The title to Declan Hill’s 2013 book The Insider’s Guide to Match-fixing in Football is potentially misleading. It is not, however, maliciously intended. Nor can Hill be faulted for his marketing acumen. Hill himself is not inside the match-fixing network, nor does he purport to have fixed a game on his own terms. However, through a synthesis of what he calls “the ‘neglected art’ of actually talking to criminals” (p. 19) and some analytic statistics, Hill provides important empirical and theoretical insight into the mechanisms, motivations and, hopefully, preventative measures central to match-fixing in modern international football. As such Hill provides an important empirical contribution to the academic work on the socio-legal and deviancy issues in sport and society more generally. Specifically, the value of this work resonates in the specific characteristics of football as a case study for corruption. I will speak of this in more detail later; however, it is worth noting that football as a global phenomenon, with a commonly agreed upon set of rules and definitions that are maintained between cultures and contexts, provides a fascinating context in which to understand match-fixing as a “universal deviancy” (p. 10).
