Pawel Cibicki needs pals right now

Things have not been going great for Pawel Cibicki since he left Leeds United. They didn't exactly go great for him here, a 23-year-old winger signing for £1.5m from Malmo as part of the barrage of test tube tries Victor Orta threw at Thomas Christiansen in 2017/18. Two assists in 358 minutes is what Leeds got from him, plus seven shots on target and twelve accurate crosses; since then he's played for Molde in Norway, Elfsborg in Sweden, Pogoń Szczecin in Poland and ADO Den Haag in the Netherlands, adding twelve goals, six assists, and crucially, three yellow cards. The second of those bookings, given for a foul against Kalmar while playing for Elfsborg in May 2019, led to last week, when Cibicki was convicted on appeal of taking a bribe and match-fixing.

The outline of the accusations is that, on the eve of the match, two defendants — who have been convicted of match-fixing — set up 27 new gambling accounts, that all placed bets on Cibicki getting a rare booking. The same people transferred SEK 300,000 into Cibicki's bank account — about £25,000. Six months ago a Swedish district court, while convicting the fixers, cleared Cibicki of all charges, because there was no evidence of an agreement to fix the match. The police investigators appealed, and this week the Court of Appeal decided the circumstantial evidence was too strong to ignore: the links between the payment, the creation of the accounts and the statistical unlikelihood of Cibicki getting booked were enough. The court overturned the original decision and convicted Cibicki, handing down probation and a suspended sentence. Neither, 'the value of the penalty nor the nature of the crime justifies a sentence of imprisonment' the court said.

Cibicki and his lawyers still maintain his innocence, and he may yet appeal to a higher court. Pawel claims he's being made an example of. After the original trial, when he was initially cleared, the Swedish FA imposed a four year ban until February 2025 anyway, made worldwide by FIFA.

"I don't care what people think, but what I think is ugly is what the Swedish Football Association has done," Cibicki told a podcast a couple of days before the appeal verdict. "It's a blow below the belt. For me it's a big joke." Cibicki claims the £25,000 was only a loan to him, and his accounts show that he paid it back a month later, plus another £8,300 interest. If it was a bribe, he says, why would he pay it back with interest?

If you think the terms of that loan sound rough on Pawel, you're right, and as he explained on Hamza Ftouni's podcast Full Time Professionals, that's his real battle. He needed the loan to finance a gambling addiction that has plagued him since he was eighteen. The terms of the loan, according to the prosecutor's case, are grim. The fixers got their money back, plus 15 per cent interest, plus the profits from their bet on his booking. Cibicki got nothing, apart from avoiding whatever would have happened to him if he hadn't got that £25,000 for his debts when he needed it. And now he has lost his career.