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An ex-police chief alleges Premier League players were involved in match-fixing, citing evidence from a 2021 casino raid, but claims police and football authorities ignored it.
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Fredrik Gardare, a former head of an international crime investigation unit, has accused Premier League players of match-fixing. Gardare, who led a Swedish police unit targeting organised crime in sport, has claimed that he uncovered crucial evidence in a casino raid in 2021, but it is being ignored by football’s lawmakers.
Several phones were confiscated in the rain, but one phone was said to have extensive evidence on Telegram of players cooperating with a criminal to fix matches across European football leagues and even international games in the Nations League. Gardare claims that multiple Premier League players were involved, too.
He says the Stockholm police and the Swedish police authority didn’t investigate it further, and his unit was disbanded.
“It was very high priority from my side, I set my whole team on this investigation,” Gardare told Daily Mail Sport. “But at the same time, the police said, ‘We are finished with this’ in December that year. We also gave the information to the football federation here in Sweden directly and said, ‘This is serious’. Hopefully they called the English FA, but I don’t know.”
The report said that the English FA hasn’t received the Swedish police force’s findings, but is ‘keen’ to examine them.
“This is important for both Swedish football and football in several countries,” Gardare said. “It’s important for England and international football to stop ongoing match-fixing. There was more than one Premier League player (found on the phone). Betting on yellow cards, corners and other aspects in matches. That phone is either sitting with Stockholm police or the national police force.”
Gardare added: “I have worked on hundreds of match-fixing cases, and this was the clearest case you could have. It doesn’t get any clearer than being found on a confiscated mobile phone. It is a very good opportunity to do something about this.”
The report also quoted Swedish FA integrity officer Johan Claesson, who admitted receiving intelligence about the case in 2021 but said they didn’t act as it ‘did not contain any specifics’.
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