Betting Integrity Monitors’ Only Conflict of Interest Is With Fixers
Today’s guest columnist is Eduard Blonk, chief commercial officer at Sportradar.
As the Supreme Court recognized with its PASPA decision to overturn the U.S. federal ban on sports betting five years ago, gambling is an activity that no laws can prevent. It is a global phenomenon that transcends cultural barriers, with millions of people all around the world taking part.
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In the digital age, the possibilities for sports wagering seem endless. Fans can place a bet before and during games. Sportsbook operators offer markets on the results of games and the events that go into them—touchdowns and goals, points and home runs—as well as things like who will score the first points and how.
This has been made possible because sports technology companies like Sportradar provide the source code for sport. We supply sports federations, leagues and clubs, media companies and betting operators with instant access to in-game events, creating a precise picture for anyone interested in what the data shows.
This has been overwhelmingly positive for sport. Deeper insights increase fan engagement and improve the decision-making process for the downstream market. But betting on sport carries the risk of abuse by criminal elements. On rare occasions, some athletes and officials succumb to the seduction of match fixers who promise them a quick buck in return for manipulating in-game events.
This is why Sportradar Integrity Services was born, to take the fight to the fixers. With our unrivaled access to in-game and betting-market data, we are positioned to invest in and develop unique bet-monitoring tools. Our integrity technology can detect in real time corrupt betting activity that indicates a fix.
In 2022, our Universal Fraud Detection Service (UFDS) uncovered 1,212 such instances from more than 850,000 matches globally. This work has been ongoing since 2005, and in that time, our data has provided instrumental evidence in over 800 sporting and criminal sanctions against match fixers—169 of them in 2022 alone.
For some, however, this dual activity of providing sports data coupled with integrity services is perceived to be a flaw. Last year, when one regulator introduced its regulatory framework for sports betting, it rightly stipulated that operators must engage with integrity monitors to assess suspicious betting patterns. But at the same time, the regulator said companies acting as an oddsmaker while also being an integrity monitor would be perceived to be involved in a conflict of interest. This position fundamentally misunderstands the nature of oddsmakers’ activity.
The dictionary definition of a conflict of interest is “a situation in which someone cannot make a fair decision because they will be affected by the result.” For an oddsmaker to be conflicted in providing both betting markets and integrity services would mean it would have power to make an unfair decision (for example, not to issue suspicious-betting alerts) because it would otherwise be affected by the result (benefiting from suspicious betting).
Boiling this down, if you believe all oddsmakers to be conflicted in providing integrity services, then you must necessarily believe they benefit from match-fixing. But this is completely illogical.
Far from being in conflict, the interests of properly regulated oddsmakers and operators inextricably align with the integrity of sporting competition. If fans and bettors lose faith in the fair conduct of competitions, then the multibillion-dollar sports and betting industries would materially suffer.
This is why we provide UFDS to more than 100 global sports federations and state authorities, entirely for free. It is why we have invested heavily in building artificial intelligence and machine learning into our surveillance of betting markets. And it is also why last year we set up the Sportradar Integrity Exchange that allows operators to share with us their own suspicions of irregular market activity, which we ultimately refer on to our sporting and law-enforcement partners.
It is right that a business such as ours, turning over hundreds of millions of dollars and with a universal view of athletic competition and the associated betting activity, should spend a proportion of its profits on protecting sport. Simply put, we can do what we do in integrity precisely because of our commercial activity in oddsmaking and betting services.
Misplaced references to “conflicts of interest” by regulators are unhelpful. They drive perceptions in the media and the public at large in completely the wrong direction. We will continue to provide our integrity services, and we will extend them wherever we can.
At Sportradar, Blonk is responsible for Global Sales, Sport Content & Partnerships, Marketing, Communications and Integrity Services.
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