A Chinese court on Thursday sentenced four top football referees to up to seven years in prison after convicting them of corruption and match-fixing.
The court in the north-eastern province of Liaoning found the four former referees, including one who had officiated at a World Cup, guilty of “taking bribes, gambling on or fixing matches,” the government website China.org.cn reported.
The court sentenced Lu Jun to five-and-a-half years in prison for accepting bribes.
Lu officiated at the World Cup finals in 2002 and was twice named the Asian Football Confederation’s referee of the year.
He confessed to receiving 810,000 yuan ($A120,000) for helping to fix seven Chinese league games involving four teams, China.org and other state media said.
Former referee Huang Junjie was sentenced to seven years in prison for fixing several matches from 2005 to 2009, including two friendly games pitting Chinese teams against English giants Manchester United and Australia’s Sydney FC.
Wan Daxue and Zhou Weixin were jailed for six years and three-and-a-half years respectively.
Wan was known as a “patriotic whistle” because he appeared to favour China when he refereed international friendly matches.
He was convicted of accepting some 940,000 yuan, mostly for fixing matches during the Chinese National Games.
Five football officials were also sentenced on Thursday.
Lu Feng, the former manager of the Chinese Football Association’s Super League Company, was sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison for taking bribes.
Several other top football officials were scheduled to be tried next month, reports said.
Dozens of other former players, coaches and officials also face trial or have already been tried for match-fixing and corruption.
Chinese football has been plagued by gambling and match-fixing allegations for more than a decade.
In an earlier report on the latest crackdown, which began in 2009, China Daily quoted an expert’s estimate that China’s online sports gambling could be worth up to 1 trillion yuan annually.
Online gamblers bet 175 billion yuan through one Chinese website alone in 2009, the newspaper quoted Wang Xuehong, the head of Beijing University’s centre for lottery studies, as saying.
In 2003, a Beijing court sentenced former international football referee Gong Jianping to 10 years in prison after convicting him of accepting bribes.