Beijing - Police have detained up to 16 people, including several players and officials, who are suspected of involvement in the latest match-fixing scandal to hit the ailing Chinese football league, reports said on Thursday. The Ministry of Public Security named four former players, coaches and officials arrested in the north-eastern province of Liaoning for suspected "manipulating of domestic soccer matches through commercial bribery", the China Daily newspaper and other media said.
Some reports said 16 people were already under detention, while the ministry said some of those detained were also suspected of gambling through foreign websites.
The "unprecedented large-scale investigation" found key evidence after the arrest in April of former Liaoning Guangyan manager Wang Xin, who fled back to China from Singapore when police uncovered his match-fixing scheme in the Singaporean football league.
"During the investigation into Wang Xin's match-rigging scheme in Singapore, it was found that he also manipulated domestic matches through commercial bribery," the official Xinhua news agency quoted a police spokesman as saying.
Wang Xin and Wang Po, the general manager of a team from the northern province of Shanxi, were suspected of fixing several matches since 2006 in the First Division, from which teams can gain promotion to the more lucrative Chinese Super League.
State television broadcast an interview with Yang Xu, the arrested former assistant manager of Guangzhou Pharmaceutical Football Club, which was accused of bribing Shanxi to lose a match.
"There have been secret rules in Chinese football," said Yang, who was also the vice-president of the football association in the southern province of Guangzhou until his arrest.
Yang was implicated in the alleged bribery of the Shanxi team to lose a vital match in 2006 that helped Guangzhou gain promotion to the Chinese Super League.
Police said two other officials from Shanxi accepted 200,000 (29,000 dollars) for throwing the game against Guangzhou, who won 5-1.
The two Shanxi officials also reportedly won more than 100,000 yuan from bets placed on their team to lose the match.
"I thought since everyone was doing that, we would suffer for our honesty if we didn't follow the practice," Yang said.
Chinese football has been badly affected by crowd trouble, gambling and match-fixing allegations since around 2000.
Allegations of corruption in Chinese football have driven fans away and many of those who continue to go to matches often chant "black whistle" every time a referee makes a dubious decision in favour of an opposing team.
Worries over match-fixing by illegal gambling syndicates prompted the Chinese Football Association to use Italian and English matches in a "football pool" lottery launched in October 2001.
In the highest-profile case, in 2003 a Beijing court sentenced former international football referee Gong Jianping to 10 years in prison after convicting him of accepting at least 370,000 yuan (54,000 dollars) in bribes.
Several other referees and at least one former CFA official were implicated in the scandal.
In another case linked to illegal betting on overseas football matches, a court in Shanghai sentenced 20 people to prison earlier this year after convicting them of running an online sports gambling operation worth nearly 1 billion dollars.
The Shanghai-based syndicate had collected stakes for overseas gambling websites via a network of local agents since 2006, the semi-official China News Service said.
Most forms of gambling remain illegal in China, apart from state-run lotteries and small-scale totalizer-system betting on horse racing in some areas.
