Swedish football players banned for match fixing

Four players have been banned, one for seven years, following an investigation into match fixing.

Sweden.- Svensk Fotboll, the Swedish football association, has banned four players after an investigation into match fixing. The players have been banned for between four and seven years for violating a number of anti-match fixing rules.

Pawal Cibicki has been banned until 2025, Robin Armandt until 2026, Kristian Legiec until 2027 and Vladimir Pasarikovski until 2028.

The association found that Pasarikovski paid Armandt SEK44,500 (€4,388) to perform below the best of his abilities in six matches in division 3 Södra Götaland. Pasarikovski and people known to him are believed to have bet around SEK250,000 on Kvarnby IK, for which Armandt played as goalkeeper, to lose a match.

Kvarnby’s former coach told police that Armandt openly boasted about how easy it was to fix matches. In December 2020, he was convicted of accepting bribes and gambling fraud.

Cibicki, meanwhile, was found to have agreed to receive a yellow card in a game played by IF Elfsborg, in exchange for SEK300,000, which was disguised as a loan. Prior to the match, 33 accounts – most of them new – placed bets that Cibicki would receive a yellow card.

As for Legiec, he was found to have placed 23 bets himself on matches played by his team, Malmö City FC, and others in the same division. He was found to have used a relative’s account to make the bets through operators including Unibet and Bet365.

Swedish gambling revenue for the second quarter reached €637.8m, an increase of 10.2 per cent year-on-year and 4.8 per cent against the previous quarter.

See also: Swedish gambling regulator publishes new AML guidelines