Despite the strides in expanding regulated gambling in the United States, 2021 still saw a dangerous volume of suspicious activity surrounding sports.
Last month, Sportradar released an annual report chronicling “Betting Corruption and Match-Fixing in 2021.”
The executive summary reveals that in 2021 Sportradar’s Universal Fraud Detection System pinpointed 903 matches that were flagged as suspicious over ten sports in 76 countries. This is the highest number of questionable games the organization has ever identified, breaking the previous high of 882 in 2019.
The description of the methodology details that Sportradar used account-level data from more than 350 global sportsbooks, “market intelligence,” and information from national gaming regulators to compile estimates of the worldwide betting handle, which for 2021 the organization estimates at 1.45 trillion Euro.
An estimated 51 percent of global handle was bet on soccer in 2021, followed by tennis and basketball. American football ranked fifth with an estimated handle of fifty-eight billion Euro wagered.
Most surprising was esports coming in behind American football with a handle of 46 billion Euro.
On a per-match basis, UEFA Champions League games were king with an average global wagering total of 198 million Euro per match. The NFL was estimated to have seen 147 million Euro wagered on each game. The only other American league checking in was the NBA with a handle of 74 million Euro in betting turnover per game.
Of the identified suspicious matches:
- 532 were identified in Europe
- 161 in Asia
- 131 in South America
- 51 in Africa
- 32 in North America
- 3 in Oceania
Perhaps given the betting volume, it is not surprising that soccer resulted in the greatest number of suspicious matches, with 694 instances being identified. This was followed by basketball, tennis, and esports (spread across four game titles.) The report notes that both esports and basketball have seen an uptick in suspicious activity in recent years.
The report details that over the last 17 years, Sportradar has identified more than 6,700 suspicious matches, which has led to more than 492 sports organization sanctions and 50 criminal convictions. In 2021, the organization reported that their system contributed to 46 sporting sanctions and 15 criminal convictions, and four cases where there were both sporting and criminal sanctions.
