Former Premier League player amongst six implicated in English match-fixing scandal

A former Bolton Wanderers footballer is one of six people to have been arrested in a major match-fixing investigation in English football.

Delroy Facey, who played for Bolton Wanderers in the Premier League between 2002 and 2004 and became an agent following his career in professional football, is one of six people to have been held by officers from the National Crime Agency in the past two days, while three of the other five suspects are also believed to be footballers. According to the Daily Telegraph, the arrests were made after an investigation by the paper found that match fixers from Asia had been targeting English football matches and that one match fixer was arrested as recently as Tuesday evening having arrived in England last week. Having gained access to covertly recorded conversations involving the arrested fixer in question, the Telegraph found that lower league matches could be fixed for just £50,000 and that the fixer was able to correctly forecast the outcome of three games involving the same team in the past fortnight. The identities of the teams involved in the match-fixing scandal cannot be named for legal reasons but it is believed that no team from the Premier League has been implicated. Commenting on the investigation, a statement on behalf of the National Crime Agency (NCA) read: “Six men have been arrested across the country as part of an NCA investigation into alleged football match fixing. The focus of the operation is a suspected international illegal betting syndicate. The NCA is working closely with the Gambling Commission and the Football Association.”