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Ex-footballer on confessing to fixing EFL matches to now helping FIFA and Premier League

Ex-footballer Moses Swaibu speaks on confessing to fixing EFL matches to now helping FIFA and Premier League understand more on match fixing.

During his career, Swaibu played for Lincoln City in the English Football League, last playing for Whitehawk in 2013, making a total of of 165 league appearances, scoring four goals throughout his career.

It was in April 2015 however when he was sentenced to 16 months in prison for his role in a 2013 match fixing scandal.

In November and December 2013, there were a number of individuals arrested by the National Crime Agency (NCA) on suspicion of fixing English association football matches off the back of two separate newspaper investigations, by The Daily Telegraph and the Sun on Sunday.

On the 17th of June 2014, a jury at Birmingham Crown Court found Michael Boateng, Krishna Sanjey Ganeshan and Chann Sankaran guilty of conspiracy to commit bribery, with Hakeem Adelakun cleared of the offence.

Sankaran and Ganeshan were given a five year prison sentence, while for Boeteng, it was an 18-month sentence.

At a later trial, Moses Swaibu and Delroy Facey were also found guilty of conspiracy to commit bribery and sentenced to 16 months and 30 months behind bars.

Once a promising talent of Crystal Palace’s academy, Moses Swaibu got into the world of match-fixing, after winning Palace’s Young Player of the Year and Scholar of the Year awards age 17.

Growing up, and in his youth, his parents split up, he and his older brother were raised by their father in Croydon in south London, had a strict upbringing. Swaibu’s father insisted on respect, manners and hard work.

“I never really had the best relationship with my dad,” he said.

“My school would finish around three o’clock and he would tell me that if I wasn’t back home by 4:30, the door would be locked.

“That door didn’t open until 9am the next morning.”

He often missed the curfew, spent evenings playing football, rode on buses across London at night, slept in stairwells, or slept on the floor of his neighbours.

“One house I went into, I slept on a mattress and could see loads of needles on the floor,” he said.

“You have to remember I was 12 or 13, you don’t know what things like that are.”

Things looked good however when he went from small-sided games with his brother, boosting his mentality beyond his years. then age 16, he impressed enough in an trial game during pre-season training with Crystal Palace to earn a youth contract.

After Neil Warnock took over in 2007, Swaibu struggled to get into the first team, leading to him being released the following year.

Then-League Two side Lincoln City came calling, signed him up, then came the match fixing, with him and three teammates being offered £60,000 in euros to make sure their side were 1-0 down to Northampton by half time in their next game.

A duffel bag full of cash was brought into the changing room without the rest of the squad knowing what was in with them, however there was no deal as most of them were benched. The players kept quiet and the money was returned.

The more he dropped down the tiers of English football, the temptation grew for Swaibu, and by the age of 23, he was going to be a father. He slipped down to the National League South with Bromley.

“In my mind, the most important thing in my life was making sure that I could pay for everything that I was under pressure to provide,” he said.

“My daughter couldn’t come into the world while I am on the back foot.”

He and five of his teammates went to fixing meeting in a London hotel, met an Asian man who, via a translator, tempted them with an offer of £20k each to be 2-0 down in a match against Eastbourne Borough.

“I opened the door and this guy – the guvnor, the main guy – was like 5ft standing up,” Swaibu recalled.

“He sat down on the bed, turned his back to us, lit up a cigarette and started doing something on his laptop.

“I remember thinking ‘bro, you can’t smoke in this hotel’.

“He didn’t speak English so there was a translator – probably 20, slim, glasses. He offered us a drink and then he got straight to the point.”

“I knew my team-mates were hesitant, but, leading up into that game, I was like ‘I am doing it’,” he confessed on the BBC’s Confessions of a Match Fixer podcast. You can listen to it, eight parts, HERE.

Bromley conceded two penalties at the first half came towards an end, one for a foul by a player unaware of the bribe and one for handball, both of which were scored.

On after the Eastbourne game: “We went into the dressing room at half-time and the gaffer says, ‘what the hell is going on?’,” he says.

