Exclusive Inside the nerve-centre of tennis’ fight against corruption
A London-based firm is playing a crucial role in the effort to end the scourge of corruption
In a discreet building in London’s financial district, 20 or so young professionals are sitting at their computer screens. The office could belong to any new-media company, judging by the prominent table-tennis table, darts board and absence of collared shirts. Yet security has to be tight at Sportradar’s Integrity Services. Employees cannot be named – and their pictures cannot be taken – for fear of reprisals from the thugs they are trying to thwart.
“People used to talk about fixing in tennis, and you’d think of the dodgy physio with inside info about someone’s bad knee,” says “Stephen”, a senior manager. “Now it’s more likely to be about money-laundering or organised crime. We have to take precautions.”
Sportradar’s Integrity Services began life in 2006, after the Bundesliga was rocked by a €2million (£1.75million) matchfixing scandal implemented by the rogue referee Robert Hoyzer and organised by the Balkan mafia. The Fraud Detection System has since accounted for 36 criminal convictions, the majority in football, as well as 215 sporting disciplinary sentences.
But there is more to Sportradar than its crimefighters. The thrust of the business lies in collecting, packaging and reselling sporting data in the first place. And while the head office might be in London, the scope is global.
From a tennis perspective, this story really starts in 2012, the year when Sportradar agreed to pay the International Tennis Federation a reported $14million (£10million) per annum for data rights to the Pro Circuit (otherwise known as poorly paid Futures events, mostly contested by players ranked outside the top 300). But it was only three weeks ago that the ITF announced it would be sending some of that money back, by engaging the Integrity Services.
Since 2008, tennis has run its own police force under the title of the Tennis Integrity Unit. Yet the perception is that the TIU, which has beefed up its staffing levels from six to 17 since match-fixing became a hot topic two years ago, is still struggling with the scale of the problem: 120,000 annual tennis matches, generating perhaps 250 suspicious betting alerts. Hence the ITF’S investment in this more technologically-led process, which picks up irregular betting patterns via algorithms, and then hands them to investigators such as “Andrew”, who have 72 hours to see if there is anything substantive behind the data alerts.
“If the odds move in a way that do not make sense from our desks, we need to check the news, social media, and look for an explanation,” Andrew says. “Maybe there’s an injury, or the weather can have an effect. We also employ a network of freelance journalists as boots on the ground. Less than 1 per cent of alerts end up being reported. We start from the position of hoping to prove that matches are legitimate, because it’s important we don’t pass anything on without having first convinced ourselves there’s a genuine problem there.”
Certain patterns crop up again and again. According to Stephen: “The smallest unit you can bet on meaningfully is a set, even if specialist bookmakers might offer games or even points. So you hear of players saying to their next opponent, ‘I’ll win the first set 6-3, you win the second 6-2, and then we’ll play the third out for real’.
“That way, an insider can cash in on three markets – the result of the first set, the result of the second set, and the fact that the match went to a decider – without actually knowing who will win. But the players can still tell themselves it was a proper match, even if it only lasted a set.”
The bulk of suspicious betting patterns occur at Futures events, which make up around threequarters of total matches played. But risk levels are roughly equivalent across the whole game – or the men’s game, at least. Last year’s TIU figures showed only 13 per cent of suspicious matches were played by women: a similar gender split to the numbers recorded in wider corporate fraud.
Since January 2016 – when a joint Bbc-buzzfeed investigation into match-fixing caused an outcry – the sport has been waiting for the outcome of an independent review panel headed by Adam Lewis QC. Delivery of an interim report was expected late last year, but has been held up by wrangling over the rights and wrongs of cases that took place almost a decade ago.
The ITF has indicated that its next step will include splitting the Pro Circuit into two: a beefed-up, better-funded version of Futures tournaments for players ranked above 700 or so, and a Transition Tour for those below, offering no rankings points as we know them. The idea is to bring down the number of world-ranked players by perhaps 50 per cent, so that the cut-off point for so-called “professional tennis” is much higher. The governing bodies hope betting on the bottom rung of the ladder will fall as a result.
Are sports-data companies partly responsible for the integrity issues that tennis faces? Some would argue these deals with the ITF and the ATP created the crisis in the first place. They increased the availability of betting markets.
Ultimately, this data is one of tennis’ resources. But the ITF has decided that a deeper cooperation with the providers is better than trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle. It could prove one of its wiser moves.