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‘Goal Line Clearance’: How The FA’s spot-fixing case against Lucas Paquetá collapsed 

In the longest judgment ever issued in global sports law,¹ an Independent Regulatory Commission dismissed the spot-fixing charges made by The Football Association (The FA) against West Ham midfielder Lucas Paquetá.² 

Soccer

05/11/2025

Between March and August 2023, the International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA) provided several communications to The FA, notifying it of unusual Brazilian betting activity on four West Ham United matches in which Paquetá had received a yellow card.³ The FA claimed that 26 bettors with links to Paquetá wagered a combined £47,000 (across the four fixtures) on the midfielder being booked – taking home a total of £167,000 in profit.⁴ 

 

This led The FA to charge Paquetá with four breaches of Rule E5.1 – preventing a participant from seeking to influence any aspect of a football match with an ‘improper purpose’ – alleging, in this instance, that Paquetá knew of the wagers and was deliberately seeking a booking.⁵

 

The FA accepted it could not provide concrete evidence of collusion between Paquetá and the bettors,⁶ but asked the Commission to cumulatively consider nine areas of circumstantial evidence⁷ that, when combined, would satisfy the civil standard of proof (namely, proof on the balance of probabilities: that it is more likely than not that the rule was breached).⁸

Why the case collapsed

​​

  • Burden of proof

    The FA asserted that Paquetá ‘bears an evidential burden’ – ‘if the charges are to be dismissed, he must show that his position, hot tips or inside information, for the E5 charges, is as likely or more likely an explanation than a spot-fix’.⁹ The Commission strongly rejected this idea, noting that there is no authority to support this ‘shifting of the evidential burden’ – clarifying that it is The FA which must ‘prove that spot-fixing is more likely than any of the potential innocent explanations.’¹⁰

  • Incomplete betting data

    The FA did not have access to complete statistics from the Brazilian betting market, with experts disagreeing as to whether the data which was presented to the Commission (taken from 11 betting operators) made up 32% or 13.7% of the overall market.¹¹ Regardless of which figure is correct, only a relatively small percentage of the market was analysed, undermining The FA’s inferences that the betting activity on these four particular matches was suspicious (‘the lack of data does add an element of caution to the assessment of the available data … Ultimately, we simply do not know what is in the data The FA have not been able to obtain’).¹²

  • Alternative explanations for the betting patterns

    Paquetá’s defence team argued the spike in betting activity on the four particular matches could just as likely have been from ‘individuals betting with the belief they had inside information’, and/or with ‘the belief they had a hot tip’.¹³ If these two innocent explanations were just as likely as Paquetá being involved in a spot-fixing scheme, then The FA would not meet the required civil standard of proof. 

    An expert witness from Paquetá’s team asserted that the widespread information sharing across such a large number of bettors was not something he’d seen before in a spot-fixing operation,¹⁴ and that the behaviour of the bettors was ‘consistent with hot tips and not inside information’.¹⁵ A witness from the IBIA conceded that hot tips were a plausible explanation for the data,¹⁶ and the Commission held that The FA’s claim of spot-fixing did not meet the required standard of proof.¹⁷

  • Analysis of Paquetá’s match performance

    The FA submitted evidence from Stats Perform Integrity Services (SPIS), which it commissioned to undertake a detailed performance analysis of nine matches (the four games under suspicion, and five more which were not suspicious but did involve Paquetá receiving a yellow card).¹⁸ In their findings, the SPIS graded each of the four matches in question as ‘strongly suspicious’, grading the other five matches as having ‘no suspicion’.¹⁹

    The Commission was unimpressed by the SPIS report, saying it was ‘tainted by confirmation bias’,²⁰ and concluding that their experts were neither ‘independent from The FA’²¹ nor experts in ‘assessment of footballing action’.²² When analysing the third of the four matches in question, the author of the SPIS report admitted when questioned that “if you take out the betting data, if there’s no betting concerns on a match, then, yes, it’s unlikely that this one would be considered suspicious”²³ – an admission the Commission found shocking, given that the SPIS graded that match as ‘strongly suspicious’.²⁴

    The Commission considered evidence rebutting the SPIS’s findings, hearing from Paquetá himself, MRKT Insights (a football analytics consultancy), an expert in sports betting, a statistician, a former Premier League referee (Mark Clattenburg), and Paquetá’s manager at West Ham United (David Moyes).²⁵ 

