( CNN ) -- In all the toing and froing that we have seen in recent weeks surrounding match-fixing -- the Europol press conference that announced more than 680 suspicious football matches worldwide and the banning of 33 players and officials for life in China -- one question has been largely overlooked : just how do you actually fix a football game ? After all , football is not a sport like cricket with stops and starts . It 's a team game with an ebb and flow that should make it very difficult to fix . But according to the European police investigators , the fixers and dodgy sporting people were able to successfully manipulate hundreds of games -- so how did they actually arrange these corrupted matches ? In essence , there are three ways and the first is the old stand-by of a dodgy referee . There have always been officials who are willing to corrupt matches . I showed in my book `` The Fix : Soccer & Organized Crime , '' that there is a long tradition in some countries of clubs providing referees with sexual bribes before matches : good-looking young women who suddenly found the men in black irresistibly attractive . The next morning , club officials would drop a gentle word about ' '' ocal hospitality '' and the official , who was often married , knew that they had to provide a `` well-refereed '' match for the host team . The problem with that method is that it is very difficult for referees to deliver a fixed match . They can give away needless penalties and red cards , but in the end their capacity to actually affect a match is limited . A second method is gathering four or five players in a team to throw a match . The advantage to this scam is that it actually makes identifying a fix very difficult for a spectator . You have six players running around trying as hard as they can ; and you have five players pretending to run around trying as hard as they can . This way an outsider finds it extraordinarily difficult to figure out what is going on . All they see is 11 players who may or may not be making mistakes honestly . All of whom are swearing and cursing the moment anything goes wrong . Who is on the fix or even if there is a fix occurring is very difficult to tell . The most pernicious method , and most effective , is when a fixer can get a club owner to fix matches . The Europol investigators spoke about this during their conference . There are dodgy club owners in Europe who will begin a season by looking at the 40 or so games in the league , and think , `` Right we will try to win these 30 matches , and we will lose these 10 . '' Morally it is a terrible thing to do . Financially , however , it makes excellent sense . Knowing that they will lose those specific 10 matches , the club owners will bet against their team and make more money losing those matches , then in winning all the other games . Last year FIFPro , the umbrella group of professional footballers ' unions , conducted a survey where they spoke to over 3,000 European players about their working conditions and the possibility of corruption in the sport . The results were so shocking that FIFPro entitled the results of their survey `` The Black Book of Football . '' In the report , players spoke frequently of intimidation and threats to ensure that entire teams fixed matches . And that intimidation was often coming from the owners of the teams . If corruption exists at a club , it makes it very easy to fix a match . A club owner simply has to walk into a dressing room and say , `` Right , lads . Today , you will lose the match . If you do not lose you will not get your salary for the last few months . '' In those cases , all the players have to do is make sure the spectators do not notice and they have a successful fix . All this is not to say that every game is fixed . The situation is far better in Europe then Asia . In that continent , there are entire leagues like - the Chinese and South Korean -- that have had to be shut down for months while mass arrests were conducted before the sports could continue . It is to say , though , that unless serious measures are taken the world 's game will be very , very badly affected .
Shanghai Shenhua stripped of 2003 and fined . 33 people handed life bans including four former Chinese internationals . Evidence of match-fixing found in two European Champions League matches , says Europol . 680 games including World Cup and European Championship qualifiers deemed suspicious .