The thing being protected
Sports integrity is the confidence that a contest is decided by the contest. Everything in this course follows from that sentence, and so does the reason gambling operators are involved at all.
Betting does not create the incentive to fix a sporting event. Fixing does not depend on betting markets, and the Council of Europe's Macolin Convention defines the manipulation of sports competitions as an improper alteration of the result or course of a competition for an undue advantage, without mentioning betting at all. Matches have been thrown for prize money, league position, transfer value and pressure from outside the sport. What betting does is create a liquid, anonymous mechanism for converting foreknowledge into money, at a scale that does not require anyone in the sport to be paid directly by a counterparty they can name.
That has two consequences worth stating at the start. The gambling industry is a route through which corruption is monetised, which is why it carries obligations. And it is also the industry that sees the betting, which is why its data features in a substantial share of what gets caught: the International Betting Integrity Association reported that in 2025 its data helped prove 54 matches corrupt and 24 of its alerts were involved in sanctions.
Both are true. A course that only says the first produces defensive practitioners, and one that only says the second produces complacent ones.
The categories
Corruption in sport is not one thing, and the response differs by category.
Match fixing. Manipulating the result of a contest. The most serious and the hardest to arrange, because it requires enough participants to control the outcome and the outcome is the most scrutinised thing in the event.
Spot fixing. Manipulating a specific occurrence within a contest, independent of the result: the timing of a first throw-in, a deliberate no-ball, a card received on purpose, a player retiring at a chosen moment. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime lists specific events during the run of play, such as bowling a no-ball, feigning an injury or kicking the ball out of play, among the forms manipulation takes. Easier to arrange than match fixing, because it requires one participant rather than several, does not change who wins, and is close to invisible to a spectator.
Courtsiding. Transmitting information from a venue faster than the official feed, to bet on markets not yet updated. Not corruption of the contest at all: the event is honest, and the advantage is purely in latency. Sports deal with it through their own rules: the Tennis Anti-Corruption Program, for example, prohibits anyone it covers, while on site at an event, from transmitting contemporaneous results for betting purposes without the consent of the governing body or event and names the offence "Courtsiding".
Insider betting. A participant, official or insider betting on their own sport using information unavailable publicly. The information may be entirely innocent in origin, such as an injury known inside the squad, and the betting is the breach. Tennis goes further and bars everyone its programme covers from betting on any tennis at all.
Doping-adjacent manipulation and other forms of competitive distortion sit outside a betting integrity framework but affect the same confidence.
Keeping these separate matters operationally. A courtsiding alert and a spot-fixing alert look different in the data, require different responses, and belong to different people.
Why spot fixing is the structural risk
If you take one structural fact from this lesson, take this.
A result requires collective control. A goalkeeper alone cannot reliably guarantee a specific scoreline, and a team that loses unexpectedly attracts immediate scrutiny from coaches, media and fans who watched it happen.
A discrete in-game occurrence requires one person and is deniable. A player can concede a corner, receive a booking, serve a double fault or bowl a wide, and every one of those happens hundreds of times a season by accident. There is no visible anomaly, no aggrieved spectator, and the participant can maintain that it was ordinary play.
The proliferation of in-play and proposition markets, which the UNODC links to better data feeds and the wider availability of in-play betting, multiplied the number of such occurrences that can be bet on. That is not an argument that those markets should not exist; it is the reason integrity monitoring exists in the form it does, and the reason market suspension decisions concentrate on exactly these markets.
Where the vulnerability sits
Corruption concentrates in predictable places, and the pattern is consistent across sports and countries.
Low pay relative to the bribe. A central factor. A participant earning very little, offered a sum equivalent to months of income, faces a proposition an elite athlete does not.
Low visibility. Minor leagues, youth and reserve fixtures, lower-tier tennis and table tennis, and competitions with no broadcast coverage. Little scrutiny, few witnesses, and frequently no video to review afterwards. The UNODC notes that manipulators increasingly target youth, women's and lower-tier competitions, which are rarely monitored as closely as the top tiers.
Markets disproportionate to the event. A fixture with negligible sporting significance carrying substantial betting liquidity is the classic risk signature. The betting interest exceeds any plausible sporting interest, which is itself the signal. In its 2021 report the UNODC, citing IBIA, put around 75 per cent of regulated betting on football on matches outside the seven biggest competitions.
Dead rubbers and end-of-season fixtures with nothing at stake sportingly.
Financial distress. Clubs failing to pay wages is a well-documented warning sign. In FIFPRO's 2012 survey of 3,357 footballers in Eastern Europe, 11.9 per cent had been approached to fix a match and 55 per cent of those approached had not been paid on time. A participant who has not been paid for months has both motive and a grievance.
Weak governance. Federations without integrity resources, without education programmes, and without an investigative capability.
