Conmebol’s Disciplinary Commission requested a report from Sportradar, a partner company specialized in identifying sports fraud, to help assess a request from Paraguay’s Cerro Porteño, seeking to annul the Libertadores da America round of 16 outward match against Fluminense.
The game was held on July 13 in Asuncion, Paraguay. Based on the analysis made by Sportradar, the vice-president of the commission, the Venezuelan Amarilis Belisario, disregarded the Paraguayan team’s claim and made official the result of the match (2 to 0) in favor of the Brazilian club. Fluminense also won the return game, 1-0, at Maracanã.
Cerro demanded a new clash pointing out that the goal wrongly disallowed by the arbitration, which had the interference of the VAR, impacted the sports fair play of the continental dispute and harmed the club’s finances, as the disqualification was closer.
The field and video referee teams did not see a Fluminense athlete who validated the move that resulted in Cerro’s goal. In the match, the Paraguayan goal was disallowed due to the offside marking. According to Portal Uol, those involved in the action were removed by Conmebol.
In the view of Amarilis Belisario, following the terms of the disciplinary code of Conmebol, the annulment of the match would only happen in three situations: use of an irregular player, impractical field of play or interference by a match official who had affected the score exclusively in cases of arbitral corruption.
Discarding conditions 1 and 2, the vice-president of the commission stuck to possibility 3 to analyze the case. Therefore, she asked the Integrity Department of Conmebol to get in touch with Sportradar to check the possibility of manipulation of the result, the only way, therefore, in which the game would be annulled.
Sportradar report did not point out irregularities in the match
“Both the pre-match and live betting markets behaved regularly and no significant bets were observed prior to the annulment of the aforementioned goal. There is no evidence in the bets observed in this match to consider that it was manipulated in order to obtain illicit profit in the sports betting markets,” says the Sportradar report.
It is worth remembering that the company has been a partner since 2017 with Conmebol, the organization responsible for South American football competitions, with the mission of detecting possible cases of match-fixing and irregularities involving clubs and national teams.
According to the report, “if the players had prior knowledge of the final result of this match, the first half or other derivative markets such as “first goal”, we would have observed strong bets on this, however, this would never occurred”.
The text continued: “For example, the odds in favor of a victory for Fluminense FC in both AHC and 1X2 markets were always at a competitive level, in accordance with the expectations set by Sportradar’s mathematical model.”
As the Paraguayan team also did not present evidence that the incorrect marking of the arbitration could have been caused by fraud, and based on Sportradar’s analysis, Amarilis Belisario decided not to accept the Paraguayans’ request and maintained Fluminense’s classification for the quarterfinals of Libertadores.
