Why isn’t athletic match-fixing stopped? (with a focus on South Korea)

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at the root of the problem of match-fixing in sports.

 

Starting with match-fixing in professional soccer, followed by professional volleyball, and now professional baseball, match-fixing has been rampant in most of South Korea’s favorite sports. In the Korean K League, a whopping 54 players have been permanently banned from professional soccer for match-fixing. These are all people who have been playing soccer since they were kids and it’s all they know how to do, but for the good of the sport as a whole, it was a necessary evil. In professional baseball, the manipulation was not about winning or losing, but about something as small and imperceptible as whether or not the first batter walked. In a sport where fair play is the name of the game, the issue of match-fixing is a big deal. Especially in eSports, which has only recently entered the world of sports. Gambling is a problem for everyone, and if you look at other fields, for example, celebrities who are recognized as similar public figures, there are celebrities who have been involved in gambling cases in the past, but they are in the minority compared to the total number of celebrities. However, in the case of Korean athletes, the percentage is huge. Where does this difference come from?
The most obvious reason is money. It’s not realistic to monitor every game and find out what’s going on, so the most realistic thing to do is to make sure that athletes aren’t tempted to cheat. This means improving the salary system for players. A minimum salary should be realized so that players who are basically starting out in the professional leagues are not tempted. Also, if all sports were to adopt the player pension system that professional soccer federations are currently proposing, and consider the future welfare of retired players, it would be a great way to prevent match-fixing on the surface.
Another measure is to change the way athletes are educated, which I think is a fundamental measure. The current prevalence of match-fixing is due to a lack of ethical judgment on the part of athletes, aside from the monetary aspect already mentioned. This problem is caused by a lack of awareness among athletes and athletic leaders that violence, sexual assault, and match-fixing are big problems. There are many examples of athletes’ lack of judgment. Drugs are one of them. In the past, players openly took drugs and even ordered and purchased them in groups, and in 2009, Korean professional baseball player Ma Hae-young revealed in her autobiography that players took drugs. It’s not enough to just tinker with the institutional aspects of fines, discipline, etc. to get rid of this problem, so the change in education needs to be twofold. The first is a shift in pedagogy that focuses on the students who are starting and continuing to exercise, and the second is additional education for the educators who are currently teaching them. Let’s look at a real-world example. Think back to your athletic friends in high school and you’ll see what I’m talking about. They spend most of their high school classes not going to class, but hanging out with each other and working out, especially during midterms and finals, and they are turned into machines. The implicit violence makes it even harder for them, and they are trained physically, but not mentally, in sports. The education system makes a lot of policies for liberal arts students, but doesn”t pay much attention to athletes. Going to university doesn’t change that. A friend of mine is currently studying physical education at S University. Even the professors who teach physical education majors at universities say that they can’t imagine physical education without violence, and in some cases, the department supports violence. In other cases, many of the athletes said that they would intentionally lose a game in order to support someone they knew. The first step is to improve the character education process for students who are just starting out, so that the entire athletic world can gradually change. However, it might be harder to ask them to change too quickly. However, if we start with sportsmanship education, even if it is not formal education, and gradually change the original culture of giving up schooling, we will see the entire sports society change in the long run. Especially in the sports world, delays and delays in schooling have a huge impact. This also means that there is a lot of support for each other’s situation. This has led to a situation where no one can refuse a senior’s request, no one can refuse a professor’s request, and it doesn’t matter if they do. In other words, it is unlikely that educating students now will have much effect. Children growing up are influenced by their surroundings, so if there is a gap between the education they receive and the reality, the effectiveness of the education will eventually decrease. Therefore, educators who are currently teaching education should be encouraged not to be influenced by such character education and solicitations, and the surrounding environment of children who are on the path of physical education should be improved.
Lastly, we need to revise the national curriculum to improve people’s consciousness. The latest scandal of match-fixing in Korea’s professional baseball is currently at its peak. Most of the cases abroad have resulted in the dissolution of clubs and a decline in attendance, but now that the exhibition games are over, professional baseball is experiencing its biggest boom yet. Even the exhibition games were mostly sold out. This shows that our society is now tolerant of cheating. However, this is because we’ve seen so much cheating in other areas of society, such as the corruption of chaebols and politicians, that we tend to think of cheating as a minor offense. Efforts to improve this perception should start from elementary school education. We should use this opportunity to establish a character-centered education rather than an academic one. In the end, it will take a fundamental change in the education system in addition to institutional improvements to solve the problem. This will take time, but in the long run, it will be an opportunity to establish a healthy and high-quality public consciousness in the sports world and society as a whole.
At the moment, the athletes involved in match-fixing will be permanently banned from the sport. However, if the process of growing up has made them stop thinking of illegal activities such as match-fixing as illegal, they will be victims. This case should be a wake-up call to make fundamental institutional and psychological changes that will make it impossible to cheat.