Last November, as the United States prepared for a World Cup soccer qualifying match against El Salvador, John Harkes and Roy Wegerle, two of the team's top players, received an alarming telephone call at their hotel in Providence, R.I. The caller suggested that they could make money by throwing their game against El Salvador.
The players reported the anonymous call to Coach Steve Sampson, but never determined whether it was a serious bribe attempt or a prank.
While the Americans were disturbed, they were not entirely surprised. Nor was anyone else involved in international soccer.
''There is enough proof in the past, not necessarily at the World Cup, but at the club level, that these things have taken place,'' Mr. Sampson said of soccer and fixed matches. ''Referees have been bribed and players have been given incentives to throw matches.''
This week, the World Cup, the 32-team tournament and ultimate championship in the world's most popular sport, will start, and with it will come celebrations of soccer's ability to galvanize national pride and transfix the globe. A television audience of 37 billion over the 33 days is expected. But in virtually every corner of that captivated globe, a darker side of soccer has worsened in recent years -- a dispiriting underside disfigured by tales of lucrative gambling rings, rigged results and a pervasive erosion of trust. In the last year alone, allegations of fixed matches in domestic club leagues have been investigated in Russia, China, Greece, Israel, Belgium and Vietnam, all coming as the economy of soccer -- experts estimate it as a $400 billion-a-year industry -- grows more enormous.
Continue reading the main storyIn Bulgaria, the Government announced last month that it was assuming control of the national soccer federation because of widespread corruption and incompetence. Last November in Greece, 123 members of Parliament backed a public statement concluding that ''championships in all divisions and team standings'' were being ''cooked up in backstage deals.''
Two months ago, Pavel Sadyrin, who coached Russia's 1994 World Cup team, told the national soccer federation that ''there were, still are, and, alas, always will be, rigged matches as long as the country does not follow the rule of law.''
And in Vietnam, fans are infuriated over concerns that bookmakers, through bribes to players and referees, are fixing club league games. The Vietnamese soccer federation recently refused to validate the score of a match between teams from Hanoi and Haiphong because of widespread suspicions of rigging.
''Our players have to relearn the spirit of sport and understand that we don't play matches using deceit,'' Nguyen Tai Ngo, a member of Vietnam's committee for sports and gymnastics, said in an Agence France-Presse report.
''These are merely reflections of the vastly increasing richness of the game,'' Paul Gardner, a columnist for the magazine Soccer America and one of the foremost authorities on the sport in the United States, said of the spread of game-fixing scandals. ''There is an obscene amount of money in the game.''
While there has never been a confirmed fixing scandal in the World Cup, the rash of recent investigations has prompted FIFA, soccer's world governing body, to install safeguards before the start of the tournament on Wednesday. For example, teams and the 67 referees involved in the tournament will stay in secure hotels or on isolated floors of hotels, theoretically apart from danger.
''Of course this is a matter of concern, but we are not expecting serious problems,'' Michel Zen-Ruffinen, FIFA's deputy executive director, said of the prospect of a scandal. ''There would be serious sanctions taken. We expect people to be aware that it is not worth destroying a career to accept money. We believe the pride of playing for a country is stronger than the desire to receive money.''
Over the years, though, the World Cup has not been immune from problems -- both real bribe attempts and suspicious matches.
A Costa Rican referee, Rodrigo Badilla, was suspended from the 1998 World Cup, Mr. Zen-Ruffinen said, for failing to sufficiently report a $50,000 bribe attempt to fix a qualifying match last October between Japan and the United Arab Emirates. Mr. Badilla, who refereed the 1994 World Cup in the United States, hung up on the caller who mentioned the bribe, and he was not suspected of having tainted the match, Mr. Zen-Ruffinen said. However, Mr. Badilla reported the matter only to another referee and not to FIFA officials, Mr. Zen-Ruffinen said.
This was the only reported case of attempting to bribe a referee in 700 qualifying matches for the 1998 World Cup, Mr. Zen-Ruffinen said.
FIFA officials are particularly sensitive to attempts to compromise the game officials because they wield enormous control in such a low-scoring sport with the right to call, or not call, penalties. Some soccer experts say they believe referees are vulnerable because their salaries have not kept up with the millions paid to top players.
