Jim'll Fix It

Having worked into the betting industry for four and a half years and working on a betting fraud detection project at Uefa for over a year, I have a reasonable amount of experience in the area of betting and corruption within football. I say football, but for football you can read virtually any other sport where there is serious competition and decent amounts of money involved. That may be distressing news to some folks, but it is true. Football is the one which grabs the headlines, but it happens in virtually every sport.

North American sports? Barring steroids, innocent and virtuous I hear you cry. I would put my last penny on some NBA, NHL, MLB games being fixed. Three leagues that play over 80 regular season games per team will have match fixing for sure. The misguided view in North America among many sporting administrators is that because betting on individual matches and match events outside of regulated casinos and sports books (online betting is illegal – try access your Betfair account over there) is prohibited, games cannot be fixed. Unfortunately, and this is the case in Europe also, it is short-sighted and they fail to recognise that the big money is floating around in Asia.

So many sports have been infiltrated. Snooker – there have been so many instances in recent years involving key players where they have either purposely lost matches or frames. The same has happened in tennis. Look at the revelation today regarding cricket and it is not even the final result that has to be fixed. The alleged corruption in that game surrounds three no-balls being balled. Somebody has caught somebody out here, but this happens all the time. When you can bet on suck minor details of a game, it creates opportunities for greater corruption which becomes increasingly impossible to detect. Players involved in such corruption are far more likely to become involved in a fix if it not involving the final outcome of the game – imagine the tennis player serves a double fault in the second set and at 4-2 up – would you be able to tell he did it on purpose? That is another misguided view by administrators looking for purely fixed outcomes rather than specific events.

So, the question is, will the States lift their restrictions on gambling over there any time soon with all the potential further corruption it could bring? I’ll bet that they will purely for the financial benefits it brings the country. The big cash is in Asia, but they can take a slice of the pie too. Cynical to think that way, but my guess is that it will happen sooner or later.

There are some pretty good books on match-fixing and corruption. Andrew Jennings book ‘Foul!’ and Declan Hill’s ‘The Fix’ are quite eye opening and a good start to learn how it works. The one issue they do not deal with is how it can be stopped. Cynical Bobby says it cannot unfortunately. There will always be lowly paid or greedy players who want to make a quick buck, and there will always be people out there throwing temptation their way. It is pretty sad to think that way, but I fear it will continue and even more so with the poor economy right now. It is a bit like the crusade against drugs in sport – unfortunately, the culprits will always be that one step ahead of the administrators.