From time to time, the world of football hosts the debate on sports betting and the manipulation of results by football teams to benefit certain sports bets.
It is common knowledge that there are betting mafias operating on an international level in different sports, although the most important ones are football and tennis.
In fact, one of the most important challenges for the official associations of these sports is precisely to fight against match-fixing that alters competitions in a much more frequent way than some people might think.
Considering that sports betting is growing year by year in any market that allows legal betting, this is a problem that football authorities are also increasingly concerned about. Where years ago there were countries where there were hardly any websites talking about sports betting, such as Japan, now we can find websites like this one that talk not only about sports betting but also about any other kind of online gambling, because the interest of users is growing over time. Some markets are more mature than others, as in any sector. For example, one of the countries with the longest tradition in sports betting (especially in football) is England, where there are a multitude of bookmakers operating both online and on the streets of the country’s main cities.
Even so, despite being one of the most traditional betting countries, don’t think that there is so much corruption in the world of English football.
Where most match-fixing problems are located
Most match-fixing takes place precisely in countries with less betting traditions, such as some countries in South America or Asia. In some of these countries we can find major match-fixing that is exploited by mafias around the world in order to make substantial profits at a much cheaper cost, as the players in these countries earn much less money than the football stars in Europe can earn.
Therefore, with lower costs and similar potential profits to what they could earn in matches in Europe, it is a perfect place for match-fixing to take place. That is why countries like Brazil are putting in place programmes and measures to try to contain this growing problem in the country’s sport, where even former Brazilian football stars have admitted to being fully aware of the problem and to having experienced it in their own teams when they were active players.
In fact, in 1982 there was a case referred to as the lottery mafia case, where a network of at least 125 players and managers of the country’s top teams manipulated match results according to the country’s sports lottery. Still, as most operators in the country are internationally licensed operators offering sports betting services worldwide, the controls and prevention mechanisms in place at these sites make it very difficult to alter results in order to make money from sports betting.
Last year, for example, more than 1,000 people were arrested in an INTERPOL police operation in more than 30 different countries, and millions of dollars in cash, computers and mobile phones used by those arrested to communicate with each other were seized.
