‘Football teams implicated in match fixing will be expelled’

Local professional football teams whose players are implicated in match-fixing in the future will face expulsion from their league, a senior sports official said Thursday.

“If players in (the first-division) K-League are caught trying to throw matches from this July and on, their teams will be forced out of the league,” said Park Sun-kyoo, vice minister of culture, sports and tourism. “We will also consider shutting down the K-League in the worst-case scenario.”

Park made the remark after holding a meeting with K-League officials and representatives from all 16 league clubs behind closed doors.

The K-League is mired in a snowballing match fixing scandal, the first of its kind for the 28-year-old competition. So far, 11 active players have been indicted and five others are under arrest.

They allegedly accepted cash from gambling brokers in exchange for deliberately making errors in games from last season and earlier this season.

“The problem isn’t simply with players and it has spread over to the rest of professional football and football as a whole,” Park added. “Teams must also act responsibly.”

Park also said if match fixing problems surface again, K-League matches will be taken off Sports Toto, the only licensed sports lottery in the nation. Teams in football and other spectator sports receive portions of proceeds from sports lottery sales.

According to Park, the K-League has also extended the deadline for players to turn themselves in to the league from Thursday to July 7. Prosecutors are scheduled to announce the findings of their probe that day.

Two players, including former national team forward Choi Sung-kuk, have come forward with their ties to match fixing schemes and are under investigation.

Choi, currently with the Suwon Samsung Bluewings, has told officials that he attended a meeting with other players last year when they plotted match throwing schemes, but has denied taking cash or other forms of bribes.

On Thursday, the head coach of the Suwon club said Choi’s situation will not be a distraction. 

“We’ve won four games in a row and are on a nice roll,” said coach Yoon Sung-hyo in a press conference. “One player won’t affect our momentum.”

Yoon noted that Choi was with a different club when he went to the players’ meeting last season. He said he prodded Choi to come clean.

“There had been a lot of rumors about Choi and we held a meeting,” Yoon said. “He said he was dragged into that meeting but didn’t take any money. Maybe he doesn’t believe he was actually involved in match fixing but some may think differently. So we felt it’d be better for him to go under investigation.”

Choi had earlier denied any link to match fixing. He is the highest-profile player in the scandal so far, with 26 international matches under his belt. 

(Yonhap News)