to me, there's more illegalities in the sport day by day, i also reckon some powerful italian mafia tried purchasing Lazio in order to hide its money laundering.
9 champion leagues

One of Spain's popular prosecuting attorney, Baltazar Garzón, is giving thought on taking this case. I read an article on it in "El Pais" which called the process "Troika operation". The prosecutor asked and recieved vast information on Guenadis Petrov, one of Russia's most popular crime organization known as "Tambobskaya" located mainly in St. Petersberg.