International Tennis Federation announces fresh anti match-fixing measures
With tennis’s Independent Review Panel expected to report on the match-fixing crisis before the end of the month, the body that runs most of the world’s professional tournaments announced today that it is reinforcing its safeguards against corruption.
The International Tennis Federation is responsible for organising all events below ATP and WTA level, which involve more than 50,000 matches played by a semi-professional workforce of up to 14,000 players.
Betting alerts on these low-level matches have caused serious concern for tennis’s administrators, and led to the commission of Adam Lewis QC to lead the IRP investigation more than two years ago.
Today the ITF moved to pre-empt some of the recommendations in the report by announcing a new partnership with Sportradar, the sports-data specialist who already supply live scores from those low-level tournaments to the ITF and to betting sites.
At the moment, the Tennis Integrity Unit does its best to monitor world markets via voluntary agreements with around 25 bookmakers. Sportradar will be running an electronic fraud detection system – which is already in use in football and 16 other sports – across 550 bookmakers, a vastly more ambitious operation.
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The investment will not be cheap, as Sportradar say they will have to hire more than a dozen extra staff to cover the vast extent of the ITF Pro Circuit. But it is likely that Lewis will recommend the introduction of stronger integrity safeguards when he delivers his verdict in a few weeks’ time, and this looks like a case of the ITF getting in early.
The spotlight may then shift to the ATP and WTA tours, which use IMG to provide their live data. As usual in tennis, there is a lack of co-ordination between different governing bodies which all do their own thing.
This has been a busy week for the ITF, which has already announced controversial plans to reorganise the world group of the Davis Cup from a home-and-away competition into a week-long tournament in November. While the new concept has outraged traditionalists, it is backed by the offer of billions of dollars of investment from Kosmos, an investment group fronted by the Barcelona footballer Gerard Pique – money which could help fund initiatives like this one.