“I went on my phone and there was just a thumbs up emoji from the translator.

“I thought this is just way too good to be true.”

As well as organising fixes at Bromley, he worked out which players might be able to do the same elsewhere.

“I would find out who the most influential player is, who is captain, who is vice captain, who has been there for more than two years, who is on a second or third stint at the club, how many games have they played in the last two years,” he said.

He felt a ‘middleman’, describing his role in organising meetings and connecting players with fixers, he added: “I would go to established businesses – say a restaurant – open up a locked door that would look like a toilet or a store cupboard and find piles of money stacked up.

“It would be a lot. It was piled up to my torso and I am 6ft 3in. I would bundle it up in rubber bands and seal it with cling film. I would be carrying a big bag – like I was going to the gym – but, it was a towel over the top and then just cash underneath. One night, I brought home £500,000.”

He knew he was hooked: “It made me so paranoid. I didn’t wear anything flashy, I rarely drove, I was always thinking, who else is on this train? What might my neighbour have seen?

“But despite the paranoia, I liked it. I was getting money fast and quick – 45 min and 90 min – that became an addiction. But it wasn’t the money after a certain stage, a lot of it came from power.”

Bookmakers saw more and more of money placed on certain teams’ games from newly-opened accounts located across the world – tipsters betting just on the English sixth tier and were always accurate.

Reports say more money was reportedly placed on the total goals in one November 2012 National League South game than on the equivalent market for a Champions League match which involved Barcelona.

They began to refuse taking wagers on some teams.

The FA took action after becoming aware of betting patterns, launching an investigation during the 2012/13 season.

BBC Sport write that as the season came to a close, the fixing was an open secret in some dressing rooms. Fans suspected their own players, and accused them from the stands.

Swaibu left Bromley at the end of that campaign after a highly suspicious 4-2 defeat to Maidenhead, making sure his side lost by two goals or more, his fixing exploits earning him an around £200k.

“It was the first time it had been that blatant and obvious and I didn’t want to face the dressing room,” Swaibu said.

“I was a mouse. The bubble had popped in that moment.

“When I walked into the dressing room I couldn’t look up. It was silent, everyone looking at me.

“The only thing I could hear was the gaffer – a grown man in his fifties – weeping.

“I didn’t get in the shower, I just went straight to my car.”

He again tried to make some quick cash, but when doing so, fell for fake syndicate, orchestrated by the National Crime Agency.

But not before he assured the fixers a 1-0 result in a League Two match between AFC Wimbledon and Dagenham & Redbridge, only for the Daggers to level the scoreline in the second half. By then, the result was irrelevant with the National Crime Agency also tracking him to a meeting.

Swaibu took two new contacts to a restaurant, demanded his £5,000 “pocket money” for attending the meeting and proving his credentials.

Ganeshan and Sankaran looked at their phones and found that Dagenham and Redbridge had scored. There was an argument, and Swaibu left the table.

As he did, diners watched on. Swaibu walked to his car, and was surrounded. Arrested and charged with conspiracy to defraud in January 2014, then found guilty of conspiracy to commit bribery in April 2015, sentenced to 16 months in prison.

“I knew it was real when they put the plastic cuffs on me,” he said recalling his arrest. “I knew it was game over.”

BBC Sport add: The mysterious backers who had recruited Ganeshan and Sankaran weren’t real though. They were a phantom syndicate created by the NCA.

While in jail, he got to see his two-year-old daughter: “She came running into the visitors’ hall, as two-year-olds do, and just ran straight towards me.

“She didn’t say anything, she just held me tight and didn’t want to let go. For the next two hours I couldn’t speak.

“After she had left I sat in that cell and I said to myself: ‘Forget the money, forget football, forget everything, how do I go back to the beginning?'”

What is he doing now? He’s using his knowledge of match-fixing for the betterment of the sport, collaborating with FIFA, the Premier League and the Sport Integrity Global Alliance to identify and prevent players from falling into the same trap he did, recently saying as many as 5 Premier league players were targeted by match fixers outside training grounds or London casinos.

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