The Brazilians also won the return game, 1-0 at Maracanã stadium, and advanced to the quarterfinals. Cerro Porteño asked for a new game alleging that a goal wrongly disallowed by the referee, in which the VAR took part, affected the competition's fair play and financially harmed the team, as the elimination of the tournament was closer.
The move, in fact, was bizarre: both the field and video referees ignored a Fluminense player who validated the play that originated the Paraguayan team's goal — an offside was marked. All those responsible were removed by Conmebol.
For Belisario, following the disciplinary code of Conmebol, the annulment of the game would only take place under three conditions:
1) irregular player lineup;
2) impractical playing field; or
3) a decision of a game official who had influenced the result exclusively in cases of arbitral corruption.
Excluding possibilities 1 and 2, Belisario settled on 3 to judge the case and, therefore, asked the Conmebol Integrity Department to call the partner company to detect the possibility of having had manipulation in the result, the only way, therefore, in that it would be up to cancel the match.
"Both the pre-match and live betting markets behaved regularly and no significant bets were observed prior to the annulment of the aforementioned goal. There is no evidence in the bets observed in this match to consider that it was manipulated in order to obtain illicit profit in the sports betting markets," informed the report by Sportradar, which since 2017 has partnered with Conmebol to identify possible cases of manipulation of the result in competitions of clubs and teams of the entity.
According to the text, "if the players had prior knowledge of the final result of this match, the first half or other derivative markets such as "first goal", we would have observed strong bets due to this, however, this never occurred. For example, the odds in favor of a victory for Fluminense FC in both AHC and 1X2 markets were always at a competitive level, in accordance with the expectations set by Sportradar's mathematical model."
As Cerro Porteño did not present evidence that the wrong performance of the arbitration could have been caused by fraud, and based on the company's report, Belisario decided not to comply with the Paraguayans' request.
Source: UOL
