Notorious match-fixer Solti’s game of fine margins echoes down the years

For Liverpool, Wednesday’s Champions League tie against Internazionale will inevitably conjure memories of 1965. Leading 3-1 from the first leg of their first European Cup semi-final, Liverpool went to San Siro and lost 3-0 in a game that players insist was fixed. The first Inter goal was scored direct from a free-kick they believed to be indirect, the second after the ball was nicked from the goalkeeper Tommy Lawrence as he bounced it before clearing.

The evidence in that instance is circumstantial, although as Brian Glanville noted in an investigation into match-fixing in the Sunday Times almost a decade later, Italian sides did remarkably well when the referee who officiated that game, José María Ortiz de Mendíbil, was in charge. There had been some very strange decisions as well in the previous year’s semi-final when Inter had beaten Borussia Dortmund, but the first concrete evidence of fixing came the following year.

As the Hungarian journalist Péter Borenich revealed in his 1983 book Csak a labdán van bőr, ”Only the Ball has a Skin”, Budapest in the 1960s and 70s became the nexus of European match-fixing. At its heart was the Hungarian Dezső Solti, who had approached the referee György Vadás, offering him enough money for “five, six Mercedes” to ensure Inter beat Real Madrid in the semi-final first leg. But Vadás refused, the game finished 1-1 and it was Madrid who went on to beat Partizan in the 1966 final.

By 1983, Solti was already serving a ban from football for his part in the scandal exposed by Glanville, having offered the Portuguese referee Francisco Marques Lobo $5,000 and a car if he ensured Juventus beat Derby in the semi-final of the 1973 European Cup. Lobo reported the approach and is generally deemed