The Asian Football Confederation has reported a 21 percent drop in match-fixing in the last four years.
How the organization determined that number was not explained, but Benoit Pasquier, the AFC’s general counsel and director of legal affairs, told Reuters that its partnership with betting data giant Sportradar has been pivotal to the reduction.
Match-fixing has been the bane of the AFC, the governing body for 47 football associations spanning the continent and organizer of the AFC Asian World Cup and four women’s tournaments, including the AFC Women’s Asian World Cup. It is one of six confederations making up the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, FIFA, as it’s known. Its competitions are immensely popular, and their viewership is steadily growing. The problem, according to Sportradar, is that player salaries have yet to catch up.
“Most of Asia sits in the sweet spot of low wages and high coverage and is, therefore, one of the highest-risk areas,” said Oscar Brodkin, director of the Intelligence and Investigation Services division for Swiss-based Sportradar, which collects and analyzes data and supplies a range of related tools for bookmakers, national and international sports federations and media companies the world over.
“Player wages in Asia are generally lower compared to places such as Europe, but paired with the growing viewership of football in the region leads to higher stakes allowed on the betting market and thus the opportunity for large-scale fraud,” he explained.
Combatting it has become a specialty for Sportradar, whose clients include the International Tennis Federation and, in the U.S., the National Football League, the National Hockey League, the National Basketball Association and NASCAR. Its Security Services division, based in London, works closely with law enforcement as well as sports organizations and betting operators through what is known as a Fraud Detection System, which compares odds movements reported by hundreds of online bookmakers with the expected odds movements for a given match, and when anything suspicious is found it is analyzed and reported to the relevant organizations. The system currently monitors some 65,000 matches across 11 sports, half of them in international soccer.
The AFC recently renewed its contract with the company through 2023 as part of an expanded agreement that also includes anti-doping monitoring, age fraud, bullying and harassment and stadium security.
