If you’ve been following Sport Witness over the past few days, or just European football news in general, you’ll be aware of what’s currently going on in Belgium.
If you aren’t then we covered some of it here, but the general gist is there is an ongoing probe into corruption in Belgian football, including possible match fixing and agents manipulating transfers to maximise their own fees.
With the Belgium national team currently on duty, it was only a matter of time before players were asked questions about it, which Manchester City’s Vincent Kompany duly answered on Thursday.
Speaking to VTM, relayed by Le Soir, the Cityzens’ captain explained no one should ‘be surprised’ about it, as what happens in football can is also ‘applicable’ to some practices that take place in ‘human trafficking, drug trafficking or prostitution’.
The Manchester City player continued: “A lot of money circulates in those environments and hidden transactions are possible. There are a lot of well intentioned people in football, but also bad ones.”
For 32-year-old, the ideal solution to a lot of this would be for all information about transfers to be made available to the public.
He said: “What I don’t understand is why isn’t the international transfer market completely transparent? We speculate enough on player wages that surely they wouldn’t care if their salary was known. Let’s be transparent so that everyone is responsible for what they invoice.
“Agents are obviously important because they defend the interests of a player, or sometimes of a club, but all of this should be transparent. I don’t understand why it isn’t already.”
