1% of matches are fixed… Is this just the tip of the ice-berg?

Worse still, that percentage could be higher, says the company, as many leagues, especially outside of Europe, have very little or no monitoring or policing of probably the biggest problem facing the integrity of football at the moment.

Sportradar monitors 65,000 fixtures a year via its Fraud Detection System (FDS) which ingests feeds from more than 450 bookmakers and monitors anomalous movements spikes in betting patterns against activity around clubs prior to and during matches. To run its analysis Sportradar is handling up to 5 billion dataset daily.

The problem of match manipulation isn’t just an issue for football. Sportradar, since 2009, has identified 1,749 highly suspicious sports fixtures across nine sports.

Although refuted by Sportradar, the fear is that many matches where there is suspicion of match manipulation go uninvestigated by federations and national police authorities, leaving the sport wide open to match-fixers to move freely between leagues, players and match officials.

“In 2014 there were 97 arrests and, so far, there have been 18 guilty verdicts, originating from or calling upon information set out in the FDS Reports we provided for our clients,” said Krannich.

This is just a drop in a fast flowing match-fixing ocean where the criminals are making good and often easy money. The profit from fixed odds betting in 2013 was €11.9 billion so the target for the match-fixing gangs is a big one.

Prevention or limiting the exposure to a match being manipulated is becoming more difficult as the criminals have shifted the patterns and timings of laying their bets to closer to kick off times – cancelling a game close to kick off because a suspicious betting pattern has been detected is not a viable option as there is not enough time to fully investigate the reasons for that betting pattern.

Other forms of protection against match-fixing can act as a deterrent, like the collation of information about players and officials who are of concern – Sportradar has a built a database of 200,000 individual profiles, some of those involved in suspicious matches, sometimes in various leagues and countries – but Krannich says that much more needs to be done to tackle the problem.

“There must be more international communication based on facts if we are to have a co-ordinated approach across the whole of the sport,” said Krannich.

He says that there is increasing co-operation between police forces and the exchange of information, but in many cases it is still early days and much more needs to be done. Federations, many of whom have preferred to keep the problems in-house, are increasingly inviting law enforcement bodies to run criminal investigations in tandem. But it is a long process.

Speaking at a briefing at the ICE Totally Gaming convention in London last week, Krannich also said that “it is crucial that the betting industry is invited to be part of the investigative solution.” Often targeted one at a time in a national market, bookmakers are just as much victims of fixers. And like sports federations, when they are hit, their reputation can be damaged: “Bookmakers are nervous about sharing that information, but keen to play their part. They often feed us information and intelligence and we become the medium through which that intelligence is forwarded or used for the benefit of our sports rights holder partners.”

Krannich said there must be real discussion of the issues. “We must clarify some of the myths around match-fixing, many of them spread by so-called experts,” he said.

Sport generally, he feels, needs to confront the problem head-on. The often-held but narrowly-focused belief that it is a problem confined to the Asian markets and gambling rings is not an acceptable approach any longer.

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