Police in Germany questioned two players from the Fortuna Dusseldorf club on Thursday in connection with the widening match-fixing scandal in Europe.
The two play for the reserve side of the club, which competes in the fourth-tier league. The main Fortuna team is in the second division.
The club gave no details about Thursday’s interrogation, except to say it was connected to the match-fixing scandal.
Patrick Neumann, the captain of SC Verl, another fourth-tier German club allegedly involved in the scandal, has decided to cooperate with authorities and “tell them all he knows,” the player’s lawyer Lutz Klose said.
“But he doesn’t have much to confess,” Klose said.
Neumann and teammate Tim Hagedorn have been suspended by the club.
In another development, police raided the apartment of a 21-year-old person suspected of trying to bribe a player of the fourth-tier Goslar club into throwing a game. The player reported the attempt to the club, which then told police.
Meanwhile, the Bavarian justice ministry reportedly has drafted a law that would punish match-fixing, doping and other manipulation in sports by up to 15 years in prison.
The questioning of two Fortuna players came one day after UEFA announced that five clubs in Albania, Latvia, Slovenia and Hungary are suspected of match-fixing.
German prosecutors are leading an investigation into match-fixing this year in Europe, with 200 games under scrutiny, including qualifying matches for the Champions League. UEFA has called it the biggest match-fixing scandal to date.
The prosecutor’s office in Bochum, which specializes in cracking down on organized crime, has declined to give details about its ongoing investigation besides saying that 15 people have been arrested in Germany and two in Switzerland.
Prosecutors believe an international gang is suspected of bribing players, coaches, referees and other officials to manipulate games so that the gang would make money by betting on fixed games. About 200 people are suspected of being involved and the ring leaders are believed to have made at least 10 million euros (US$15 million).
“In Europe, you have the bribery, in Asia you have the betting and in Berlin you have the cashing in,” Joerz Ziercke, the president of the Federal Crime Office, the German equivalent of the FBI, said at a conference on Thursday.
German authorities originally named nine countries where they believe the manipulations had occurred — Austria, Belgium, Bosnia, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Slovenia, Switzerland and Turkey.
On Wednesday, UEFA also named clubs in Albania and Latvia and identified the five as KF Tirana, FC Dinaburg, KS Vllaznia, NK IB Ljubljana and Honved Budapest. Seven qualifying games in the Champions League and the Europa League between July 16 and Aug. 6 involving the five clubs were allegedly manipulated.
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