FK Pobeda, Zabrcanec & Zdraveski v. UEFA

Macedonian club FK Pobeda – Prilep faced UEFA scrutiny after its first qualifying round Champions League tie against Armenian side FC Pyunik in the 2004/05 season. A betting expert commissioned by UEFA produced a report establishing that an unusually large amount of money had been wagered on the first leg between the two clubs. Following its own investigation, UEFA's Control and Disciplinary Body found in April 2009 that club president Aleksandar Zabrcanec and former captain Nikolce Zdraveski had violated the principle of integrity and sportsmanship under UEFA's Disciplinary Regulations, banning Zabrcanec and Zdraveski for life from football-related activity and excluding Pobeda from UEFA competitions for eight years starting the 2009/10 season. UEFA's Appeals Body confirmed the decision on 27 May 2009, and all three parties appealed to CAS.

A three-member CAS Panel — Efraim Barak (Israel, President), Stephan Netzle (Switzerland), and Denis Oswald (Switzerland) — issued its award on 15 April 2010, the first match-fixing case CAS had ever decided. The Panel found the evidence UEFA presented sufficient to establish that the Pobeda–Pyunik matches had been fixed, and that Zabrcanec's involvement in that manipulation was established, which in turn confirmed the club's own responsibility as his conduct as club president. On that basis, the Panel upheld both the eight-year competition ban on Pobeda and Zabrcanec's lifetime ban.

Zdraveski's case was decided the other way: the Panel found it was not "comfortably satisfied" — the evidentiary standard CAS panels commonly apply in disciplinary appeals, sitting above a balance of probabilities but below criminal-standard certainty — that he had actually been involved in the match-fixing, and annulled the sanctions UEFA had imposed on him for lack of sufficient evidence. The case is treated as foundational in football match-fixing jurisprudence precisely because it shows the same evidentiary record producing opposite outcomes for two individuals implicated in the same scheme: one bound closely enough to the proven manipulation to be sanctioned, the other not.