Youth football dogged by suspicious betting activity in 2018

A new report from Stats Perform and Starlizard Integrity Services has revealed a slight decline in suspicious betting activity concerning football in 2018, though two matches at the highest level of the game were flagged for potential corruption for the first time.

In addition there was a disproportionately high level of unusual activity around youth football, and despite a decline in the number of matches in Asia being flagged, it remained the largest region for suspicious activity.

In total, however, only 0.61% of all matches monitored were classed as suspicious.

The second annual Suspicious Betting Trends in Global Football report, compiled by Stats Perform and Starlizard in partnership with data specialst TxOdds identified suspicious betting patterns around 377 matches over the year.

This marks a decline from 2017 — when 397 matches were flagged — despite an increase in the number of matches monitored to 62,250, across 115 countries and including youth, international, friendly and women’s matches.

However, for the first time, two matches categorised as “Tier 1”, which includes the highest levels of competition and for which the highest stakes can be wagered, were considered suspicious.

Of the 377 flagged matches, 58 involved youth football, even though youth matches made up only 5.6% of the sample.

Games in Asia were overrepresented among the suspicious matches. Of the 7,263 matches in Asia monitored, 69 were flagged as potentially being fixed based on betting patterns. However, this marked an improvement from 2017, when 68 out of 5,075 matches in Asia were flagged.

Africa was the only continent which saw an increased percentage of matches flagged. Of the 1,923 total matches in Africa monitored, five were flagged as suspicious, up from just one out of 1,250 in 2017. The majority of flagged games and total games monitored were located in Europe, where 227 out of 35,469 games were marked as suspicious.

International matches had a greater proportion of games flagged than any continent, with 47 out of 4,896 matches identified.

The report highlighted one European domestic youth league as containing an especially high amount of suspicious betting activity. The number of suspicious matches remained unchanged year-on-year at 8% of fixtures, while one team from this league has no been involved in 13 flagged matches in the past two years. None of the countries, teams or leagues in question were named in the report.

One men’s senior international team had five of its 10 games in 2018 flagged, after having no matches flagged in 2017.

In addition, one European country saw a drastic decrease in flagged matches after “effective action by the governing body and law enforcement,” which included a number of arrests, shut down what Perform said it believed to be an “organised, cross-border match-fixing operation.”

“It is important that the football world remains diligent and alert to integrity threats at all levels of the game,” head of Starlizard Integrity Services Affy Sheikh said. “In producing this report, a huge effort has been made and a vast amount of data analysed in order to provide sports and integrity stakeholders with detailed intelligence on suspicious betting patterns across many different competitions and countries.”

Stats Perform head of integrity Jake Marsh added: “We believe that by shining a light on suspicious activity in a non-accusatory public forum we can elevate understanding of the latest trends and areas of concern to integrity stakeholders.

“The efforts of integrity stakeholders, sports governing bodies and law enforcement are amplified when working together towards a common goal. To this end, we share the results of our analysis with stakeholders on a non-commercial basis in order to assist their efforts in protecting the integrity of football.”

In July, the International Betting Integrity Association reported that 18 football matches generated alerts for suspicious wagering activity in the second quarter of 2019, while the Global Lottery Monitoring System reported 324 alerts and 25 red alerts concerning football. On 25 July, Swedish state-owned operator Svenska Spel ceased offering odds on fourth-tier league Division 2 Södra Svealand after integrity monitoring partners revealed that as many as 13 matches in the division were suspected to have been rigged during the spring season.