HANOI, June 10: Vietnam’s top football player has been sacked over allegations that he and three teammates had been fixing matches in Vietnam’s V-League, an official from his team said Tuesday.

The scandal rocked the communist country’s wildly popular new state-run league, with midfielder Le Huyen Duc insisting Tuesday he had been framed.

“I’m just a victim, a scapegoat of a bigger power game. I know I’m the envy of many who now are fuelling an entire campaign against me,” the star player told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa by telephone. “I swear to my fans that I’m innocent. They can trust me.”

Duc - a three-time winner of the Golden Ball award for league’s best player - is accused with three teammates of being a “dark power” within the club, deciding whether to win or lose matches, at least six state-run newspapers and one state-run website reported.

The sponsors, East Asia Bank, said the decision to fire Duc was final.

“We’ve made our decision (to fire the players). It’s now over. We are now beginning a new chapter in our club. We want it to be stainless,” Nguyen Tien Huy, the bank manager, said.

Earning US$1,600 per month, Duc was Vietnam’s highest paid soccer player and had received and declined even more lucrative offers from Indonesia and the Philippines.

Duc’s team, East Asia Bank, was playing fairly well at the start of the season but towards the end has experienced surprising losses, newspapers reported.

At a match in Ho Chi Minh City May 10, Duc’s team were playing the bottom-of-the-league-team LG-ACB. East Asia Bank were three goals up, but let in three goals in the last five minutes of the game, the state-run media reported.

“You can’t blame it all on the players for the poor performance of the team. The fact has indicated that even the best team in the world has its ups and downs,” Duc said on Tuesday.

Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security, the Vietnam Football Federation, and representatives of seven teams in Vietnam’s V-league suspected of match fixing, met in Hanoi on Tuesday to discuss the scandal.

Duc’s contract with East Asia Bank was signed on Jan 8 this year and was supposed to end in October.—dpa