"It's a demanding, physical and difficult league. There's a lot of one-on-one, and it's better than many other leagues in Europe, but it's also the dirtiest."
This is how a number of former players described the Cypriot league for a special project organized by the Spanish "Mundo Deportivo": "Here you have a good climate and many rich investors for the clubs. And it's also very close to Europe. So it's not bad to come here."
These things, among others, are what attract quite a few foreign players to the island, some of them with a particularly dubious past.
One of the examples of this is Akinkumi Amaro, a Nigerian player who was arrested in 2022 in Sweden on suspicion of rape and sexual harassment, a year later he was also convicted of the acts and sentenced to a year in prison, after appealing the sentence he was released for the next hearing to be held in July, and in the meantime he spends his time in the Ammonia Nicosia uniform .
Jurgen Klopp leaves Liverpool at the end of the season // Photo: X network
But his mother is not the only player with a sexual criminal record, also Kingsley Serpo, who was previously convicted of child rape and even spent time in prison in Sweden, plays in the league, in the Apoel Nicosia uniform: "Serpo cannot play in the member state of the Schengen Agreement, but Cyprus is not yet part of this cooperation, So it was an opportunity for him. However, he is not allowed to travel when Apoel plays European matches in Schengen countries. In Sweden, for example, it was a scandal, but not here and I don't really know why," says Thanos Lakiutis, a local football journalist.
But sex offenders in football team uniforms are not the only problem of the league in Cyprus.
Widespread corruption problems spread in large parts of the league, as for example in the case of the Brazilian player Alf Manga who signed Kief with the Paphos uniform.
He was later suspected of being involved in a match-fixing scandal and was banned from playing in Brazil pending his trial.
In a survey conducted among the league's players a few years ago, more than 60 percent answered positively to the question of whether they were addicted to playing.
Manga.
Uninterrupted game, photo: from Twitter
The many problems have led some of the largest betting agencies in the world to exclude the Cypriot league from their betting program, for example in the case of Federbet, an organization of casino owners and European betting companies, which was founded, among other things, to identify game fixing and act to eradicate the problem: "We see that the Cypriot league is one of the dirtiest in the world . It's a game coordination school," said the general secretary of Federbet several years ago.
"It has to be the most dangerous place in the world to be a judge," Judge Charalambos Scapolis told The Guardian in 2016. And indeed, whistleblowers suffer repeated harassment and danger, in September 2023, for example, the judges went on strike after an attack on his mother's car of one of them.
In June 2023, the referees' union facilities were attacked, and in 2020, a car bomb paralyzed the league for a week: "Attacks happen from time to time. Judges go on strike and demand security guarantees for themselves and their families, but even though the state says it is trying to find solutions to the problem, I don't think there have been significant changes."
Thanos says, to Kyotis.
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Convicted of rape, photo: from Twitter
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