Sportradar posts integrity report for 2023

Sportradar, a data and monitoring company, is without a doubt one of the best-suited entities in the sports ecosystem to monitor, flag, and act on signals of suspicious betting activity.

With sports betting legalization around the world at a record high, and organized crime repeatedly linked to match-fixing across a variety of sports, Sportradar has taken it upon itself to monitor the industry in an annual report, which is intended to strengthen stakeholders’ ability to respond to corruption and manipulation in the industry.

The third annual report produced this way, Betting Corruption and Match-fixing in 2023, comes from a vast data trove, including 850,000 events across 70 sports monitored by Sportradar. The company flagged a total of 1,329 suspicious games and matches, which occurred in 11 sports and across 105 countries.

The good news is that no single sport actually exceeded the 1% threshold for suspicious betting activity, meaning that on average, sports are fairly free of manipulation. Only one in 467 matches was flagged as suspicious in 2023, a rather small instance. Sportradar’s 2023 report is marked by the deployment of the Universal Fraud Detection System which has been enhanced with AI algorithms to make detection easier and far more optimized, although the company always verifies suspicious betting signals through human analysts.

More importantly, reporting from Sportradar Integrity Services has already had an actual impact on crime in sport. For one, 147 sporting and criminal sanctions were issued as a direct result of the company’s monitoring capabilities and follow-up action.

Sportradar touts its ability to help fight fraud and has taken its mission of monitoring the market seriously, establishing integrity partnerships with global organizations and collecting vast informational datasets based on automated input that guarantees no manipulation can influence flagging suspicious betting patterns or aberrations in sports.

Sportradar EVP, of Integrity Rights Protection and Regulatory Services, Andreas Krannich said that his company was firmly committed to honing its algorithms and detection capabilities in such a way as to unearth even the most challenging cases of match manipulation.

Many have become increasingly sophisticated and have to do with proposition betting where a player is supposed to act in some small way to secure a wagering outcome, which is far more difficult to detect than say, a team purposefully forfeiting a game. Yet, Krannich is confident that Sportradar has been actively able to detect even that kind of criminal intent and execution.

Once again, Europe continued to post the highest number of suspicious games and matches, with 667 such instances. Asia was second with 302, and South America came up last. Soccer continued to lead the way with 880 suspicious matches registered, followed by 205 for basketball, and 70 matches in tennis. These three sports form the bulk of corruption cases.

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