Sportradar released its annual “Betting Corruption and Match-Fixing” report on Monday, and the results were fairly encouraging – especially for the expanding North American sports betting market.
Out of 1,329 suspicious matches detected throughout the world in 2023, only 35 occurred in North America. Europe led the way with 667, followed by Asia (302), South America (217), African (108), and Oceania (0). This was out of a total of 850,000 events and matches that Sportradar monitored across 70 sports, resulting in a suspected manipulation rate of 0.21% – or one suspicious event out of every 467. That rate was right in line with 2022.
Soccer was far and away the most fallible sport, with 880 suspicious matches – or 66% of the total amount of events flagged. Basketball came next with 205 suspicious matches, followed by table tennis (70), tennis (61) and esports (46). In basketball, 92% of all suspicious matches occurred in Asia and Europe, indicating that fears of bettor manipulation of U.S. college hoops have gone largely unfounded.
Men's sports accounted for 1,295 of the suspicious matches, while only 34 were flagged in women's sporting events.
A.I. key to ID'ing suspicious activity
According to the report, the vast majority of suspicious soccer matches featured abnormal live betting, which occurred in 95% of cases flagged. Brazil was easily the country with the most reports of suspicious activity (109), although that figure marked a 44-match decline from 2022.
In its report, Sportradar highlighted the increased effectiveness of artificial intelligence in identifying suspicious activity. For example, in one case study involving a European soccer match, A.I. detected unusual deviations in the movement of live bookmaker odds, based on a data set of odds movements in hundreds of thousands of past soccer matches.
The suspicious odds movements spiked toward the end of the first half, which ended in a 0-0 tie, and favored two goals being scored in the second half and the away team losing. That's exactly what happened, with the home team winning by a final score of 2-0 and the match getting flagged as suspicious.
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Furthermore, account-level betting data was used to detect 85% of suspicious matches in volleyball and 100% of suspicious matches in tennis and table tennis, underscoring the importance of collaboration with the sports betting industry to combat match-fixing and integrity threats.'
“In combination with access to account-level data, collaboration across the industry, and human experts, we have a suite of powerful tools to help both prevent and detect risks to sports integrity,” Andreas Krannich, Sportradar's executive vice president of integrity, rights protection, and regulatory services, said in a press release. “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.”'