Get your fix on: why the manipulation of matches still plagues the sporting world

When Hossein Vafaei breezed down the steps of the temporary arena constructed inside London’s Alexandra Palace for his match at snooker’s 2023 Cazoo Masters, he made history by becoming the first Iranian to compete in the annual invitational for the world’s top 16 players. Yet the 28-year-old only discovered he would be playing in the prestigious event in front of a 2,000-strong capacity crowd when he received a phone call three days prior after world number nine Zhao Xintong was suspended from the World Snooker Tour as part of a match-fixing investigation. Zhao’s compatriot and another rising star – 2021 Masters champion Yan Bingtao – had already found himself axed from the tournament after being suspended from the Tour in December as part of the same match-fixing probe.

A total of 10 players – all of them Chinese – have been suspended so far since October by the sport’s governing body, the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA) relating to allegations of manipulating the outcome of snooker matches for betting purposes. Besides Zhao and Yan, the other players are Liang Wenbo, Lu Ning, Zhao Jianbo, Li Hang, Chang Bingyu, Bai Langning, Chen Zifan and Zhang Jiankang.

Just as EGR Intel was about to go to print, all 10 were charged by the WPBSA with various match-fixing-related offences. The headlines generated by these bans and charges involving 10 of the 27 Chinese players on the Tour, including two top-16 professionals, has rocked the world of snooker and sullied the game’s image. “The fact they [Zhao and Yan] are high-ranked players is clearly not going to help the reputation of the sport […] snooker will be disappointed,” says Steve Paine, director of consultancy Evolve Sports Integrity.

On the plus side, Paine, who previously spent nine years until July 2022 working within sports betting integrity at the UK Gambling Commission, points out that the WPBSA investigation “reflects how seriously match-fixing is taken these days”. “They’ve got an integrity unit and monitor where risks might occur. Snooker is fairly advanced, but not all sports are in this position, so it’s a positive they can identify this stuff and weed it out,” he comments.

Snooker is no stranger to match-fixing scandals

Snooker is no stranger to betting-related corruption scandals, though. In 2018, China’s Yu Delu and Cao Yupeng received lengthy bans for rigging matches, while former world number five Stephen Lee was banned for 12 years in 2013 after being found guilty of seven charges of match-fixing. Snooker’s rules state that a player can receive up to a lifetime ban if found guilty of manipulating matches. But any lengthy ban can be career-ending in snooker.

Digital fingerprints

Once the fixers have corrupted a sportsman, their next problem of course is getting the money down without setting off alarm bells. “Every bet placed in a digital environment is traceable, making it possible to monitor it also from an integrity perspective,” confirms Eric Konings, owner of Rosendale Business Consultancy and who previously spent nearly eight years as sports integrity officer at Kindred Group.

Retail outlets allow for bets to be placed largely anonymously, or another option – if they chose to use online – is to split up a big bet into smaller chunks among multiple layers. Indeed, the BBC reported that with the snooker case involving Cao’s match, some 38 betting accounts in the Far East used computer software to attempt to place a total of £250,000 in one second.

The people behind the accounts could have netted a profit of £1m but their plan was foiled when the bookmakers smelled a rat. Konings says: “A rule of thumb is that any market movement that is unusual but that cannot be explained based on publicly available information is suspicious. Think of a lot of traffic on a specific outcome, the market moving against the favourite, or a ring of bets from a specific geographic location. Suspicious betting activity does not by default equal fixing, but it needs to be reported to the relevant bodies.”

These days, markets are monitored 24/7, 365 days a year. Sportradar, which collaborated with the WPBSA on the latest investigation, keeps tabs on the odds movements at hundreds of bookmakers across the globe, including those in Europe, North America, Asia and the US-facing offshore operators based in the Caribbean. The Swiss company’s proprietary bet-monitoring system, the Universal Fraud Detection System (UFDS) monitors more than 500 million matches across 60+ sports annually and is utilised by well over 100 sports federations, leagues and state authorities. Sportradar tracks 30 billion odds changes from 600 betting operators and identifies when a suspicious betting pattern warrants further investigation.

The firm revealed last March in its annual Betting Corruption and Match-Fixing report that it detected 903 suspicious matches in 2021. And there has been a steady increase since 2016 (485 suspicious matches) if you ignore the dip in 2020 caused by the disruption to sport due to Covid-19. Early indications reveal the company identified 1,192 suspicious matches across 12 sports in 2022, an increase of 32% on 2021, although this won’t be quite the final total once all the data is evaluated.

While this looks alarming at face value, it’s important to stress that many of the matches where the system raises red flags are not found to be rigged. In addition, 99.5% of sport based on Sportradar’s data shows no sign or irregularity. Regardless, the marked increase in 2022 should still be a wake-up call for all sports not taking the issue seriously.

“We detected a record number of suspicious matches last year, and indeed in the previous year,” says Tom Mace, director of global operations for integrity services at Sportradar. “So, if you look only at the number of cases which we’re detecting and reporting, the numbers are going up. But it’s not that simple; you can’t say it is getting substantially worse year on year but clearly it remains a hugely significant and evolving problem for those sports that have had match-fixing issues in the past, like tennis or snooker, as well as some newer ones such as esports. So yes, it’s quite a substantial problem.”

Suspicious minds

Unsurprisingly, football is the most attractive sport for match-fixers given that it is the world’s most played and most bet-on game in terms of volume and interest. Of the 903 suspicious matches flagged by Sportradar in 2021, 694 (77%) involved football. The next nearest sports were basketball and tennis with 62 and 53 suspicious matches, respectively.

