Visiting China for the first time last month, I was struck by the gambling. People were betting even under a statue of Marx and Engels in a Shanghai park. In a state betting shop in Beijing, dead-eyed middle-aged men – exactly the same types who populate British bookmakers in mid-afternoon – were staring at screens full of numbers. Then there’s all the illegal gambling that you don’t see.

Travelling around China, I felt what I had previously only understood intellectually: that what is happening there will change most things that happen elsewhere. In football, the consequences could be terrible. Partly because of Chinese betting, and partly because the world now wagers online, the sums gambled on European games have soared. That makes fixing European matches more lucrative. Inevitably, more matches are being fixed.

Estimates of today’s betting volumes are staggering. Declan Hill, in his seminal 2008 book on match-fixing, The Fix, quoted “a recent study for the American journal Foreign Policy [that] estimated the entire Asian gambling industry, both legal and illegal, at $450bn a year.” That’s perhaps 20 times the revenues of all of European professional football. When the sums bet on games dwarf the players’ wages, it’s no wonder match-fixing has become a global, stable and mature industry.