By Paul Nicholson
February 19 – Football corruption at federation level may be grabbing the headlines and attention of the media but a recent audit of one of the world’s leading match-fixing fraud monitoring systems is a brutal reminder that betting related match manipulation by organised crime syndicates is a far bigger threat to the integrity of the game.
A study led by David Forrest of the University of Liverpool’s Management School and University of Salford’s Professor Ian McHale into whether Sportradar’s Fraud Detection System (FDS) was fit for purpose within UEFA’s national markets came to the conclusion that “matches reported as suspicious by the FDS are very likely to have been manipulated.”
Sportradar monitors the top two leagues and the premier domestic cup in each of UEFA’s member countries as well as the matches in UEFA’s own competitions – a total of more than 31,000 matches per season. Slightly more than 1% of those matches are reported as being suspicious – on average, approximately 350 fixtures per year.
What is particularly concerning for football is not just that the study concluded that FDS was accurate in that the matches its flagged up were likely to have been fixed, but that the authors felt that Sportradar frequently erred on the side of caution when reporting suspicious activity.
Sportradar monitors betting markets for abnormal activity by comparing betting volumes against match activity. Where volumes suddenly increase that can’t be explained by the matched to an event or fit model expectations then alerts are generated.
In conducting the study looked at the reliability of data, the strength of the mathematical models and human parts of the process that ultimately dictated which matches were reported as suspicious or not.
For Sportradar the news was good in that the study found that the FDS system’s coverage of the global market is “very wide”, the betting data is “free of error” and information gathered from sources is “subject to robust checks to ensure accuracy”.
For football the news is not good and a wake up call for administrators, if they still needed it.
The report authors commented that they were “struck… by the disparity between the number of positive screen results generated and the number of cases with known follow-up action by the sports competition or a law enforcement agency. Reasons for inaction are varied and may include, for example, lack of resources or a legal framework within which match fixers can be pursued. But we note that, if the reason is that sports federations typically prefer not to pursue further any reports of suspicion surrounding matches, then this necessarily undermines the capacity of the FDS to contribute to safeguarding the integrity and authenticity of sport.
“Most fixes are executed by athletes themselves (rather than, say, referees) and their decisions on whether or not to engage in a fix must depend partially on their perception of how likely it is that their behaviour will be both detected and punished.”
Separate to the report Forrest said that betting related match-fixing has “affected the outcome of some leagues. One motive for fixing is to achieve sporting gain – for example to avoid a relegation threat. This is not betting motivated but will usually be picked up by monitoring the markets because people can’t resist the temptation…and it can be the case that they can only afford the bribe by getting money from the betting market.”
Forrest also points out that once match-fixing in a league becomes widely suspected by fans the clubs and the league face a bigger financial issue. He points to Italy (Greece is a similar and very recent example) where when the match-fixing scandal became wider known “there was a steeper decline in attendance”.
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