Sportradar's 2023 integrity report reveals steady suspected manipulation rate in sports at 0.21%

Sportradar Integrity Services, a unit of sports technology company Sportradar, has published its annual Betting Corruption and Match-fixing in 2023 report detailing the company’s findings into suspicious betting on global sports.

Based on the monitoring of approximately 850,000 events and matches across 70 sports, the report highlights a total of 1,329 suspicious matches in 2023, occurring in 11 sports in 105 countries.

Compared to 2022, the data indicates the suspected manipulation rate in all sports remained steady at 0.21% or one in every 467 matches in 2023. Similarly, the analysis has marked no single sport having a suspicious match ratio greater than 1%, confirming that 99.5% of sporting events monitored had no suspicious betting detected.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) assisted in detecting almost three-quarters (73% or 977 instances) of all suspicious matches in 2023, representing a 123% increase when compared to 2022.

While AI integration into Sportradar’s Universal Fraud Detection System (UFDS) has boosted detection rates, the company stated that the analysis by their integrity experts remains "essential" to ensure accurate interpretation of data. 

Key findings in 2023:

• As the world’s most popular sport for betting, soccer continued to be the most affected by match-fixing with 880 suspicious matches, followed by basketball with 205 matches, then table tennis with 70 matches.
• Account-level betting data was used to detect 85% of suspicious matches in volleyball, and 100% of suspicious matches in tennis and table tennis, which Sportradar says underscores the importance of collaborating closely with the sports betting industry to combat match-fixing and integrity threats.
• Europe had the highest number of suspicious matches (667 vs 630 in 2022), followed by Asia (302 vs 240 in 2022) and South America (217 vs 225 in 2022).
• 1,295 suspicious matches came from men’s sporting events, while 34 came from women’s sporting events.

Data and reporting from Sportradar Integrity Services last year contributed to a total of 147 sporting and criminal sanctions, spanning 10 sports in 23 countries across 39 cases.

By supporting over 220 partners globally including sports organizations, state authorities, national platforms and law enforcement agencies, Sportradar stated that it is "committed to keeping sports clean from threats such as match-fixing, doping and other forms of fraud and corruption."

Andreas Krannich, 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.”

As well as account-level data, the UFDS analyses 30 billion odds changes across 600 global betting operators in real-time and uses advanced AI to detect and flag suspicious matches to Sportradar’s global team of integrity analysts.

Supporting this effort is also the Sportradar Integrity Exchange (SIE), where more than 70 betting operators proactively submit suspicious betting information, using account-level betting data to detect and flag suspicious matches.