Book Review: The Fix by Declan Hill

Sports fans like to see their favourite athletes giving it their all. Even in a lost cause, even against all odds, fans want to be inspired by all-out effort and exertion. That, I think, is one of the quiet appeals of March Madness; the players are going all out for an entire month, with (supposedly) no financial benefit. Fans want to see their heroes leave it all on the field.

Anything less is anathema.

Just ask Vince Carter. A team's supporters will turn on anyone who doesn't give 100% in a game. That is, after all, why the phrase "giving 110%" has become a sports cliche.

Declan Hill's The Fix shows that that core value is under attack and proves that sometimes the heart, the effort that your favourite player is exhibiting on the soccer pitch is an illusion.

It certainly is a bitter pill to swallow, but Hill conclusively proves that match fixing is reaching epidemic proportions in the world of soccer. His investigation reaped a shockingly large amount of circumstantial and conclusive evidence that soccer games at levels as high as the World Cup and Champions League have been fixed. By the end of The Fix his message is crystal clear: no level of soccer is safe, except perhaps the most impromptu of pick-up games.

The body of evidence he's compiled is impressive in its breadth and detail. Interviews with players, coaches, managers and owners as well as convicted and active match fixers. Statistical evidence. Memoirs and police reports. Photos of match fixers and confessions of guilt. It's an overwhelming deluge of information that will rock any fan of soccer, or of pure sport in general, to the core.

This is the only real flaw in the book.

It's hard to take. Hard to read. The first fifty pages left me so thoroughly disgusted that I wanted to fling the book down and never pick it up again.

The stories Hill has uncovered left me uncomfortable at first, and then increasingly cynical. I began searching for a silver lining and, eventually, I found several. For starters, I was relieved to note that my favourite side, Glasgow Rangers, is never mentioned. (Although, in my now cynical mind, that does not place them above suspicion.) Hill also included several stories of brave men and women standing up to corruption. Reporters in Malaysia exposing far reaching corruption as well as the uplifting story of girls amateur soccer in Nairobi are just two examples of people standing up to corruption. There is still a lot of good in the world of soccer. Hill leaves his readers with the sincere hope that these bastions of honesty and character can hold out and continue to fight the good fight.

The most important of all the good to come forward in The Fix is the book itself. The Fix gets the word out, putting Football Associations worldwide on notice that something is rotten in the state of soccer. As Hill points out in his blog: "We can do something about the corruption in football. The first thing is to ensure that there are effective well-staffed and well-resourced security departments in not just UEFA, but also at FIFA and in every National Football Association around the world. "

I've read a lot of books on soccer and sports, and The Fix is the first book that does more then earn a recommendation. It makes me want to sit soccer managers and Football Association administrators down and read the entire book to them. It makes me want to get involved and help stop the moral decay of the Beautiful Game.

I highly recommend this book to anyone, not just soccer fans or sports fans, but anyone with a passing interest in organized crime, corruption or globalization. It's a fascinating, ableit unsettling, read that is well written and incredibly informative.