The Most Obvious Case Of Match-Fixing You Will Ever See

    Is 79 goals in one game too many?

    Earlier this month, per the BBC, two amateur Nigerian football clubs combined for 146 goals. No, that's not the total for their season; that all happened in a single game for each team. Plateau United Feeders won their match 79-0 over Akurba FC, while Police Machine FC waked away with a 67-0 victory over Bubayaro FC.

    Aside from scoring an impossible amount of goals, the teams involved didn't even try to make it look natural. The Feeders scored 72 goals in the second half alone, while Police Machine only got six of their 67 goals in the first half. As Nigeria Football Federation vice president Mike Umeh said in a news conference on Monday, "It was embarrassing that in one of the games, a player scored 11 times while in the other, four goals were scored within a minute and a player scored three own goals in a match."

    The reason behind the madness is that the two winning teams were even in points heading into the match and both needed to raise their goal differential in order to advance to the next tier of their league. Unfortunately, neither knew how to fix a match discreetly, and every player, coach and official involved in the two matches has received a lifetime ban from all football-related activities. Meanwhile, the two clubs have been banned for a period of ten years.