Swansea Boss Laudrup has No Problems with ‘suitcase’ Bonuses
September 21, 2012
Swansea manager Michael Laudrup has revealed he sees no problem with offering rival teams a cash bonus to win, and it it is not a form of match-fixing.
Former Denmark international Laudrup has spent time in a wide range of countries throughout his career as a player and manager, and played for Italian sides Juventus and Lazio during the 1980s, a period associated with match-fixing investigations in the country.
He believes that match-fixers should be hit with lifetime bans, but believes the ‘suitcase’ culture prevalent in Spanish football, where one team will pay another team to take points off their immediate rivals in the league table, is not an issue.
“To say I’m against that [match-fixing] is obvious,” Laudrup said. “The worst match fixing I’ve heard was what happened in Italy before I came there in the beginning of the ’80s, where somebody bought three or four of the players in a team to lose a game.
“That means that seven or eight players in a team were playing to win, like normal, and three or four of them just to lose.”
However, he added: “If Swansea play the last game against a team and a third team pays Swansea to win the game, I really don’t see anything bad about that. It’s just a bonus. For me, match-fixing is when somebody pays someone to lose a game.”