FRANKFURT: The German Football Federation (DFB) on Friday suspended a former player until August 2012 for three cases of match-fixing in Third Division matches here.
Patrick Neumann, 30, who used to play for then Third Division club SC Verl, has been banned for two years and nine months, but his ban is back-dated to November 2009 when he was first suspended after allegations of match-fixing.
An investigation revealed he accepted money to influence the results of three Third Division games which his club played in between May and October 2009.
Neumann is the seventh player suspended by the DFB for match-fixing with a court case ongoing here involving 30 matches across the continent in what is believed to be European football’s biggest fraud scandal.
Verl now play in Germany’s regional west league, effectively the Fourth Division.
The news comes less than a week after former striker Rene Schnitzler at Bundesliga club St Pauli admitted to pocketing more than 100,000 in bribes to fix five matches in 2008.
The Stern magazine cited Schnitzler as saying he had received cash to manipulate five away matches during the 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 seasons when the Hamburg outfit were still in the Second Division.
He said an agent handed him the money to fix the games, but denied actually doing so and in the article Schnitzler added that he was addicted to gambling.
No comments:
Post a Comment