Individual sports. Tennis and table tennis feature heavily in reported cases, because one participant controls a great deal and lower-tier competitors often earn little from the sport. In 2025 tennis accounted for 74 of IBIA's 300 suspicious betting alerts and table tennis for 34, second and joint third behind football; 29 of the tennis alerts concerned events outside the main professional tours, and all 34 table tennis alerts concerned events outside ITTF competitions.
The uncomfortable summary: the risk is highest where the money in the sport is lowest and the money in the market is not.
Who is involved
Participants. Players and athletes, acting under financial pressure, coercion, or occasionally as organisers.
Officials. Referees and umpires, whose influence over discrete occurrences is substantial and whose decisions carry built-in deniability. IBIA's 2025 report records sanctions against six tennis umpires, alongside ten tennis players, in cases involving its alerts.
Team staff. Coaches and support staff with access to team information and influence over selection and tactics.
Organised networks. The professional layer. Groups that identify vulnerable participants and competitions, arrange the manipulation, and manage the betting across many accounts and jurisdictions to avoid concentration. This is the part that makes the activity a law enforcement matter rather than a disciplinary one.
Bettors with information who are not involved in arranging anything, including the friend of a participant who hears about an injury.
Recruitment follows a recognisable pattern: an approach through a trusted intermediary (cricket's Anti-Corruption Unit reports the use of former and current players as "trusted insiders" to recruit players), an initial request that seems minor and deniable, payment, and then leverage built from the first act. Once the first act has occurred, that leverage makes it hard to stop, which is why education programmes concentrate so heavily on the first approach.
What the operator's obligations actually are
Gambling operators sit in this system with a defined and limited role, and being precise about it prevents both overreach and evasion.
Detect and report suspicious betting. Operators see the betting, which the sport does not. Reporting to an integrity body, the relevant federation or the regulator is a licence condition in many markets. In Britain betting licensees must pass suspicions to the Gambling Commission and relevant information to the sport's governing body, and the Macolin Convention obliges its parties to require operators to report irregular or suspicious betting without delay.
Manage the market. Suspend, void or limit where manipulation is suspected. This is the operator's direct commercial and integrity lever.
Restrict participant betting. Enforce prohibitions on betting by those involved in the sport, where identifiable. In Britain the Commission's code expects operators to make it a condition of a valid bet that the customer is not breaching a governing body's betting rules, and to void the bet where they are.
Cooperate with investigations. Provide betting data under proper process.
Do not offer markets that cannot be supervised. A judgement about which competitions and which market types are responsible to price.
What operators do not do: investigate participants, impose sporting sanctions, or determine whether an event was fixed. Those are functions of sport governing bodies and, where criminality is alleged, law enforcement. An operator that concludes a match was fixed has exceeded its role and its evidence.
The bodies you will encounter
Sport governing bodies and federations hold disciplinary jurisdiction over participants through their rules, and their sanctions are the most common outcome in practice: Sportradar reports having supported more than 1,000 sporting sanctions, against more than 70 criminal convictions.
Integrity units within sports, such as the International Tennis Integrity Agency, set up in 2021, and the ICC Anti-Corruption Unit in cricket, run education, monitoring and investigation inside their sport.
Betting integrity associations, of which the International Betting Integrity Association is the most prominent, aggregate alerts across member operators. IBIA says its members are more than 90 companies with over 200 betting brands. That aggregation is the point: a betting pattern that looks unremarkable at one operator can be unmistakable across twenty.
Data and monitoring companies, including Sportradar and similar providers, run detection systems across markets and supply alerts to sports and operators. In 2025 Sportradar reported monitoring more than a million events across 70 sports and flagging 1,116 suspicious matches.
National platforms and regulators, established in several countries to coordinate sport, betting operators, regulators and law enforcement. The Macolin Convention requires each party to identify a national platform that collects and analyses information on suspicious bets and issues alerts.
Law enforcement, where criminality is alleged. Fixing may be prosecuted as fraud, bribery, corruption or under sport-specific offences depending on the jurisdiction. In Great Britain, for example, cheating at gambling is itself an offence under the Gambling Act 2005, punishable by up to two years' imprisonment.
The practical point about this landscape is that no single body sees everything. The sport sees the contest, the operators see the betting, the monitoring companies see across operators, and law enforcement holds the compulsion powers. Effective cases are almost always the product of information crossing between them.
The rest of this course
Lesson two covers what a suspicious betting pattern actually looks like in data and why most alerts are not corruption. Three covers monitoring and alert handling. Four covers the operator's decision set: suspension, voiding and market design. Five covers the sporting and legal frameworks and how a case is actually resolved. Six covers prevention, which is mostly education and market design rather than detection. Seven covers building the function and working with the bodies above.
Throughout, one discipline applies: an unusual betting pattern is a hypothesis about the market, not a finding about a person. Confusing the two has ended careers on evidence that did not support it, and getting the distinction right is the whole professional standard in this field.