In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes

Following up on Scott’s post about the latest major league gambling scandal, this is where we’re all heading in less than three parsecs*:

Turkish authorities formally arrested eight people, including a top-tier club chairman, on Monday as part of an investigation into alleged betting on football matches. The Turkish football federation (TFF) has also suspended 1,024 players pending disciplinary investigations.

The TFF suspended 149 referees and assistant referees earlier this month, after an investigation found officials working in the country’s professional leagues were betting on football matches.

Turkey’s state-owned Anadolu news agency reported that a court had ruled to arrest the Eyupspor chairman, Murat Özkaya, and seven others as part of the investigation. Eyupspor, who play in the top-tier Turkish Super Lig, were not immediately available to comment.

In a statement, the TFF said it had sent 1,024 players from all leagues to the Professional Football Disciplinary Council (PFDK) as part of the investigation, including 27 players from the Super Lig, who have all been suspended. Among those 27 were players from champions Galatasaray and Istanbul rivals Besiktas, among others. . . .

The TFF president, Ibrahim Haciosmanoglu, has described the situation as a “moral crisis in Turkish football”. Its own investigation revealed that 371 of 571 active referees in Turkey’s professional leagues had betting accounts, and 152 of them were actively gambling.

One referee had placed bets 18,227 times and 42 referees had bet on more than 1,000 football matches each. Others were found to have bet only once.

Being able to create and book an almost infinite variety of prop bets in a casino that literally more than a billion people can carry around in their pocket at all times is a qualitatively different situation than the bad old days, when you had to meet Vinnie around the corner and slip him five c-notes to bet on the outcome of tomorrow’s big game.

Also too, let us note the ubiquity of the combination of greed and stupidity that would lead a MLB closer already making millions of dollars per year, and in position to soon make tens of millions more, to participate in the type of scheme Scott was writing about yesterday. Leaving aside the moral dimension, you would probably have to be something like 99.9% sure that you weren’t going to be caught for this to be economically rational, although I’m not going to dig up Milton Friedman’s festering corpse to run the exact numbers.

Of course this raises the question — not begs the question, let us maintain some linguistic standards even as society degenerates into a non-stop combination sleazy casino-brothel — of how much of this stuff is going undetected. I would bet that the answer is: A whole lot.

*I will never tire of making fun of that. The sheer laziness!