AI picks up speed against match-fixing in latest Sportradar integrity report

Sportradar’s Integrity Services unit has released its latest anti-corruption report on suspicious betting activity spanning throughout 2023.

For that year alone, the match-fixing prevention specialist managed to monitor around 850,000 events and matches across 70 sports with the help of AI. A total of 1,329 matches were lit up as suspicious, constituting 11 sports across 105 countries.

This rate ‘remains steady’ in comparison to 2022, with 0.21% of events being flagged down, or in other words – one in every 467 matches for the whole of 2023.

Moreover, the data signified that no single sport had a suspicious match ratio greater than 1% – effectively meaning that existing anti-corruption measures have managed to safeguard 99.5% of monitored sporting events from suspicious betting activity.

As previously stated, Sportradar’s AI capabilities have assisted in detecting the majority of suspicious matches in 2023 with a 73% success ratio or 977 cases highlighted – representing a big leap for the company’s proprietary AI technology with a 123% YoY increase in successful interventions.

Andreas Krannich, Sportradar’s EVP, Integrity, Rights Protection and Regulatory Services, 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.”

Some of the other key findings in the report noted that football remains the most lucrative sport for match-fixers with a total of 880 cases, followed by basketball with 205 matches and table tennis with 70 matches in 2023.

In terms of gender-specific events, men’s sports take the majority stake of suspicious bets placed with 1,295, while women’s sports have a total of 34 recorded cases.

Geographical distribution data has shown that Europe had the highest number of suspicious matches with 667 in total (2022: 630), followed by Asia with 302 (240) and South America with 217 (225).

Sportradar recently renewed its partnership with the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) to maintain its supply of match-fixing targeting solutions until 2027.

Finally, the report noted that account-level betting data was used to detect 85% of suspicious cases in volleyball and 100% of cases in tennis and table tennis, which underscores “the importance of collaborating closely with the sports betting industry to combat match-fixing and integrity threats”.