According to a report by Sportradar Integrity Services, in 2022, 1,212 suspicious matches were identified across 12 sports and 92 nations, out of the 850,000 matches it currently monitors across more than 70 sports worldwide. Despite a 34% increase since 2021, the total number of suspicious matches shows that match-fixing is still largely uncommon in international sports.
Overall, the data show that match-fixing does not occur in 99.5% of sporting events, and no sport has a suspicious match rate greater than 1%. Sportradar’s Universal Cheat Detection System (UFDS) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) advancements helped detect 438 of these matches.
In 2022, the number of criminal and sports sanctions with which the company supported its partners increased from 72 to 169, an increase of 135% compared to 2021. This increase is due to technological advances, as well as the focus of leagues and federations in dealing with the threat that match-fixing poses to the integrity of sport.
Penalties have been imposed by sports federations or criminal courts on persons found responsible for cheating in sport and breaking the law using Sportradar Integrity Services findings as evidence.
Meanwhile, football continued to have the most suspect matches (775), but one of the most notable developments of 2022 was the sharp growth in suspect basketball matches (220), which jumped by around 250% compared to 2021. When it comes to all sports combined, Europe continues to have the most suspicious events (630), followed by Asia (240) and South America (225).
Andreas Krannich, managing director of Sportradar Integrity Services, said: “We’ve taken an even more proactive approach to uncovering match-fixing in 2022, from implementing a new AI model to developing more formal working relationships with bets until the launch of our Integrity Exchange, which resulted in over 300 alerts”.
