Proportion of football matches marked as suspicious falls for third successive year

Stats Perform Integrity and Starlizard Integrity Services have jointly reported that more than 200 football matches played around the world in 2020 were suspicious.

This is the third successive year that the proportion of suspicious matches identified has reduced, marking a 50% decrease from the pair’s inaugural report from 2018, when 0.73% of matches were flagged up.

In their latest report, the two data firms analysed 61,296 football matches played over the 2020 calendar year, or 23% fewer than in 2019 (89,939) due to the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on fixtures around the world. However, this was comparable to the 62,250 matches scrutinised in 2018.

The findings of the report reveal that 0.35% (217) of matches in 2020 were identified as suspicious, while 0.56% (456) of games were reported to be suspicious the year before.

Now in its fourth year, the Suspicious Betting Trends in Global Football report was gathered after analysing matches from over 800 different domestic and international competitions across 112 countries.

The 217 suspicious matches identified covered 80 different competitions in 51 countries, while 48 involved club friendly matches. A total of 16 were youth matches, three involved national teams and just one was a women’s game.

Of all the identified games, 42% were at the highest level of domestic football in the country in which they took place, while more than a third (36%) was in the second tier.

The study also revealed there were a total of 93 suspicious matches in Europe, down from 248 in 2019, while questionable matches in Asia plunged from 90 in 2019 to 25 the following year.

Jake Marsh, global head of integrity at Stats Perform said: “2020 was an exceptional year for football in how it was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and we will no doubt be understanding the long-term effects and risks to the sport for several years.

“Despite the reduction in fixtures in 2020 there was still a very high number of matches that we identified as suspicious and potentially linked to manipulation.”

These thoughts were echoed by Affy Sheikh, head of integrity at Starlizard, said: “Worryingly, we have still identified over 200 games that are suspicious in terms of potential match manipulation, and that, we feel, warrant further investigation.

“Despite the more limited availability of matches due to the pandemic, this suggests that criminals have found new ways and new targets in their attempts to manipulate matches and the betting markets.”

Last week, Stats Perform data rival Sportradar published a report detecting more than 1,100 suspicious sports matches since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in April 2020.