SPORTS BETTING: FIGHTING THE FIX
Tom Mace of SportRadar leads a critical discussion at the IAGA Summit Berlin on the escalating threats to betting integrity, examining global challenges like match-fixing, micro market vulnerabilities, cross-border data concerns, and the urgent need for industry-wide collaboration and education.
Tom, could you begin by detailing Sportradar's role within the betting integrity ecosystem?
Sportradar Integrity & Regulatory Services focus on five main areas: tackling match-fixing, ensuring compliance and good governance, promoting safe sporting environments, supporting anti-doping efforts, and helping to support gambling regulators.
Our work against match-fixing involves a thorough strategy to detect and prevent betting-related corruption and manipulation in sports. On the compliance and governance side, we help partners manage risk and stay ahead of potential issues.
We also work to create safer spaces in sport by addressing harassment and abuse, while our anti-doping efforts aim to keep competition clean and fair. Finally, our regulatory services are all about building a more tech-driven, ethical and sustainable betting industry and help ease the administrative burden of both regulators and betting operators.
What are the most prevalent forms of match-fixing and fraudulent conduct you’re seeing across different sports today?
Match-fixing has always been multifaceted, although the most prevalent forms of manipulation involve the weaker teams, or players in single sports, losing by a greater margin than expected by the betting markets. Tese manipulations are most common as they are more straightforward to enact and arouse less suspicion with casual observers. However, there is an ever-increasing emphasis on spot-fixing (where only an element of the match is manipulated), particularly in sports
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outside of football. Naturally, spot-fixing can prove more attractive for the athletes engaging in match manipulation, given that they can generate illicit profits without losing the match.
Which sports and regions appear most vulnerable to integrity breaches, and what underlying factors contribute?
Of the 1,108 suspicious matches we detected in 2024, 439 occurred in Europe, with Asia accounting for 310. Meanwhile, South America observed 245 suspicious matches, with 69 in Africa, 43 in North America and two in Oceania. Football remains the sport most affected by match-fixing, largely due to its status as the number one betting sport, which gives more opportunity for match-fixers to target it.
What makes certain regions and sports more vulnerable to match-fixing is complex, but there are a number of key risk factors, with the financial concerns of players and their clubs, and a lack of preventative measures and integrity protections at the forefront of this. As our statistics show, with suspicious matches occurring across 12 different sports and 95 countries, match-fixing is a truly global issue across a multitude of sports, making it imperative that sports federations and competitions implement robust integrity provisions.
How has Sportradar adapted its surveillance tools to help detect suspicious betting in micro-markets?
Sportradar’s primary monitoring tool is the Universal Fraud Detection System (UFDS), which is a market-leading, AI driven and Court of Arbitration of Sport (CAS)-endorsed bet monitoring tool. Our proprietary machine learning algorithms
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