The world's number one snooker player, John Higgins, has been suspended by snooker's world governing body following allegations that he and his manager Pat Mooney agreed to accept money to influence the outcome of matches.

“Match-fixers will be at the World Cup in South Africa. They will be there approaching players, referees and team officials and trying to bribe them to fix matches. They will be there because there has been no effective action on the part of FIFA to clean up this problem,” says Declan Hll in this article.

In the trial of Luciano Moggi, a former Juventus executive, phone tap conversations have been produced and used by the defense, implicating other Italian clubs in the match fixing scandal which rocked Italy four years ago.

The match-fixing plague dogging football has led to further arrests in China and Turkey and more allegations emerging in Italy and Switzerland in the last week alone.

Yesterday Turkish police arrested 46 people believed to have been involved in match-fixing.

Nan Yong, the executive vice president of the Chinese Football Association (CFA) was discharged last week after a nationwide crackdown on gambling and match fixing carried out by the Chinese public security department last year.

American newspaper, the New York Times went to Germany to take a closer look at the state of German football in the wake of the match-fixing scandal.

FIFA has been forced to call in international crime-fighters Interpol to form a task-force to combat a wave of match-fixing and bribery that is sweeping through the game.