When the World Cup kicks off in Germany on Friday, millions of Vietnamese fans will combine two national passions — football and betting.
Bars screening the matches, many of them after midnight, are tripling their beer and food stocks, anticipating a sustained, enthusiastic and noisy onslaught in one of the world’s most football-crazed nations.
Even though the Vietnamese national team has never got close to qualifying for the World Cup — they finished last in their group behind South Korea, Lebanon and the tiny Maldives this time around — interest is at fever pitch.
Five-star hotels with giant plasma screens and roadside restaurants who rig their TV sets to overhead power lines all hope to cash in on the event, during which red-eyed office workers will bring daily life to a near halt.
But it is not just the legal economy that hopes to make a killing from the global game. Vietnam’s many illegal and wildly popular betting syndicates are also hoping to multiply their profits.
”I enjoy football very much, but watching a match without betting is so dull,” said Nguyen Hai Thang (39), who says he spends about 600 000 dong ($37) a day on gambling, nearly 20 times Vietnam’s average daily wage.
”It’s great fun, thinking about lucky numbers and analysing a football match,” he said. ”I hope it’ll make me a lot of money one day. I win quite often, but of course I lose even more.”
Thang, the owner of a fashion shop in Hanoi, said he lost five million dong ($300) last month on the European Champions League final between Barcelona and Arsenal.
This was small fry, he said, compared to the millions other gamblers wager on card games, cock fights, buffalo fights, even fish fights, or ”so de”, which is based on — and vastly more popular than — state lottery numbers.
But some of the biggest money goes into football betting.
A betting syndicate can gather up to hundreds of bookmakers of different levels, who take orders from their clients, in many cases by just a telephone call.
”Relations between bookmakers and betters are based on trust. I take phone orders from betters that I have known for many years … Strangers have to pay me deposit,” a bookmaker in Hanoi told Agence France-Presse, refusing to be named.
A major corruption scandal this year that sent ripples through the one-party government first broke when it emerged that transport-ministry officials had bet millions of dollars on English and Spanish league matches.
The ministry’s director, Bui Tien Dung, is now behind bars, awaiting trial on charges of spending 28,8-billion dong ($1,8-million) in foreign-aid money meant to build bridges and highways.
State media then said he had staked $320 000 on a Manchester United-Arsenal game and $268 000 on Barcelona-Real Madrid.
Last month, in an all-too-familiar story, Hanoi police raided a football betting network and arrested its leader, whose reported monthly turnover was 30-billion dong ($2-million). This network was believed to have a direct connection with football betting rings in Hong Kong and Macau. The arrest, however, did not seem to affect the illegal football betting circle in the political capital much.
Scores more of the shady syndicates are still believed to be flourishing in cities and provinces across the country of 83-million people, sometimes accompanied by spin-off problems such as loan-sharking.
The communist leadership, having tried and failed to curb this ”social evil” for years, is now considering a plan to legalise football betting later this year, a move that could channel the vast cash flow into state coffers.
”Legalising football betting will bring the government hundreds of billion dongs a year,” said Huynh Vinh Ai, deputy chairperson of the national sports committee. ”I hope the public will support this project.”
But one vendor running football bets on the streets of the capital was confident his business would survive competition from the state.
”The situation will surely not change,” the bookmaker said.
”I’m confident that we will receive lots of phone orders for World Cup matches. It has always been that way over the past a decade. Legal or illegal, betting has become part and parcel of many football fans here.” — AFP
