Betting and Sports Integrity: Preventing Match-Fixing and Corruption

Today, many main leagues and sports are used to detect abnormal betting patterns, mainly in football, cricket, and tennis, which are considered risky sports. For sports performance, the legal status of corruption in countries is very different, which complicates the prosecution process, especially abroad.

Everyone has to be vigilant against the current situation of online manipulation. The IOC guideline 2020+5 mentioned that athletes are not the only ones who are at a higher risk. And the changing ways (social media) with which officials get in touch, and the methods they use to raise funds (cryptocurrency).

The claims that the gambling industry should pay a considerable share of the expenses that happen to match-fixing. It is being thought to channel some of the funds that betting firms already pay in tax, for sure, in some countries.

Monitoring 2023

The company's report, Betting Corruption and Match-fixing in 2023 summarizes the findings of the inspection firm on some forms of suspicious betting on sports events worldwide. The observation involved about 850 thousand events and matches in 70 sports, and the report mentioned 1,329 suspicious matches in 2023, which were observed in 11 sports in 105 countries.

The table below, compared to 2022, demonstrates that the ratio of suspected violations throughout all sports remained the same at 0.21% or one in every 467 matches in 2023. Similarly, the investigation didn’t detect any sports with a suspicious match rate of more than 1%, and therefore 99.5% of the sports monitored could not be considered suspicious. 

Number of suspicious matches identified in each sport for the year 2022, obtained from web data, along with the data for 2023.

The artificial intelligence (AI) machine was used to identify a significant proportion (73% or 977 cases) of all suspicious cases in 2023, which is an increase of 123% compared to the 2022 results. The integration of AI into an entire system of fraud detection has achieved a significant increase in the percentage of detected bets, where integrity experts analyze the data for accurate interpretation. The AI's capabilities and human controls are also being created to make sure that the sport is not distorted.

Match-fixing which has been named the most common form of cheating in sports, the football is still the most affected sport (880 suspected matches), then basketball (205 matches), and table tennis (70 matches).

What is the problem?

The sport can be a competition between individuals or teams who commit to come and compete under the rules that are agreed upon. This is where the appeal of sports comes in, the uncertainty of the outcome, and this is why they cannot be considered as any other art form or the rest of the entertainment. 

Sporting match-fixing is one of the fundamental challenges. Match-fixing has two motives, both of them being of an innate origin. First, a sport may be anchored for sporting reasons: bribery may be done with a payment of cash or other incentives like inducing one person or a team to lose at a particular competition. Secondly, some people may attempt to generate money by playing a game they already know the outcome of in a competition where they have recorded the outcomes beforehand. Of course, you shouldn’t try to make money from this, but you can definitely whet your interest in watching the game using https://india1xbet.in/en.

Conclusion

In 2015 the IOC decided to implement the Olympic Movement Code on the Prevention of Manipulation of Competitions. The purpose of the Code is to set standards for match management, to ensure uniformity of disciplinary procedures, and to provide sanctions for National Olympic Committees, International Federations, their members, and other organizations recognized by the IOC. The Code follows the Council of Europe Convention where the jurisdiction is geographically limited.