The businessman, the writer and the match-fixer

At the forthcoming Play the Game conference, to be staged at Coventry University in June, Mark Davies (Managing Director of Betfair), Declan Hill (journalist, writer and academic) and Michael Franzese (convicted mafia boss and former match fixer) will go head-to-head in a public debate about match-fixing in sport. Is such a debate relevant and necessary? Is match-fixing a massive problem that is getting worse, given the influx of 'big' money into many sports allied to the advent of online gambling? Or is the debate likely to over-emphasise a practice which, at worst, is almost insignificant and essentially confined to the margins of sport? At the heart of the debate will be a fundamental and challenging question: what actually constitutes match-fixing?