Fahad Al-Mirdasi had the Saudi King's Cup final in his hands. He was going to referee it. And he ruined it with a WhatsApp message asking for money to favour Al-Ittihad. The Saudi Federation suspended him for life before the opening whistle, in 2018. The club that was supposed to benefit didn't even need it — they won the title 3-1 on their own. A bought referee, a final already lost for the corruptor, and a career destroyed by a mobile phone message. That is the summary of almost everything we know about buying referees.
Buying a refereeing decision looks like the perfect shortcut. Trophies, European qualification, tens of millions in prize money. And yet, when you run the cold calculation that any crime economist would make, the deal usually goes wrong. Not because club executives are saints, but because the numbers don't add up. Bribing a referee is a bet with a low probability of success, a high entry cost, and a brutal punishment if you get caught. The arithmetic of crime, the kind Gary Becker laid out in 1968, says a crime only pays when the expected gain exceeds the expected cost. In modern football, it almost never does.
It is worth putting the formula on the table, because it explains everything else. The expected value of a bribe is the probability that the referee actually changes the result, multiplied by the benefit that brings you, minus what you pay, minus the probability of being discovered multiplied by the sanction. Four variables. Three of them work against the corruptor.
Let's start with the attractive side: the benefit. The figures are dizzying. According to UEFA's accounts, a place in the Champions League group stage guarantees around 18.62 million euros, plus 2.1 million for each win and 0.7 million for each draw in that phase. Add up the quarter-finals, semi-finals, the final. Winning the whole thing is worth a fortune — tens of millions in prize money alone for the champion. The Europa League distributes less, around 25 million to the winner, but it is still a lot of money. A goal gifted by a referee, if it earns you qualification, can translate into tens of millions. That is the magnet. That is why the temptation exists.
The problem appears in the first variable of the equation: effectiveness. A bought referee guarantees nothing. He can award the penalty you asked for and you can still lose the match. He can err in your favour and VAR can correct it in thirty seconds. A striker from the opposing team might score a stunning goal from thirty metres that no referee in the world could prevent. Buying the decision is not buying the result. And it is in that gap that all the profitability is at stake.
Let's put some numbers in. Imagine a club that bribes its way to a win that secures Champions League qualification, with a gross benefit of 20 million, a payment to the referee of half a million, and an expected sanction of 50 million between legal fines and loss of UEFA revenue. If the probability that the bribe actually alters the result is 10% and the probability of being caught is 5%, the expected value comes out negative. Two million in expected gain against three million in expected cost. Minus one million. For the deal to start paying in that scenario, the bribe's effectiveness would need to exceed 13%, and guaranteeing that in a football match is a fantasy. In a smaller league things are even worse. With a benefit of three million, a bribe of fifty thousand euros, and a sanction of five million, the operation is only profitable if the risk of detection is practically zero or if you have the referee so firmly controlled that the win is guaranteed. Neither of those conditions exists today.
And bribes are not cheap. In Colombia, a former FIFA referee claimed that offers of up to 200 million pesos — around 45,000 dollars — were made for an important match. Another leaked payment records of 11 million pesos, close to 2,500 dollars, described as a toll for getting onto the refereeing shortlists for the Liga BetPlay. We are talking about a bribery market where key matches cost tens of thousands of dollars. At large European clubs the price would go up, and with it the risk, because scrutiny is also greater.
The catalogue of punishments confirms why the scales tip the way they do. The Italian Calciopoli scandal of 2006 sent Juventus to Serie B, stripped them of two titles, and forced them to sell half their squad to rebuild. Missing out on the 2005/06 Champions League cost them, by some estimates, around 35 million in television money and bonuses, not counting the reputational damage. The Negreira case, revealed in Spain in 2023, exposed millions in payments from Barcelona to a former vice-president of the Technical Refereeing Committee over nearly two decades — money whose sporting return nobody has been able to demonstrate. Ibrahim Chaibou, the Nigerien referee, was banned for life by FIFA's Ethics Commission and fined 200,000 Swiss francs, around 182,000 euros, for accepting bribes in friendlies. Russian referee Sergey Lapochkin received a ten-year UEFA ban in 2021, running until 2031, which in practical terms means the end of a career. The punishment, in almost every case, is maximum for the referee and devastating for the club.
There is an honest objection worth acknowledging. If the math always came out negative, nobody would try it — and yet Calciopoli happened, Negreira happened, the Colombian cartels existed. The answer lies in the variable that fluctuates most: the probability of detection. Where historically catching the corrupt actor was almost impossible, the calculation changed sign. A referee for international friendlies operating within an Asian betting network worked in the shadows. A league without VAR, without serious financial audits, and with opaque appointment processes offered terrain where the risk tended toward zero and even a modest benefit was worth it. The model does not say that bribery is always irrational. It says it becomes irrational when the system does its job. It also ignores factors the formula cannot capture — the coercion of criminal networks that pressure referees through fear, inherited loyalties, current executives paying for the sins of previous management. The purely rational actor the model assumes does not always sit in the directors' box.
That is why institutional design is almost everything. VAR recorded every incident from 2017 onwards and narrowed the window of phantom errors. The public draw for referee appointments breaks the fixed relationship between a given official and a suspicious club. Financial auditing exposed Negreira — it was not a journalist with a hidden microphone but a tax authority report. And paying referees better matters more than it might seem, because when a Colombian assistant referee earns a few hundred euros per match, a 45,000-dollar bribe stops being a temptation and becomes a lottery ticket. Each of those measures pushes upward the probability of being caught, and with it the expected cost, until red colours any balance sheet.
Becker said it nearly sixty years ago. A crime disappears when the penal system pays more than the crime does. In football the translation is simple. As long as winning the Champions League cleanly remains cheaper than buying it and losing it in the courts, the coin will keep landing on the side of those who play football. The day it stops doing so will be because someone switched off VAR.
