What if jokes about bent referees, dodgy goals and teams throwing in the towel were closer to the truth than we realise? What if when certain clubs win certain matches, the credibility of the sport suffers defeat? What if, one day, results in the Barclays Premier League are viewed with the same raised eyebrows generated by outcomes in other parts of the world?

Unpalatable possibilities, especially after another engrossing weekend of football, but corruption is on the agenda after the publication of The Fix, a book that has investigated matchfixing, and reports of suspicious betting patterns in Asia during a game between Norwich City and Derby County last month. Only last week, David Nielsen, a former Norwich player, said that he “threw” a game in 2004 while playing for Aalborg against Copenhagen.

It was reported last month that the FA investigation into the match at Carrow Road had stalled because of problems in gathering information from the Far East, but the governing body said yesterday that the inquiry was ongoing and that it will continue to work closely with British gambling authorities. The FA’s regulation department includes former policemen, forensic accountants and fraud experts, but Declan Hill, the Canadian journalist and academic, who wrote The Fix, believes that they could do more.

“The FA and Fifa need a security department like US sports have, five or six tough former Scotland Yard or anti-mafia guys,” he said. “People whose ideal is The Sweeney. Task them on drug-taking, anti-match-fixing.”

“If [the Norwich game] were a fix the surge occurred at a very odd time, the middle of the game. Normally, if you’re fixing a game, you do it at the beginning when the most money is on. Huge swings doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a fix. The point is, what’s happening is a shift in culture. Any of these stories would have seemed unbelievable five years ago. Now you’re getting accusations of Asians match-fixing in Europe, some of them without evidence. These stories are the beginning of the destruction, the beginning of the end.

“They’re becoming common: France, Germany, Denmark, England. Once you start to have these conversations, it doesn’t matter how much is true. It’s eating away at the credibility of the game. So FAs have to be seen to be doing something in a more rigorous way than Asian federations ever did. There, some officials are a part of the corrupt culture. I’d be stunned if any European football official ever took part in a fixed match.”

Hill travelled to Asia and uncovered alarming evidence that the result of a game in the 2006 World Cup finals may have been influenced by Far Eastern criminals who, with billions of pounds at stake, are turning to Western European leagues.

“Where will the Premier League be in ten years is the problem,” Hill said. “They have a global product, but they don’t protect it anywhere close to the same level as the North American sports leagues. Games aren’t necessarily being fixed, but even in really small youth-league matches in the UK, information on those games is being relayed live back to Shanghai.”

A fix need not mean a dramatic upset — the important thing is that the result corresponds to the expectations of those laying wagers. The rise of spread betting — where you wager on small things such as the time of the first corner or booking — offers a potential avenue to exploit players without necessarily having a discernible impact on a match.

“The Asian fixers have a reputation for paying well,” Hill said. “They are considered very trustworthy. They show up with bags of money. They say, ‘You’ll probably lose anyway, take the cash’. They come so frequently to the big tournaments that it is almost unimaginable to think no one has ever taken the money.”

Sepp Blatter, the Fifa president, whom Hill interviewed, poured scorn on the author’s claims. “Blatter can do nothing less than trash my book and tarnish it,” Hill said. “Remember the stakes. Blatter says in the book, ‘If what you say is true, my career has been a failure’. By his own words, then, Blatter has failed.

“Fifa’s official reaction was that the fixers have always failed. They have gone to all these different tournaments, they have approached all these different players and they always failed. But they always come back. That means the fixers must be the unluckiest tourists in the world.”

The usual riposte in this country is that with players already so well paid, why risk their careers? “People are being naive if they think it will never happen,” Hill said. “You can always reach some of the people.”

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