Tennis has long been a favourite target for fixers as it is considered one of the easier sports to manipulate given that it is one player versus another player. Also, a subtly missed back-hand or a double-fault are extremely difficult to spot. Tens of thousands of matches take place each year, which makes policing the sport difficult, while players at the lower rungs only just scrape a living. In fact, the top prize for some low-level tournaments is often only a few thousand dollars.

Tennis accounted for 33 of the 76 suspicious alerts in Q3 2022, says the IBIA

Likewise, coming back to snooker, the WPBSA website shows 28 of the 130 players on the Tour haven’t won more than £10,000 since this season began in July 2022. A further 17 players have earned less than £25,000 in prize money. Snooker has a minimum £20,000-a-season guarantee for earnings, but travel and accommodation costs over the course of a season soon add up. Therein lies a big problem: if players can make more money fixing outcomes or in-game action (spot-fixing) than they can from legitimate earnings, that sport is always going to be vulnerable.

“The criminals will target athletes with less to lose, either those at the end of their careers or those who are financially vulnerable,” says Paine. “They could be in debt for whatever reason, or they could be playing sport at a very low level and not commanding a very high salary. Or they might not have been paid by their club or sports body for a few months,” he adds.

At the other end of the spectrum, the assumption is sports with well-paid elite athletes, such as the top European football leagues or major US sports, are insulated from match-fixing. No sport is ever fully immune to this scourge though, especially if match officials can be corrupted, as was demonstrated when NBA referee Tim Donaghy conspired to fix games for betting purposes and was jailed for 15 months. Or there was the case of football referee Robert Hoyzer who fixed matches in Germany for a Berlin-based Croatian betting mafia ring.

Sometimes the plots are unconventional and bizarre, like the Asian betting syndicate that tampered with the electronics to switch off floodlights at football grounds in the Premier League back in the 1990s. Under betting rules at the time in the Far East, all bets stood if a match was abandoned at half-time. Mainly though, it’s the mid- and lower tiers of sport where criminals focus their attention. “The match-fixers are going to want to manipulate matches in competitions and sports where there’s a lower chance of them being detected and caught,” Mace explains. “And to fix matches for betting purposes you need to have liquidity in the betting market.”

Quite often, Mace says, this involves the unregulated or lightly regulated arena. “We see a lot of match-fixing money being placed in the loosely regulated market in Asia, where, for example, there is very little in the way of robust regulation.”

Fixers could also be switching their attention to esports, especially as many online bookmakers take competitive video gaming seriously these days and will lay some lumpy bets on the bigger events. In fact, Sportradar found esports had the fourth-highest number of suspicious matches (47) in 2021, while the International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA) reported that esports accounted for 16 of the 76 suspicious alerts flagged in Q3 2022. This meant esports was in second spot, ahead of football (13) and behind tennis (33). Indeed, a number of match-fixing scandals have surfaced in recent years as the bodies governing esports struggle to get a grip on the problem. “Match-fixing is a risk as esports becomes more popular and mainstream, especially in terms of the availability of betting markets,” Paine remarks.

A big old unit

Many sporting bodies now have integrity units to investigate potential match-fixing incidents. Football’s two leading federations – FIFA and UEFA – boast integrity task forces. Snooker’s integrity unit, which is spearheaded by Nigel Mawer, a former Scotland Yard detective, is considered a leader in sport and includes a confidential hotline for tip-offs from whistleblowers. Meanwhile, the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA), previously known as the Tennis Integrity Unit, is the new, independent body established in 2021 to protect and safeguard the integrity of tennis.

The ITIA’s role was underlined in December 2022 when two low-ranked French tennis players received lifetime bans for match-fixing. Mace says: “More and more sports are establishing integrity units and have the capacity to investigate and bring cases, whether that’s independently or with Sportradar Integrity Services. Last year alone, we helped our partners achieve 130 successful sports sanctions by using our data.” Regarding tennis specifically, Mace comments: “They have probably the biggest integrity team in terms of numbers and investment. And it’s completely independent from the sport, which is an evolution in their integrity infrastructure.”

However, the proliferation of integrity units means an increase in more match-fixing incidents being discovered – in the short term at least. “If you got people looking for it, you are probably going to find more of it,” Paine confirms. Ultimately, the potential punishments need to be a strong enough deterrent. Sports also need to ensure athletes at the lower levels earn enough to not be tempted to lose on purpose. Easier said than done, though. Greater transparency to betting is Konings’ solution to combat match-fixing. He says: “Local regulation of betting is the best cure for this disease, as it adds transparency to the market, puts requirements on licence holders to monitor and report, and enables cooperation between all key stakeholders.”

As long as there is sport, and money can be made speculating on the outcome or in-play events, match-fixing will never be fully eradicated. It is important to reiterate that most sport is clean; only a tiny fraction of events are manipulated for betting purposes, yet fans need to trust what they are watching is legit. Paine says: “Fixed matches account for a really small proportion of the sporting events that happen around the world but when they do happen it can cause disproportionate harm to the reputation of a sport.” As for the 10 charged Chinese snooker players, they now face a tribunal to determine their guilt. “Breathtaking levels of stupidity” was how six-time world snooker champion Steve Davis reacted to the suspensions. This being snooker’s last-ever betting-related scandal seems unlikely, though.