Match fixing scandal reaches highest levels
Officials battling to save their sport’s integrity after reports of widespread corruption
It was three hot seats for the men in suits.
Chris Kermode, the head of the Association of Tennis Professionals, along with his counterparts from the International Tennis Federation and Wimbledon — arguably the three most powerful tennis executives in the world — sat down to face the press about the allegations of widespread match-fixing in their sport.
The story couldn’t have broken at a worse time: The Australian Open, the first of tennis’ four Grand Slams, was just getting underway, and the focus should have been on the sparkling play as another season began.
Instead, many were wondering which athletes weren’t playing fair.
“It has been hard on the Australian Open, no question about it,” Kermode said. “We need to address the perception, public confidence. We don’t have anything to hide at all.”
Kermode and other tennis officials are battling to save the credibility of their sport after an investigation by the BBC and Buzzfeed revealed evidence of match-fixing. In interviews with the Toronto Star, investigators confirm the so-called “gentleman’s sport” has a systemic problem.
“If you came up with a sport to corrupt, you couldn’t do any better than tennis,” one senior investigator said. “It is the easiest game in the world to fix.”
As an individual game, fixing is simple compared to team sports; and the economics of the sport — not everyone makes a living wage — can leave some athletes vulnerable to corruption, investigators say.
“The key thing that drives matchfixing is the culture of ‘tanking,’ ” said Richard Ings, a former high-level tennis umpire and ATP executive. “Everyone knows about it inside tennis.”
“Tanking is a huge issue in tennis,” Mark Phillips, a match-fixing investigator with a long experience both in horse racing and tennis, agreed. He said tanking has been common in tennis at least back to the 1980s, with players deliberately under-performing for reasons as varied as scheduling, avoiding injury or giving a game to a fellow-professional in front of their home crowd.
The life of a tennis professional can be difficult and costly. A recent study for the International Tennis Federation estimated only 10 per cent of the players on tour can actually cover their costs, which can include travel, coaching, support and accommodation, for example.
Into this mix comes a vast, global sports gambling market. The European Sports Security Association, a private gambling sports gambling group, estimated that $323 billion (U.S.) is being bet on all sports — including tennis — per year. Philips estimated that on just one fourthround match in this year’s Australian Open more than $7 million (U.S.) was bet with just one British gambling site.
Tennis authorities were aware of the problem, said Ryan Rodenberg, a former semi-professional tennis who is now an assistant professor of sports law analytics at Florida State University. It was his academic paper “Forensic Sports Analytics: Detecting and Predicting Match-Fixing in Tennis” which was the catalyst for the Buzzfeed-BBC reports.
“We knew the tennis governing bodies had commissioned a 2008 study concluding that 45 matches were suspicious and warranted more scrutiny,” Rodenberg said. “Our focus was on first-round matches since they tend to be more susceptible to possible match-fixing.”
Rodenberg discovered at least 25 first-round games each year in tennis had suspicious movements in the betting patterns, meaning the odds on the game moved suddenly in a way that indicated someone knew the fix was in.
Rodenberg points out that a suspicious betting pattern does not always mean a fix — there are legitimate reasons like an injury — but it is a red flag for sports officials that can be used to focus investigations on certain matches or players.
There is now a multimillion-dollar industry which monitors the movements of odds to tip off sports officials, and Tallinn, Estonia, is where the frontline is. Several European companies have set up their headquarters in the former Soviet republic, including Sport Integrity Monitor Limited — or SportIM — which has a number of high-profile clients, including the English soccer association and Major League Baseball.
Their offices are a large room, furnished in light, Scandinavian-style wood. The staff of more than 100 — mostly young men — stare at computer screens showing sports events and their betting movements.
Essentially, what SportIM and other sports integrity monitoring companies do is watch the odds movements from bookmakers around the world to see if there are any strange patterns or bizarre shifts in the odds.
It is a lucrative new business, and SportIM alone has brought an extraordinary amount of resources to the problem of solving match-fixing in sports. There are dozens of satellite dishes on the roof that show the traders live television feeds of hundreds of games in dozens of different sports being played in the world.
“A few years ago all the fixing in sports was done pre-match,” said Alistair Flutter, one of SportIM’s founders and a Cambridge University mathematics graduate. “But now with live betting on sports events, the weird odds movements are coming during the match. In some of these tournaments, 90 per cent of the bets are placed during live events.”
The European Security Sports Association, which is based in Brussels, has put out public estimates of approximately 50 “red-flag warnings” each year on tennis. Francesco Baranca, the managing director of Federbet — another sports monitoring company — says the actual number of suspicious matches is far higher.
“Fixing has got huge in tennis, because the bets are on different things in tennis. Now you can bet on everything” at different levels of the sport,” he said. “Before you could only bet on major tournaments. Now you can bet on from Challengers to Future.”
It’s also possible to wager on various elements of a match, Baranca said: “It is possible to bet on more things — who is going to make the break, first serve — almost everything that happens in a match. These make a big, big escalation of fixing.”
Baranca’s company works with the Spanish soccer league, and he has created controversy by pointing out some of the major fixing scandals in that sport.
“It’s shocking,” he said, saying his company has seen 25 possible fixing cases in the last three months — “and this is in a period when there are not many major tennis matches.”
He is not alone in his concerns. In the last 10 years, there have been numerous reports inside tennis citing dozens of players from the lowranking to the senior levels of the men’s tour.
This past week at the Melbourne press conference, Kermode announced the establishment of an independent review to monitor all potential signs of corruption.
Ings says there is an easy way to stop fixing in tennis which has nothing to do with the gambling markets: Just have a player ranking system where every match counts. Currently, only a player’s best16 results count towards their ranking. Rodenberg agrees. “The most obvious (way of cutting down on possible corruption) is the ranking system in pro tennis where players may play in tournaments and the results don’t impact their ranking at all.
“It would be like the Toronto Maple Leafs or Vancouver Canucks playing an 82-game NHL season but only having 70 or so games count.” Declan Hill is an investigative journalist who specializes in corruption in international sports. He is the author of “The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime,” and “The Insider’s Guide to Match-Fixing in Football.” Follow him on Twitter @declan_hill.
In interviews with the Star, investigators confirm the so-called ’gentleman’s sport’ has a systemic problem