Sports Tech 2 min read

Advanced AI helps to weed out suspicious betting activity and match-fixing

Written by MOS Editorial Team

Published on 6 March 2024

Sportradar Integrity Services has found 1,329 suspicious matches across the globe in 2023.

Of those detections, 73 percent came directly through cutting-edge AI technology.

Sportradar works with sporting competitions to monitor 850,000 events annually – ranging from the elite level to amateur sports.

The company has just released its yearly Betting Corruption and Match-Fixing report.

The 1,329 suspicious matches took place across 11 sports in 105 countries.

This equates to one fixed match in every 467. This figure is 0.21 percent higher than in 2022.

The analysis shows that no single sport has a suspicious match ratio greater than one percent, and no suspicious betting was detected for 99.5 percent of sporting events Sportradar monitored.

The world’s most popular betting sport, football, was the most affected by match-fixing with 880 suspicious matches.

Basketball had 205 suspicious matches, while table tennis had 70.

Europe is the most affected region, with 667 incidents, while Asia had 302 (up from 240 in 2022) and South America had 217.

Sportradar Integrity boss Andreas Krannich says AI has been crucial in helping to keep sport clean.

“Continued investment in the development of technology is key to detecting otherwise hard-to-find occurrences of match-fixing,” Krannich explained.

“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.”