Former footballers Dickson Etuhu and Alban Jusufi have been sanctioned with a five year ban for offering Kyriakos Stamatopoulos a SEK2 million (€182,000) bribe to underperform during a match between AIK and IFK Gothenburg, the Swedish football association (SvFF) announced. The SvFF was postponed the 18 May 2017 match after Stamatopoulos, the AIK goalkeeper, reported the attempt.

The full Decision (PDF below) reveals that Etuhu and Jusufi met with Stamatopoulos at a Stockholm restaurant on 16 May 2017, where the bribery attempt took place. Etuhu, a former Nigerian international, was registered with AIK at the time of the offence and Jusufi, a Swedish Albanian, was registered with IFK Rössjöholm in Sweden’s fifth tier. Etuhu transferred to IFK Rössjöholm from AIK in August 2017, shortly after the bribery attempt.

The two players were issued with fines after being convicted of bribery in November last year, when the Svea Court of Appeal overturned a 2018 District Court decision to acquit the pair. It is understood that the Stockholm District Court didn’t consider the restaurant conversation as concrete evidence that a bribery attempt had been made. The Svea Court of Appeal disagreed, but didn’t view the crime as serious enough to warrant a custodial sentence.

The SvFF said that both players had ‘contravened provisions on manipulation (section 1.3) or the provision on separation and attempted manipulation (section 1.4) of its anti match-fixing regulations’. The five year ban applicable to both players runs from 14 April 2020 until 13 April 2025.