Another top referee, Kurt Rothlisberger of Switzerland, who worked the 1994 World Cup and was removed after a controversial no-call on an apparent penalty during a Belgium-Germany match, was banned for life last year for allegedly demanding $60,000 to help fix a 1996 European Champion League match.
Just as worrisome to FIFA is the mere perception of rigged games.
During qualifying for the 1998 World Cup, the coach of El Salvador, Milovan Djoric, was twice suspended for contending that the referees had helped Mexico during its matches against El Salvador.
Horace Burrell, the president of the Jamaican soccer federation, threatened last fall to sue the Salvadoran federation over its suggestions that Jamaica may have offered bribes to the Salvadorans to throw a qualifying match against Jamaica in November. The Salvadorans later apologized and admitted the Jamaicans were guiltless.
A particularly disquieting incident took place in Qatar at the 1995 World Cup for players under 17 years of age. According to Mr. Zen-Ruffinen, some players had been offered gifts by men thought to be part of a Malaysian betting syndicate.
''They were not asking the players to do something in exchange,'' Mr. Zen-Ruffinen said, adding that the players had allowed the men to take photographs. ''The idea, most surely, was to use the pictures at a later stage when these players became famous, presumably in a case of extortion or something like that.''
In one preventive measure, match assignments for referees at this World Cup will be handed out with little advance notice, and referees traveling to matches will be accompanied by security guards.
''I have never been approached,'' said Esse Baharmast, the lone American referee assigned to this World Cup. ''If there is a strange phone call coming in, the first thing I would do is go to the authorities.''
Mr. Sampson, the American coach, said he understood the need for the precautions. ''I'm not really concerned about it, but I don't want to be naive,'' he said. ''When so much is at stake financially for individuals and for countries, when literally the image of an entire nation is resting on the results of how a team fares in the World Cup, there is bound to be at least the perception that there will be those kind of incidents.''
Soccer experts say that there is nothing inherently corrupt about the game, but rather that corruption in soccer is reflective of the money and popularity of the sport and consistent with the corruption found at many levels in many countries.
With widespread television exposure, soccer also has become hugely popular for bettors. In Thailand, where two men were given three-month sentences in May for operating an illegal soccer betting racket, a research center estimated that $1 billion would be bet in that country alone during the World Cup.
Last January, 12 of China's top clubs said in a newspaper survey that they had offered cash bribes to referees, some of whom had accepted. In April, two soccer players were arrested in Vietnam for fixing league matches last year, and published reports said up to 74 players and team officials were suspected of rigging games. And the Italian Parliament was suspended on April 29 when a scuffle broke out among elected officials over the credibility of the refereeing in a match that had significant implications for the Italian season.
A match-fixing scandal at the 1998 World Cup would be a painful embarrassment for the French, who suffered through the most notorious example of match-fixing in recent years. Bernard Tapie, the former French Urban Affairs Minister, was sentenced to a year in prison in 1995 for fixing a 1993 match involving the team he owned, Olympic Marseilles.
In the last two decades, two World Cup matches have aroused suspicion of rigging. In 1978, Argentina needed a four-goal victory over Peru to advance ahead of Brazil -- total goals counted in the formula for advancement -- and into the final against Holland. When Argentina won, 6-0, Brazilian reporters noted that the Peruvian goalkeeper, Ramon Quiroga, was a native of Argentina. Mr. Quiroga has continued to deny any foul play. FIFA has since changed the tournament format to single elimination after the first round.
In the 1982 World Cup, a 1-0 victory by West Germany over Austria sent those two teams to the second round on goal differential ahead of Algeria. West Germany scored early, and neither team made any real effort to score again. To avoid this situation again, FIFA now schedules all final games in the first round at the same time, so teams cannot know in advance how many goals will get them to the next round.
Alan I. Rothenberg, president of the United States Soccer Federation, said he doubted games would be thrown at the 1998 World Cup.
''Maybe I'm the classic, naive American,'' he said, ''but I believe when players step on the field, they play hard and want to win.''
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