36-year old Dimitris Alexandrou, sports journalist, newspaper editor and radio producer, has decided to pull the big stunt: to fix eleven games in the Greek Soccer League and play on air the recorded conversations he’s had with the people who will help him with his scam. He is hoping to generate a scandal so huge that will blow the whole structure of Greek soccer to pieces. This could be the very last chance for the game, so that new people, with clean hands, can take over from there and rebuild it from scratch, rewrite the “manual”.But how did Alexandrou come to that? Through the stories he relates to his loved ones about his 20 years in that field, and especially the events of the last few days before his taking off to Ibiza, he offers us a Grand Tour around the privet rooms of Greek professional sports, the dark halls, the ‘closets’; we witness the back stage action, and finally get an insight of how the game is played today.
A whole legion of seedy characters – thugs, high-class whores, agents fixing games, bookmakers fixing bets, team owners, referees, journalists, media moguls – feature in Alexandrou’s stories of his life as a reporter, and it’s exactly these stories that, in the end, push him over the edge.
Vassilis Sambrakos tells us a fictional story with fictional characters – a sort of nightmarish version of the realities of Greek soccer that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the clean, transparent, reliable, unspoiled, wholesome game we actually enjoy today.
