At first glance it looks like a normal sports bar. There are palm trees, comfy banquette seats and several large TVs. Only the framed shirt in the corner once worn by David Beckham strikes an oddly ostentatious note.
But this month Café King, a bar in Berlin’s fashionable Charlottenburg district, is at the centre of a match-fixing scandal that has sent shockwaves through Germany’s football establishment, and has heaped growing embarrassment on the nation as it prepares to host the 2006 World Cup.
At the beginning of the month, police raided the café, and arrested its three Croatian owner brothers — Milan, Filip and Ante Sapina. Inside, they found betting receipts totalling €2,4-million. They also discovered a luxury convertible Mercedes parked outside and a receipt for a newly purchased Ferrari.
Further raids across Germany followed. Detectives stormed into the homes of four Bundesliga referees —one of whom, Wieland Ziller, was photographed tentatively opening his front door in an Adidas dressing gown. They also searched the houses of 14 players or former players from Germany’s second division in an operation involving 150 officers.
Any doubts that the scandal was of minor proportions were dispelled then. German sport was in its worst crisis for more than three decades, while the country’s legendary reputation for probity and — well — humourless rectitude, appeared suddenly in doubt.
The raids came after the tearful confessions last week of 25-year-old referee Robert Hoyzer, who confessed to manipulating at least eight league and cup games. In return, Hoyzer had taken €67 000 in bribes and a plasma TV set from a Croatian betting gang.
The matches in question included a notorious cup encounter last August between Paderborn SV and Hamburg. Paderborn, the underdogs, won 4-2 after Hoyzer inexplicably sent off Hamburg’s star striker and awarded Paderborn two dubious penalties.
According to the news magazine Spiegel, the café-owning Croats liked to attend the games they had bought. They turned up in Hoyzer’s hotel room shortly before the Paderborn match and even gave him a lift back to Berlin afterwards. There, they handed him €20 000 in cash. The German authorities began investigating when the betting firm Oddset reported strange patterns in connection with the game and mysteriously large sums being put on a Paderborn victory.
The fresh-faced Hoyzer initially denied any involvement in match fixing. But after spending hours closeted with his lawyer, he emerged to admit he was guilty as charged. In return for a lenient sentence, he would tell the authorities everything he knew — including the names of other players and referees who were bent. (Hoyzer’s attempts to fix matches didn’t always work.
In May last year, the brothers paid Hoyzer €8 000 to ensure a Paderborn victory against the undistinguished East German side of Chemnitz. Despite his best efforts, Paderborn lost. Afterwards, Hoyzer paid the bribe back. The furious Croats suffered losses of €215 000, Spiegel claimed, and accused the referee of ”inactivity”.)
In 1971, several leading Bundesliga players were suspended after admitting accepting money to throw matches. The scandal prompted Germany’s government to regulate the betting industry, but in recent years the authorities have reacted slowly to the rapid globalisation of the gambling industry — and the growth of Internet betting.
”Since reunification there have been loopholes in German law. Traditionally the German state has controlled all betting, but with globalisation this is impossible,” says Prof Christiane Eisenberg, a cultural and sport historian at Berlin’s Humboldt University. ”Historically there is nothing unusual about match-fixing. It’s happened in many countries before. The only unusual thing is that it’s happened in Germany.”
The scandal has prompted much agonising among German commentators, who have noted that the crisis in German sport neatly reflects the current existential crisis in German society as a whole.
”This has definitely damaged the reputation of German football,” says Christian Sachs, one of Germany’s leading sports columnists. ”Up until now German football has been pretty much OK. The Bundesliga has been run on a professional basis. We have seen none of the black-market money that has flowed into places like Italy or the Balkans.”
What, then, has gone wrong?
”Germany is a different society nowadays from what it used to be. It is in an evolutionary process, like any other society. Ever since unification Germany has been in a state of flux. So has professional football.”
It is perhaps no coincidence that the betting scandal has taken place during a period of unprecedented gloom in Germany, Europe’s largest but now ailing economy. The country that invented the Wirtschaftswunder or post-war economic miracle has recently fallen on hard times, suffering four years of dismal economic growth.
As detectives knocked on doors in suburban parts of Essen and Dresden last week, officials at the federal labour office in Nuremberg revealed that more than five million Germans are now unemployed — the highest figure since the early 1930s, when Hitler and the Nazis came to power.
Franz Beckenbauer, the man responsible for Germany’s successful 2006 World Cup bid and who is leading next year’s arrangements, has described the match-fixing revelations as ”disgraceful”. It appears to be too early to say whether the scandal will cause long-term damage to the tournament’s success, but it can’t have helped.
Hoyzer, the man at the centre of the scandal, has gone into hiding in the Ruhr region, apparently terrified that Germany’s ubiquitous East European mafia will try to kill him. This week Cafe King, where he allegedly played cards, was only half full.
The bar is directly opposite the posh Steigenberger hotel, and a short walk from several erotic cinemas and the Beate Uhse sex museum. It is an area where money and sleaze have always converged, though seldom with such spectacular results.
But why did Hoyzer do it?
”The Croatian mafia drew him in,” suggests Sachs. ”The rumour is he lost a lot playing cards. He had to get the money back. But it’s still hard to believe it’s happened here.” — Â