This weekend saw Sportradar Integrity Services, the world’s leading integrity service and business-to-business division of Sportradar (NASDAQ: SRAD), publish the full annual review titled “Betting Corruption and Match-fixing in 2023”. The report carefully outlines the investigative findings of the operations unit regarding suspicious betting activity across the most varied palette of world sports. The analysis reveals a total of 1,329 matches under suspicion in 2023, encompassing 11 sports across 105 nations, after examining almost 850,000 events and matches throughout 70 sports. The analysis reveals a total of 1,329 matches under suspicion in 2023, encompassing 11 sports across 105 nations, after examining almost 850,000 events and matches throughout 70 sports.
Steady Surveillance, Unwavering Integrity
The analysis reveals that the level of suspected manipulation across all sports has remained stable for the second year running—at 0.21%. This does yet reveal one more very important fact: less than 1% of the monitored sports competitions showed tendencies for suspicion. It could be seen that over 99.5% of these events did not detect any suspicious betting activities.
The AI Advantage in Integrity Monitoring
In fact, the report reveals that the contribution of artificial intelligence (AI) led to the identification of almost three-fourths of all suspicious matches (73% or 977 cases) in 2023, reaching an increase of 123% compared to the last year. The UFDS has already been augmented with the latest AI from Sportradar. Sportradar will use AI and human powers for better expert analysis needed in data interpretation, which they assure will ramp up the integrity of sports.
Key Insights from the 2023 Report
The report sheds light on several critical findings. The most betted-on sport in the world is football, which features 880 suspicious matches, far higher than any other sport. Basketball is second, with 205, and table tennis is at 70. It should be noted that it was heavily dependent on the account-level data for betting; but more specifically, volleyball, tennis, and table tennis showed the greatest reliance—sports where collaboration with the industry was, of course, most evidently required to resolve the issue of match-fixing. Geographically, Europe had the highest number of suspicious matches, followed by Asia and South America.
The vast majority of suspicious matches were identified in men’s sports, with a smaller fraction in women’s events. This epitomises the continued, diligent efforts of Sportradar at the close of 2023, totaling 147 across 10 sporting and criminal sanctions in 23 countries. Further reinforcement is made for its position at the helm of integrity in service delivery. The company collaborates with over 220 organizations, including sports organizations, state authorities, and law enforcement agencies, all of which work to prevent corruption from endangering the purity of sports.
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Andreas Krannich, EVP at Sportradar, said: “Continued investment in the development of technology is key to detecting otherwise hard-to-find occurrences of match-fixing. In combination with access to account-level data, collaboration across the industry and human experts, we have a suite of powerful tools to help both prevent and detect risks to sports integrity. Further advancements in the fight against match-fixing will be possible as the AI models continue to learn and we will keep honing our expertise to protect sport from manipulation.”
Sportradar employs a comprehensive and multifaceted strategy to discover instances of match-fixing, leveraging its industry-leading technology and its Integrity Services division. In addition to account-level data, the UFDS employs sophisticated AI to identify and report questionable matches to Sportradar’s international staff of integrity analysts. It also evaluates 30 billion odds changes in real-time across 600 international betting providers. The Sportradar Integrity Exchange (SIE), where more than 70 betting companies proactively report suspicious betting information, is another resource that helps in this endeavour. It uses account-level betting data to identify and flag questionable matches.
