From rigging to redemption: Moses Swaibu tries to write his wrongs

If you were passing by a certain Chinese takeaway in Dalston, East London, in August 2013, you’d have found the footballer Moses Swaibu stuffing a bag of cash into the back of his Mercedes SLK 250 CDI before driving it home to south London.

Two years later, you’d have found him in prison.

Swaibu, a former scholar of the year at Crystal Palace, was sentenced to 16 months for conspiracy to commit bribery for his part in a match-fixing scandal while he was playing at non-league club Bromley.

“ The first day felt like a year and four months felt like four years,” Swaibu said, 11 years on.

“But being arrested and going to prison was the best thing that could've ever happened to me. I was either going down a path of potentially being killed or I’d become a criminal mastermind and gone away in the sun with all of these match fixes.”

Swaibu is a reformed character. Years of therapy, introspection and a desire to educate the next generation of players has led him to become the go-to man for football authorities on matters of match-fixing.

It is an ongoing battle, and one that he believes is getting harder, due to the complex and new ways in which markets can be manipulated and gone unnoticed.

“You are now looking at a trillion dollar industry, and if you look at the USA – where the next World Cup and Olympic games are – their online betting market is under five years old,” he said.

“So the same problems I had in the early 2010s, I think they’re about to have a massive wave and a conveyor belt of illegal gambling inside information.”

This, coupled with new technologies like cryptocurrency and digital wallets, make those determined to prevent match-fixing much harder.Swaibu served four months of his sentence before being released, and founded  the sports integrity advisory GameChanger360 in 2019. He has since spent the past six years advising governing bodies and professional clubs in their fight against pernicious influences in football.

His experience of match-fixing include spot-fixing – the practice of influencing a specific aspect of the game, for example being yellow carded, unrelated to the outcome of the match but one in which you can place a bet – as well as acting as a ‘middleman’ for those looking to fix a match. Whilst his experience as a fixer manipulated matches in the non-league, he says it’s a problem that reaches all levels of the game.

“ I went into Manchester United a few years ago, and after we'd done the session I was approached by four different players,” he said.

“These are high profile players now, but they were telling me, ‘Yeah, we’ve been approached.’”

As the world’s most popular sport, football still makes up the bulk of suspicious events identified linked to match-fixing. Sportradar, the sports technology analysis company, reported in 2024 that 65% of all suspicious sports events were in football, but the number of suspicious matches had dropped in the past year from 881 in 2023 to 721 last year.Swaibu’s story became the subject of an award-winning BBC podcast last year and he has now written about his experiences in a new book, Fixed: My secret life as a match fixer.

“It’s hard to see myself then because there’s been so much change – my lifestyle back then and who I am today is like Jekyll and Hyde,” he said.

“ I had a mob style mind map version of what I believed I was going into. So I managed to understand how the betting market works, legal and illegal, how to get odds.

“I knew how to turn £1,000 into £10,000 and £10,000 into £100,000 and £100,000 into a million pounds. So at that time, I became so good at what I was doing. I had a pool of players in the UK and an international corridor for me to really go and expand this.”

Identifying the problems is easy, but finding a solution is an ever-evolving process.

“Anywhere there’s a live betting market being placed, there’s an illegal betting market being placed as well,” Swaibu said.

“ I’m on the ground and I’m seeing and hearing and speaking to different people, it has to come back to the same place, which is education. We’re not just ticking boxes anymore. We’re not just going in there and saying, ‘Hey, have you done the educational sessions? We need to give players something that's tangible, and I feel it is changing now.”

Fixed: My Secret Life as a Match Fixer by Moses Swaibu is out on Thursday 12 June by Blink Publishing.

Photograph by Andy Hall