A couple things stand out in the latest Sportradar report on match fixing attempts. Artificial intelligence—AI—played an increasing role in coming up with more accurate reporting. And very few of the questionable activities involved North America.
And now for the details…
Sportradar released its annual “Betting Corruption and Match-Fixing Report” for 2023 on March 4, according to SportsHandle.
Out of 1,329 suspicious matches throughout the world in 2023, only 35 occurred in North America. Europe had the most with 667, followed by Asia (302), South America (217), African (108), and Oceania which had none. Asia was the continent with the biggest rise in suspicious events, with 60 more detections than in the 2022 report. Europe had the second-largest jump in such matches with 32 more than last year.
These figures were part of 850,000 events monitored worldwide. The figures collected spanned 70 sports, with 11 of them revealing suspicious interest. Men’s sports accounted for 1,295 of the matches with suspected deviance, while only 34 were flagged in women’s sporting events.
Do the math and it’s a suspicious rate of 0.21 percent, or one such event out of 467, pretty much in line with 2022 where it was 1 in 473. Of the 70 sports, soccer produced the most dubious events with 880, or 66 percent of total number flagged.
Sportradar’s integrity work contributed to 147 sporting and criminal sanctions, across 10 sports and 23 countries. One case alone led to 10 snooker players guilty of match fixing and other charges.
Andreas Krannich, Sportradar’s executive vice president of integrity, rights protection, and regulatory services, had this to say, per iGaming Business, “Continued investment in the development of technology is key to detecting otherwise hard-to-find occurrences of match-fixing.
“Further advancements in the fight against match-fixing will be possible as the AI models continue to learn, and we will keep honing our expertise to protect sport from manipulation.”
To highlight the increased effectiveness of AI in identifying suspicious activity, the report laid out a case study involving a European soccer match. AI detected what was described as “unusual deviations in the movement of live bookmaker odds,” based on a data set of odds movements in hundreds of thousands of past soccer matches.
Back to the numbers…
Brazil racked up the most questionable games at 109, although that figure marked a 44-match decline from 2022.
Of all suspicious games, 40 percent occurred in the 10 countries most affected by match fixing, highlighting a clustering of sorts. Football was responsible for 71.5 percent of such events, while basketball represented 17.5 percent.
“In combination with access to account-level data, collaboration across the industry, and human experts, we have a suite of powerful tools to help both prevent and detect risks to sports integrity,” Krannich said, per iGaming Business. “Further advancements in the fight against match-fixing will be possible as the AI models continue to learn, and we will keep honing our expertise to protect sport from manipulation.”
The report’s Asia findings about the largest rise from one year to the next comes after Sportradar penned an extension to its integrity partnership with the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) in January. The partnership between the pair began in 2013, with the new deal set to run from 2024 to 2027.
Sportradar will continue to work alongside the AFC on a range of integrity matters. This will include a joint effort to tackle issues, such as match-fixing, in Asian football.
Sportradar attributed the detection of 977 suspicious events to AI in 2023, an increase of 123 percent over 2022, a testimony to technology improvement and thus effectiveness.
Overall, 99.5 percent of events had no suspicious betting take place.
