Q&A: A question of integrity

Confidence in a company can come to define how a business is perceived, how successful it is and, inversely, how unsuccessful it may be. A business without confidence is doomed to fail, so establishing confidence begins with one thing: trust.

In the sports betting industry, being a successful and confident operator relies on trusting that the sports you take bets on are sound, with high levels of integrity that both you as an operator, and indeed the punter, can trust.

One of the key bastions in maintaining sporting integrity for operators is sports betting integrity body ESSA, which has driven the industry’s push for trust and sporting integrity to the very highest levels of European sport and political life. Here, ESSA president Khalid Ali outlines the organisation’s philosophy on this process and how regulators can learn from its tactics.

EGR Compliance: What for you is the central pillar that underlines ESSA’s approach to maintaining sporting integrity?

Khalid Ali (KA): For me, it is one word: cooperation. It is a word used a lot in the industry and in the meetings that I attend both in the UK and internationally. Everyone is talking about cooperation, but at ESSA it underpins everything we do with our members and external stakeholders that we work with, so really that is key for us. It is a central tenet of what we do.

If I go back about seven years, there was widespread antipathy and distrust towards the betting industry, but one of the great achievements of ESSA has been to get different sports and regulators on board, show them how we operate and dispel some of the negative sentiments that have pervaded the industry in the past.

Increased awareness and education have gone a long way for us, to the point where we are sitting around tables and having meetings with all the major sports and regulators. I recently attended a high-level meeting of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, where we discussed several points on behalf of the sports betting industry and outlined the challenges we face. We have come a long way as an industry after having faced a lot of criticism in the beginning, but I think we’ve demonstrated certainly over the last five years the value that ESSA brings to the whole integrity debate.

EGR Compliance: In are there any standards that you currently use with your members which you think could potentially be rolled out by regulators and sporting associations to combat match fixing?

KA: In terms of standards, we have our code of conduct which are relevant to the entirety of our membership. To become a member of ESSA you must adhere to our code. I wouldn’t call it a standard, but it is a good guideline of what we expect from our membership. I think if the one thing other regulators and associations could adopt is the way we report cases of match fixing to the sport’s governing bodies and the regulators. We have a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that we have put together, and one of the things that we have called for at the recent Council of Europe meeting is the implementation of a shared template MOU.

One of the challenges that we face in negotiating an MOU with a sport or regulator is they all want to edit and amend the MOU to suit their needs, causing us a lot of challenges, so a common MOU would go a long way to avoiding this. We would also welcome a common definition of what constitutes a suspicious betting pattern. This is always subjective and varies between regulators/associations, so a common definition would aid understanding and consistency. This could be used by both sports and regulators alike if they chose to, as well as some of our guidelines and approaches for identifying suspicious bets.

The MOU’s open a line of communication; however, the alert platform is only available to members of ESSA, we don’t give out access to that to operators. The operators only receive access to an alert sheet which has all the details we require on it. Information is then passed to the regulators/association who then have the information they need to judge the alert and respond to the operator as required.

EGR Compliance: The number of suspicious betting alerts in tennis was higher than that in football during Q2 2018, but what is it about tennis that makes it particularly susceptible to match fixing?

KA: If you look at our quarterly reports you will see that tennis is by far the one sport that we have the most issues with. However, to put this into context, there are a lot more tennis matches taking place and available for betting – there is a tennis match or tournament happening everywhere around the world. Yes, the alerts are high but as a percentage of suspicious betting its quite low in terms of the matches taking place.

There are several things that make tennis easier to manipulate fraudulently. Firstly, it’s a one-on-one sport. Secondly, the structural issues in the tennis ranking system mean that you do not have to win all your matches to be ranked. The other issue is player compensation. A lot of the identified games are taking place at the lower levels where players are not remunerated that well and the temptations to take bribes is high. A lot of the time we find that it is players fixing the games to try to find another income stream because they can’t afford to stay professional.

EGR Compliance: In the thematic report to the European Council you highlighted betting on esports as a potential emerging integrity risk, so what does esports need to do to maintain integrity?

KA: When we looked at this one of the things we were asked is what do we see as emerging risks – esports is becoming one of those areas as its popularity increases. I think there was a time when people thought it was just a fad, but it’s not. It’s here to stay and the integrity risks are going to increase as its popularity increases. When you have something like this it is inevitable that someone will offer betting on it. Indeed, some of our members offer esports betting, but from our side what is important is that we have the same mechanisms in place to preserve integrity.

Esports is a very young industry; we are working with ESIC (Esports Integrity Coalition) and have an MOU with them. We are also speaking with some of the other developers right now about having some sort of information sharing agreement. From our point of view, we are starting to put in place the mechanisms to alert the relevant people if we identify any issues.

EGR Compliance: ESSA signed an agreement with UEFA aimed at combatting match-fixing in high-level football tournaments earlier this year. Six months on, how is that partnership going?

KA: We had no prior cooperation agreement in place with UEFA, which primarily comes back to the previous idea that there was distrust between sporting governing bodies and the betting industry. Our new agreement is representative of the great turnarounds we’ve made in this and I hope UEFA now realise the value that ESSA brings to the integrity debate by flagging up suspicious betting to them.

Now that we have been working with them for six months, we have a very good relationship with them, it’s going well, and we hope it will continue to do so, particularly with the 2020 UEFA European Championships coming up. We hope that we will be able to put in place some further measures and initiatives and have several things in the pipeline, but that relationship is going well.

EGR Compliance: Do you have any plans to upgrade the ESSA monitoring and alert platform in the immediate future?

KA: One of the things we discussed in our traders working group was about improving the ESSA platform and it’s something that we are constantly monitoring. At the moment our platform is in a really good place, but technology changes and we have to focus on giving our members the best integrity services possible.

EGR Compliance: What advice would you give to American associations, officials and regulators about the best way to maintain integrity in sports now that sports betting is becoming a reality in the US?

KA: Its funny because when I look at the US market, I think back to when we first began ESSA and I believe that they are highly likely to go through a similar sort of process. That being said, they might not and I’m spending a lot of time in the US speaking to stakeholders, which comes back to what we discussed at the beginning: cooperation.

You can already see the different positions and how everyone is aligned: sporting associations on one side asking for integrity fees, and on the other side the trade associations and their members on the other. However, there’s also the tribal casinos and the players associations. We work with the players associations in Europe but the ones in the US are very different and much more powerful, with some receiving up to 51% of the income from sports.

It’s going to be a complicated process because of the stakeholders involved and whether it occurs on a federal or state level. One thing we’ve always pushed in Europe is a ‘single market’ approach to betting. It never happened in Europe, instead every country just did things on their own, which has caused some issues in terms of standards and duplication of costs.

In the US the situation is different because many states already have gaming regulation and, therefore, doing anything federally would be challenging and most likely not efficient. Therefore, we hope that the states find a way of working between themselves to provide a seamless gaming experience for operators and their customers.