    Mr Moyes’ testimony was compelling to the Commission, stating that Paquetá never appeared to be seeking a card,²⁶ that he disagreed with the SPIS’s characterisation of some of the ‘key events’ in their report,²⁷ and that, due to injury, Paquetá had actually requested to be left out of one of the four fixtures under suspicion – only agreeing to play on the condition he be substituted early.²⁸

    Mr Clattenburg (a veteran Premier League referee) informed the Commission that he disagreed with the decision to award a yellow card in two of the four matches under suspicion,²⁹ also stating that he believes “Paquetá’s behaviour does not appear … to be the behaviour of somebody deliberately intending to receive a caution”.³⁰

    The Commission concluded that ‘we preferred the evidence of the witnesses relied upon by the Player to that of The FA’s witnesses in relation to the assessment of footballing performance.’³¹ The Commission believed that the opinions of Mr Moyes and Mr Clattenburg, due to their extensive footballing experience, carried more weight than the SPIS analysts,³² finding that ‘there was nothing in the on-field conduct of the Player that advanced The FA’s case in respect to the E5 charges’.³³

  • Explanations for deleted texts

    Much of this discussion is redacted from the judgment (protecting the privacy of individuals who had been messaging with Paquetá, and avoiding specific details of rifts within his family becoming public). 

    The FA had hoped that evidence of massive quantities of deleted text messaging data and contact information could be used to support its case, but experts working for both sides eventually agreed that there are legitimate automated-deleting reasons for which messaging data could have been lost.³⁴ This led The FA to accept it could not prove Paquetá manually deleted any data which he had not already admitted to deleting,³⁵ and the Commission was satisfied with the personal reasons Paquetá gave for deleting certain messages (so as not to upset a redacted individual).³⁶

    The Commission did not believe any evidence from the analysis of the mobile phone data could be said to support the E5 charges in The FA’s case.³⁷ Furthermore, it determined that the absence of any mention of betting or of any of the four suspicious fixtures within the messages that The FA analysed was actually ‘a significant point in favour of the Player’s defence. It indicates that the Player is being truthful about his lack of interest in gambling.’³⁸

Conclusion​​

Despite the low burden of proof needed for such a serious, potentially career-ending, conviction, The FA failed to persuade the Commission that spot-fixing was more likely than alternative explanations for the increased Brazilian betting activity in the four suspicious matches. The Commission found The FA’s reports on the player’s performance and his mobile phone data unconvincing, choosing to dismiss all four of the E5 charges against him as ‘not proved’.³⁹ 


Note: The FA was successful in two claims concerning Paquetá’s refusal to comply fully with the investigation.⁴⁰ But, given that his refusal to answer questions was based on legal advice, the Commission clarified that ‘any sanction imposed will be on the lower end of the scale’.⁴¹​

References​​

​The full judgment can be accessed here: https://www.sportresolutions.com/assets/documents/The_FAvPaqueta_Written_Reasons_FINAL_redacted.pdf

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  1. ​https://www.blackstonechambers.com/news/the-fa-v-lucas-paquet%C3%A12/ (accessed 03/11/25)

  2. ​Judgment, Para 873

  3. Judgment, Paras 6-14

  4. Judgment, Para 10

  5. Judgment, Paras 15 & 19

  6. Judgment, Para 32

  7. Judgment, Para 32 (1-10)

  8. Judgment, Para 20

  9. Judgment, Para 34

  10. Judgment, Para 35. Also discussed in Para 875(a)

  11. Judgment, Para 218

  12. Judgment, Para 283

  13. Judgment, Para 240

  14. Judgment, Paras 230-231

  15. Judgment, Paras 288-289

  16. Judgment, Para 210

  17. Judgment, Para 876

  18. Judgment, Para 580

  19. Judgment, Para 591

  20. Judgment, Para 779

  21. Judgment, Para 772

  22. Judgment, Para 773

  23. Judgment, Para 777 (with the quote coming from Day 12’s Transcript, page 101, lines 15-17)

  24. Judgment, Para 777

  25. Judgment, Para 592

  26. Judgment, Para 662-664

  27. Judgment, Para 664

  28. Judgment, Para 613

  29. Judgment, Para 668

  30. Judgment, Para 673

  31. Judgment, Para 877

  32. Judgment, Para 787

  33. Judgment, Para 796

  34. Judgment, Para 819

  35. Judgment, Para 860

  36. Judgment, Para 865

  37. Judgment, Para 866

  38. Judgment, Para 867

  39. Judgment, Paras 873 & 946

  40. Judgment, Para 944

  41. Judgment, Para 945

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