The infinite chaos of Greek football: How the latest hope for change was lost

Former referee Konstantineas says he was targeted in the attack

On the night of 29 February 2012, a bomb exploded in a bakery in the south of Greece, blowing out the shop windows and destroying part of the store.

Konstantineas was a Greek referee in the country's top flight. When he wasn't on the pitch he could be found at his bakery - a family business in his hometown of Kalamata, on the Peloponnese peninsula. He enjoyed the work. It was a way to separate himself from the violent world of Greek football. But that world caught up with him.

The bomb had been placed in his oven. Konstantineas believes he knows who was responsible. A few days before he was to referee a league game between Xanthi and Olympiakos, two people came to see him.

"They insisted that Olympiakos had to win the game, and they threatened me," he says. "But I have never been part of that system. I cannot be bought."

Police investigated but there were no arrests made after the explosion. Nobody has been convicted for the attack.

At the end of that 2011-2012 season, Konstantineas retired as a referee. He later moved into politics and from 2015 to 2019 served as a member of parliament with the radical left-wing Syriza party.

"After the explosion I started fearing for my family," he says. "I had to send my children into hiding. I never expected it to get to that level."

Almost 10 years later, little has changed in Greek football. Intimidation and violence remain regular features of the country's not-so-beautiful game.

Just this month, on 1 February, a 19-year-old man was stabbed to death outside the ground of Aris FC, allegedly by supporters of PAOK, who condemned the attack. The two teams are rivals in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki. Several arrests have been made.

Between these two violent events can be traced a long, messy disintegration in the state of Greek football - and the latest chance for real change seems to have been passed up.

Many thought Theodoros Zagorakis would be the man to solve things. Popular for his glorious past as the captain of Greece's Euro 2004 triumph, in March 2021 he was elected president of the country's football association.

Stating his ambition to clean up corruption, Zagorakis, who has been an MEP since 2014, won with 66 votes from 68. But the honeymoon lasted only 165 days. The former Leicester City midfielder announced his resignation on 8 September, apparently disillusioned by the enormity of the task facing him, citing a "toxic atmosphere".

Greece's Euro 2004 victory has proved a flash in the pan, an enchanted interlude in an otherwise ugly story. Since the 2000s, the country's football has been sinking lower and lower. Domestic attendances are poor - the top-flight average is around 5,000 - and many fans feel alienated by what they are seeing. On the pitch, the quality has dropped. Off the pitch there seems to be one scandal after another.

In 2003-04 there were three clubs playing in the Champions League group stage - with two of them there as automatic qualifiers. Now only the Greek champions are entered, and must navigate two qualification rounds to reach the group stage.

Olivier Kapo, a former Birmingham and Wigan midfielder, played for Levadiakos in Greece in 2013-14. He described Greek football as "a total mafia" in an interview with French football magazine So Foot.

"Everything is corrupt," he said. "Games are bought with sport bets. This stuff doesn't happen anywhere else. Uefa does not pay attention to Greece. Some matches are played until the 99th minute. The president has bodyguards - do you think that's normal?"

Kapo claimed he was himself asked by match-fixers to deliberately get a red card in a game. He said when he refused they threatened him and his family. He decided to break his contract with his club so he could leave as soon as possible.

In March 2018 PAOK president Ivan Savvidis stormed on to the pitch after a disallowed goal, carrying a holstered gun

There have been several attempts to clean things up.

The last big case came to light in 2015, spearheaded by prosecutor Aristidis Korreas. His 173-page report detailed the alleged activity of dozens of major protagonists who faced charges of "initiating, participating in and directing a criminal organisation, fraud, attempted criminal extortion and corruption".

Korreas investigated many of the most senior and important figures in Greek football, using telephone tapping in tandem with the Greek intelligence services to gather evidence. He believed he had unveiled a powerful conspiracy that sought to control results through the actions of corrupt referees.

Six years later in January 2021, 28 key figures, including the Olympiakos and Nottingham Forest president Evangelos Marinakis, several referees, and several members of the Greek FA were acquitted of all charges.

In the meantime, as the court cases dragged on, the violence continued.

The 2014-15 season was suspended three times. A 46-year-old man, Kostas Katsoulis, was killed after fans clashed at a third division match in Crete. The vice-president of the central referees committee was attacked. Hooligans invaded the pitch during a derby match between Panathinaikos and Olympiakos.

In March 2018, unhappy with a referee's decision to disallow what would have been a late winning goal in a crucial match against AEK Athens, PAOK president Ivan Savvidis entered the pitch carrying a holstered gun. The league was suspended once more. Savvidis, a Greek-Russian tobacco magnate who served in government as a member of Vladimir Putin's United Russia party, apologised. He was fined and his team docked points.

In December 2018, referee Thanassis Tzilos was attacked by four hooded assailants in the city of Larissa, suffering serious injuries after he was dragged from his car and violently beaten on the head and legs. Again the league was suspended as referees went on strike.

Just before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, tensions escalated when Olympiakos accused PAOK's president of also owning Xanthi FC, breaking rules on multiple ownership. Savvidis denied any wrongdoing but PAOK were again docked points.

When the threats of sanctions against PAOK were first mentioned, 8,000 of their supporters gathered in the streets with a banner that read: 'Greece is divided in two.'

For Giorgos Vassiliadis, a former deputy minister for sport who served between 2016 and 2019, that ominous message revealed a worrying wider problem.

"In a country that has been in a recession for 10 years, where youth unemployment has reached 50%, violent reactions will develop," he says.

"And these are expressed among football supporters, where the conditions are right, and where manipulation is exercised by economic actors who are interested in football as a product and not as a sport.

"The situation - of trying to fix Greek football - is so mired that the government is considering the political cost of any action. Justice does not work in this country. The solution can only come from outside."

World and European governing bodies Fifa and Uefa have both intervened.

In 2011, a Uefa report detailed 41 league results they believed were suspicious from the 2009-10 season, setting in motion a match-fixing scandal that Giorgos Nikitiadis, the government's then deputy culture minister, described as "the darkest page in the history of Greek football". He said the criminal investigation would go "as deep and as high as necessary".

Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis met with Uefa president Aleskander Ceferin in February 2020 in Athens

But, as would happen again 10 years later, prosecutors were frustrated at the final outcome. Of the 68 suspects named by judicial authorities, only a few were convicted even then on relatively minor charges. The senior officials or club owners who had variously denied charges of fraud, extortion or money laundering were all acquitted.

Uefa sent special representatives on a mission to clean up Greek football in 2016. But after four years in the country, the delegation left with no visible progress, despite the signing of a memorandum between Uefa president Alexander Ceferin and Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.

The latest update came on Tuesday, with a joint letter from Uefa and Fifa that called on the Greek FA to urgently ensure appointments to its most senior positions were transparent.

Petr Fousek, a former footballer who is now the Czech FA president, was one of those brought in by Uefa six years ago to provide advice in Greece as an independent expert.

"In Greece it's complicated because of the club owners," he said. "There is not much we can do, just try to create synergy, bring them together and ease the tensions.

"But the big problem in is the lack of unity. Without unity, we cannot achieve certain goals. Without unity, everyone tries to take power."

Georgios Antonopoulos, professor of criminology at Teesside University and member of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, says: "In Greece, becoming a successful football club president is not the result of love or care for the football club. It is another way of consolidating one's business and political power and leverage."

Former referee Konstantineas couldn't agree more.

"Greek football is a hydra with many heads. You cut one, others emerge."