Declan Hill is an investigative academic and journalist. He is one of the world’s foremost experts on match fixing and corruption in international sports. In 2008, Hill, as a Chevening Scholar, obtained his doctorate in Sociology at the University of Oxford.
His book ‘The Fix: Organized Crime and Soccer’ has appeared in twenty-one languages. Hill was the first person to show the new danger to international sport posed by the globalization of the gambling market and match-fixing at the highest levels of professional football (soccer) including the Champions League and FIFA World Cup tournaments. Part of the book details his involvement with an Asian match-fixing gang as they travelled around the world to fix major football matches.
Hill has also published a number of academic articles, was a reviewer for Global Integrity and has probed the impact of the Russian mafia on professional ice hockey in the NHL. In 2011, he pioneered the first on-line anti-match-fixing education course for Sport Accord that was eventually used by Interpol – the International Police Force.
In 2013, his second book ‘The Insider’s Guide to Match-Fixing’ was published and immediately translated into Japanese. It is a popular version of his Oxford doctoral thesis and was dubbed by its English-language publisher as ‘Freakonomics meets Sports Corruption’.