SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
La Liga’s partnership with cyber security firm COMSEC and official data provider SIS saw a record number of unofficial data scouts ejected from Spanish football grounds during the 2014/15 season.
The work, undertaken with the support of Real Federación Española de Fútbol, resulted in substantial disruption to the activities of unofficial data collectors at La Liga, Liga Adelante and Segunda Division B matches.
For the upcoming 2015/16 season, plans are in place to further increase the detection and disruption of unofficial in-stadium data scouts.
Javier Tebas, President of LaLiga commented on the partnership: “Protecting the integrity of sport has never been more important. LaLiga is committed to taking all necessary measures to eradicate unofficial data collection, ‘court-siding’ and gambling fraud from within our grounds.”
Rachel Coulson, Head of Business Data for SIS, said: “We’re working closely with our partners at LaLiga and COMSEC to ensure operators continue to have access to the highest possible quality and reliable official data products.”
She added: “Operators desire a fast, reliable and robust data stream for Spanish football and unauthorised data collection, apart from not being endorsed by LaLiga, is heavily dependent on unofficial in-stadium scouts which can cost operators dearly when it is disrupted.”
James Ramm, Managing Director of COMSEC, said: “Unofficial data collection is unsupervised and unreliable. COMSEC is proud to work with LaLiga and SIS to combat unofficial in-stadium data collection and removing match-fixing opportunities”.
The Spanish first division, La Liga, is watched by over 800 million viewers in 183 countries.
