In Portugal, the local municipality of Leiria is paying 5,000 Euro per day in maintenance costs for a stadium that is now closed. And a further eight percent of the annual local municipality budget is spent repaying the mortgage of the stadium that was built for the European championships in football in 2004.

Certain phrases in the English language mean the exact opposite of their dictionary definition, Canadian match-fixing exposer Declan Hill told the Play the Game Conference on October 29.

Conference photos and presentations from the first days at Play the Game 2013 are now available for download on Play the Game's conference website and on Flickr.

Football matches are fixed on a regular basis by criminals, an EU law enforcement official told Play the Game this morning, because for them it makes economic sense. While the rewards are often great for the fixers, Nick Garlick, a Senior Specialist at Europol’s Organised Crime Networks, said that a broad network of agents and middle men help shield them from the law.

Match-fixing is the "most serious threat to sport as we know it today," former Interpol match-fixing investigator Chris Eaton told the Play the Game conference.

When professor Gerhard Treutlein from Heidelberg University wants to get young people to discuss doping and the rights of athletes, he tells a true and quite disturbing story from the 1970s in West Germany.

“You can deliver the best test on earth, and the system will turn it into complete nonsense in three years,” a German doping expert told the Play the Game conference this evening.

“As you will understand and as this week will show, the noise of democracy has not yet reached every corner of international sport. Nevertheless, I insist that the situation has changed fundamentally over the past years. It is now legitimate to ask for democracy, transparency and freedom of expression, such as Play the Game has done since 1997.”