Recent criticism of live betting is misplaced according to Khalid Ali, European Sports Security Association secretary-general.
It may be just coincidence, but the increased amount of clamour around the issue of in-play betting coming from certain stakeholders in the sporting community in recent months seems conveniently closely-timed to a wider debate that is being played out across Europe on the future of online gaming.
The context is this: politicians in Brussels are in the process of deciding a path on the future of online gambling in the European Union (EU). Meanwhile, certain sports rights-holders and others in the sports community are using this process to try and push the bookmaking industry to hand over a larger share of its revenues for the ‘privilege’ of offering bets on sports competitions. To help make their point, they are using the spectre of increased match-fixing as a Trojan horse in order to secure funding to protect integrity.
This is a difficult concept to grapple with on a number of levels. For one thing, Europe’s bookmakers already bankroll sport in the EU to the tune of €3.4 billion a year through sponsorship, streaming rights and other commercial agreements. For another, to say that such licences are necessary to combat increasing incidence betting-related match-fixing seems incredulous when one considers that the advent of online betting, whether pre or in-play, has actually been good for the fight against match-fixing.
How is this the case? There are three main reasons. The first is that online, each transaction has its own digital fingerprint containing identification verification, deposit and payment details as well as time-stamped historical records. This data enables bookmakers to build a very accurate profile of their customers’ betting habits. Equally importantly, the industry has invested massively in recent years in the skills and technology to be able to analyse huge volumes of bets in real-time. This has meant that any suspicious patterns can now be spotted almost instantaneously, and any attempted manipulation neutralised almost before it has started.
But the industry has gone one step better by creating my organisation, the European Sports Security Association (ESSA), in order to make sure that when such information on match-fixing is detected – it is shared among the industry and the relevant sporting authority in order to prevent it causing further damage.
By investing in the right people and processes to keep criminals out of betting, Europe’s licensed, regulated bookmakers have done more to preserve the integrity of sport in a few years than the industry has managed in the past century. Indeed, the ESSA only referred four instances of suspicious betting in the whole of 2010, a stark contrast to the hysterical numbers often cited in the press.
That is not to say that match-fixing is not a problem for sports: it undeniably is, and needs to be snuffed out once and for all. But to do this, we need a global solution and one that involves more regulation, not less. Europe can lead the way here, by proving that licensed, regulated markets are the best way to defeat organised crime, just as they have for other industries. To fail this task is in nobody’s interests but the criminals.
