Soccer not aware how big fixing problem is: Put

The Belgian doesn't see an obvious road to redemption for the world game, however, after the revelation this week that organized crime gangs had fixed or attempted to fix hundreds of recent matches, including some at the very top level.

World Cup and European Championship qualifiers and two Champions League games were implicated among nearly 700 suspicious games in a report on Monday by the European Union's police agency, indicating a deep-set and widespread problem of corruption for the world's most popular sport.

Put said all of Belgian soccer “was sick” from match-fixing when he coached there.

“There are a lot of big international players who are involved in match-fixing,” Put said in South Africa on Tuesday.

Put was banned in Belgium for three years from 2008-11 after the club he coached, Lierse, was implicated in fixing games for money in the 2004-05 Belgian league season in a betting scam allegedly run by a Chinese businessman.

He was not banned by FIFA, he said, and is adamant that he was a scapegoat. Although he didn't deny on Tuesday that the fixing took place at Lierse, he said he wasn't in control of it.

“I am just a coach. I am forced to listen to people above me. This was not the decision of a coach or a player. It was a whole team,” Put said on the eve of Burkina Faso's African Cup semifinal match against Ghana.

More crucially, he said soccer was still in deep trouble from match-fixing, eight years after his case.

“You have to see what's going on in football now,” he said. “I think it's worse (than in 2005). What happened at that time has survived.”

The problem of fixing was “for sure” bigger and more problematic than soccer authorities realized, Put said, and might “always exist” in soccer.

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