T20 team owners face match-fixing probe
Staggering £34.8m a game bet on Afghan league Other competitions under scrutiny as ICC investigates
Cricket’s anti-corruption unit is investigating a series of franchise owners over allegations of instigating matchfixing, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.
A number of owners in the 2018 edition of the Afghanistan Premier League could face civil charges of corruption by the International Cricket Council’s Anti-Corruption Unit.
The ACU is concluding a number of investigations into the 2018 edition of the Afghanistan Premier League, many of them involving team owners themselves. It is understood this process is likely to lead to a series of formal charges lodged against owners and their associates.
The revelations highlight a new frontier in corruption in cricket, with owners themselves accused of driving fixing within their own teams. Some owners, it is alleged, recruit some players to deliberately under-perform.
They are then accused of betting against their own teams on betting markets – the vast majority of which remain unregulated and almost impossible to trace – guaranteeing themselves a profit far exceeding the prize money for winning leagues.
In such situations, players – especially less well-paid local cricketers – can be placed in an almost impossible situation. Retaining their contracts depends on their owners, meaning that they can either under-perform or allegedly go against their owners’ wishes and face not gaining another contract.
The amounts bet on the Afghanistan Premier League, and other similar competitions, mean that owners and their associates could stand to make huge amounts of cash from betting against their own teams.
On the UK betting exchange Betfair, an average of £34.8million was bet on each Afghanistan Premier League game in 2018, compared to £6.5million for each Test match in the same year. The amounts bet on Betfair are estimated to be only a few per cent of the total sums bet on each game worldwide, which is estimated to often exceed £500million in the Afghanistan
Premier League and be even greater for other competitions, showing how lucrative it could be knowing the result of games in advance.
The ACU’s challenge is heightened by the difficulty of following money gambled on games.
Worldwide, only about 15 per cent of sports betting is legal and fully visible to regulators, according to the International Centre for Sport Security, a thinktank. About 35 per cent is underregulated and partially visible; and half is illegal and invisible to regulators, largely in Asia.
The Afghanistan Premier League has been riddled with accusations of corruption, leading to the 2019 edition being postponed for what the country’s cricket board called “risks for integrity of the league”.
One prominent figure in Afghan cricket, speaking anonymously, has previously described fixing in the Afghanistan Premier League as “rife”, lamenting that some of those accused are “dodgy as f---”.
While the ACU charges are centred on the Afghanistan Premier League, there are also rumours about impropriety from team management owners in other leagues.
Of all the changes begun by the rise of club-based leagues in the age of Twenty20, perhaps the most unfortunate has been to expose cricket to new and heightened threats of match-fixing. T20 has meant that there is more cricket than ever on TV and live streams. If you can watch it, you can bet on it. And if you can bet on it, you can try to fix it.
Gambling on cricket has taken place since the 17th century. By the early 19th century, the sport was riddled with fixing; famously, in one game between England and Nottingham, both sides were paid to lose. The MCC were forced to ban bookmakers from Lord’s.
The modern golden age of fixing was in the 1990s, culminating in the Hansie Cronje affair in 2000. And, while the top echelons of international cricket are far cleaner than 20 years ago, there are unmistakable parallels between the two eras. Both then and now, transient pop-up tournaments – for interminable one-day international triangular series in Sharjah then, read T20 leagues now – were most susceptible to corruption.
At its core, the vulnerability of cricket today is a numbers game. Twenty years ago, there were about 150 games a year worth fixing – the amount of top-tier international games played each year. Now, there are over 700 T20 fixtures played worldwide every year.
From under 200 players who played in major international games each year 20 years ago, now over 2,000 play in T20 games each year. The pool of players worth corrupting has snowballed.
Comparatively, low-tier leagues attract huge sums of betting money. On the UK betting exchange Betfair, an average of £34.8 million was matched on each Afghanistan Premier League game in 2018. The figures matched on Betfair are only a small percentage – reckoned to be under 5 per cent – of the total amounts staked on games, suggesting that each Afghanistan Premier League match would have over £500million matched on it, the majority through illegal bookmakers in India and east Asia. Even unofficial state-run leagues have attracted sizeable amounts gambled – some matches in the Tamil Nadu Premier League, a regional T20 league in India, have over £30million matched on Betfair alone. While anticorruption education in international cricket is much improved, education in domestic leagues remains haphazard – often, insiders have reported, a PowerPoint presentation at the start of a season, with players arriving late for leagues sometimes not even receiving that.
The sport also still lacks one unified anti-corruption code across all levels of the game. Instead, the International Cricket Council’s Anti-Corruption Unit has jurisdiction for international games alone, and only covers domestic leagues when it is invited. Though a smattering of countries use domestic anti-corruption units regarded as robust enough, a myriad of other leagues – including the Bangladesh Premier League – rely on their domestic anti-corruption units alone. Doing so has one clear advantage: it is cheaper for those running the leagues.
Fixers adjusted to the new realities of the franchise age far quicker than anti-corruption bodies.
Players bored and lonely away from home are targeted through the promise of friendship, free gifts, or even honeytraps. “They tend to hunt the bars for you,” Chris Gayle wrote in his autobiography Six Machine.
“You’ve got to be careful out there.”
Franchise cricket is a notoriously insecure world, with teams discarding players like Tinder dates. Players often appear for five or more teams a year. Such insecurities are exacerbated by the unstable economics of leagues; a spate of T20 leagues have collapsed, increasing players’ temptation to cash in while they still can.
There is also simple human jealousy. Whereas in international cricket players generally get paid an identical match fee to their team-mates – though the size of their national contracts and sponsorship deals varies hugely – in franchise cricket some players can be paid dozens of times more than their team-mates. Owners are emerging as another – and, perhaps, the most serious – problem. Franchise cricket lacks any equivalent of the Premier League’s fit-and-properperson test, however inadequate that has proved.
For some owners of teams who are shedding cash, fixing offers a way into the black. Team owners, and their associates, in the Afghanistan Premier League are under investigation for allegedly driving fixing by their own sides, as Telegraph Sport reveals today.
This is the greatest challenge of all to cricket’s integrity: how to stop fixing when it originates from the very top of teams? Finding a satisfactory answer could define how successfully cricket is able to resist the nefarious forces of corruption in the 2020s.
Players who are bored and lonely away from home will be targeted by fixers