The annual integrity report from Sportrader has been released, with 1,329 suspicious matches detected across 2023 – with 880 coming from football and a rise seen in Asia.
Titled the ‘Betting Corruption and Match-fixing in 2023’ report, the findings look at suspicious betting on a global scale from approximately 850,000 events and matches across 70 sports. Europe was found to have the highest number of suspicious matches (with an increase to 667 from 630 in 2022) but Asia saw a jump, going from 240 the year before to 302 in 2023. This was the most significant jump worldwide.
As it has been in the past, football was the most affected sport with 880 suspicious matches, while basketball remained in second place at 205 matches. This was then followed by table tennis, tennis, and esports.
A majority of the issues came from men’s sporting events, with just 34 activities happening during women’s games.
Speaking in the Sportrader press release via their website, Andreas Krannich, EVP, Integrity, Rights Protection, and Regulatory Services, said: “Continued investment in the development of technology is key to detecting otherwise hard-to-find occurrences of match-fixing…
“In combination with access to account-level data, collaboration across the industry, and human experts, we have a suite of powerful tools to help prevent and detect risks to sports integrity.
“Further advancements in the fight against match-fixing will be possible as the AI models continue to learn and we will keep honing our expertise to protect sport from manipulation.”
Artificial Intelligence helped with the mass amount of data, detecting almost three-quarters of all occurrences. Analysis by the ‘integrity experts’ also took place alongside the AI.
Sporting and criminal sanctions
The company worked alongside 220 global partners including sports organizations, state authorities, national platforms, and law enforcement agencies to tackle match-fixing.
The data from Sportrader in 2023 contributed to a total of 147 sporting and criminal sanctions, spanning 10 sports in 23 countries across 23 cases.
Featured image: Via Ideogram
