Concern about the threat posed to the integrity of a sport like football, from the elite to the amateur level, has been on the rise in recent years, prompting firms such as Sportradar Integrity Services, play an active role in the global monitoring of sports.
Sportradar works with over 84 governing bodies worldwide, including global authorities such as FIFA and IOC , as well as with 15 partners in the US, including major league baseball (MLB) National Football League (NFL) National hockey league (NHL) Major League Soccer (MLS) nascar and United Football League.
V interview with Ampire Media Andy Cunningham , Head of Integrity at Sportradar, discussed the measures taken to protect the integrity of sport and also discussed which industries are most at risk.
Regarding the impact of threats to the integrity of sports betting, Cunningham stated that many leagues and tournaments are at risk, including football, tennis, volleyball, ice hockey and handball.
He noted: “The key trends that we saw in football, for example, were friendlies and warm-up matches before the season. In 2020, the number of suspicious matches that were football friendly increased by 60% to over 50 matches.
“We have seen lower levels, second, third, fourth and fifth in some foreign countries, as well as youth level in 2021, become more targeted than before, only in football.”
Cunningham has also focused on the growing esports, which is an increasingly popular market for players.
“We treat esports like any other sport, where we work with some of the biggest publishers, perhaps the most famous ones like Activision and Riot Games, around the world and basically from our point of view, we use technology to monitor it," he said.
Cunningham highlighted Sportradar's strategy of "reverse monitoring" as a means of maintaining sports integrity, which he described as "essentially monitoring the stock exchange for insider trading", except that Sportradar instead analyzes the betting markets for corrupt money or potentially fixed matches. .
He continued: “The good news is that a very small percentage of matches have ever been considered suspicious, usually less than 1% or even less than 0.5% of the total number of matches we consider.
“We track everything – last year we monitored over 600,000 sports systems around the world, and just over 500 were found suspicious.”
In addition, Cunningham stressed that Sportradar is focusing on educational programs aimed at educating both professional and amateur athletes about the risks associated with the integrity of world sport.
Source - Ampire Media YouTube channel.
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