SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
Spain’s DGOJ has announced the formation of a new partnership with the Spanish Professional Footballers Association (AFE), strengthening its network of stakeholders combatting match-fixing and upholding sports integrity values.
Spanish gambling’s regulatory agency will work with the AFE to develop a new ‘athlete first’ collaborative framework to tackle the risks of match-fixing and illegal wagers across Spanish football leagues.
The partnership will move to establish ‘shared protocols between both organisations’, focused on crime prevention by educating players, clubs and further officials on the risks of illegal betting on football.
“Both organisations agree that the manipulation of sports competition and betting fraud undermines the interests of participants and operators in the sector, and constitutes one of the greatest threats to professional football,” the DGOJ detailed in its statement.
Meanwhile, the AFE highlighted its concerns that syndicated players needed to be better informed on the career-threatening consequences of being involved in match-fixing and betting manipulations.
The DGOJ remarked that it had begun preparing new informative materials and awareness campaigns for AFE athletes that will be made available through the organisation’s digital platforms ‘as well as within the changing rooms themselves’.
The AFE partnership forms part of the DGOJ’s ongoing regulatory strategy of expanding its support network with key social stakeholders to strengthen its oversight on key gambling-related risks, from market integrity to operator conduct, harm reduction and the treatment and prevention of gambling harms.
