Woeful lack of funding indicates tennis doesn’t take match-fixing seriously In modern sport, nefariousness is never too far away if you look closely enough. Even the All-England Club is fighting […]

In modern sport, nefariousness is never too far away if you look closely enough. Even the All-England Club is fighting corruption on its own lush lawns.

On Wednesday, it emerged that a match at Wimbledon was under investigation over match-fixing allegations. The ABC uncovered that a first round men’s doubles match had been flagged as suspicious due to a series of bets in the hour before the match, leading to the odds changing dramatically in a way that generally indicates skullduggery. Pinnacle Sports, an international bookmaker, alerted authorities at Wimbledon immediately; the doubles pair under suspicion is believed to include one player ranked among the top 100 in singles.

Really, the allegations should be no surprise at all. Industry insiders believe that, while the pinnacle of elite sport is not necessarily more corrupt, there is more corruption than ever across the sports industry. The reason is simple: there is more professional sport than ever – more matches televised, and more that is possible to bet on. That means there are more potential targets for fixers.

“Tennis meets many of the criteria for a sport at risk of betting-related corruption,” explains Vassilis Barkoukis, an expert in sports corruption. The sport is fragmented, with a myriad of tournaments that have betting markets: each year, the Tennis Integrity Unit monitors almost 100,000 matches. While team sports are complex to fix – if a striker is paid to underperform, his teammates may still score – a tennis fix needs only one person or, at most, two. The structure of matches also make them particularly susceptible to corruption: each set, each game and each point are distinct events – and distinct betting events – which means that they have their own betting markets. So a player could agree to lose a set, say, and still be free to win the match.

An endemic issue

Last year, the TIU prosecuted 14 corruption cases. Five of those were banned for match-fixing – all men with career-high singles rankings of 187 or lower. Yet this only hints at the true vulnerability of tennis to corruption. From the start of 2015 until the end of 2017, the TIU received 779 alerts from betting operators and regulators into suspicious activity. The Independent Review Panel’s interim report into corruption in tennis, published in April, conducted a survey of 3,200 professional tennis players found that 14.5 per cent said they had knowledge of match-fixing, 16 per cent had first-hand knowledge of players betting on matches – which is prohibited – and 11 per cent knew of inside information about matches being provided. All of this suggests that only a minuscule percentage of fixes are fully uncovered and that corruption in tennis is rampant.

Where the alerts have come so far in 2018 is instructive. The TIU releases quarterly updates on the number of alerts, and there were 38 in the first three months of 2018. Of these, 23 were matches in the Men’s Futures competition and five in the equivalent Women’s competition; six of the others were in the ATP Men’s Challenger events – the level below the Futures competition and the main tour – and only four across ATP and Women’s Tennis Association events and the Hopman, Davis and Fed Cup tournaments combined.

The concentration of suspicious matches in the lower echelons of the sport is partly because there are just so many more games at this level. But the susceptibility of Futures and Challenger events speaks to how unevenly tennis distributes its wealth. The sport awards around £210 million in prize money each year, and 60 per cent goes to the top 1 per cent in the men’s and women’s singles tours.

“The player incentive structure creates a fertile breeding ground for breaches of integrity,” noted the Independent Review Panel. In the report, one TIU investigator says some lower level events face a “tsunami” of problems.

In 2011, the ITF agreed a deal to provide live scoring data of $15,000 ITF events – the lowest professional level – which allowed betting companies to offer live betting on such matches, criticised by the report as a mistake. This was regrettable in two ways: first, it led to an explosion in corruption at this level, in tournaments where there are poor safeguards to prevent players from interacting with corruptors and crowds are typically only a few days; second, it also led to a surge in social media abuse received by losing player.

Outside the rarefied elite, tennis careers are a lonely existence spent in cheap hotel rooms playing in front of puny crowds and, for those outside the top 100 in singles, probably losing money after covering their costs. For such players, the attraction of fixing a match – or even part of a match – may be greed, bitterness at never having reached the top, or even getting the money they need to carry on playing the sport professionally.

Malfeasance has been abetted by the TIU, which is funded entirely by the governing bodies of tennis, not being given proper resources to do its job. At the start of 2016, when 16 players who had been ranked in the top 50, were flagged over suspicions they have thrown matches dating back to 2003, the TIU had a lamentable six full-time staff.

There are signs that the TIU is now better-equipped to police the sport. It now has 17 full-time staff, and is in the process of appointing another investigator. It has become more transparent, issuing quarterly updates about the number of alerts it has received. A Training and Education Unit will be established this year to help educate young players against the risks of corruption, and stop them being groomed by fixers while starting out on the Futures tour.

Lack of resources

All of this should be welcomed. And yet it doesn’t obscure that the TIU remains lamentably under-resourced. This year, the first round losers in the men’s and women’s singles draws at Wimbledon received a combined £5 million; the TIU’s entire budget for 2018, to protect the integrity of every single match in every single tournament, is only £2.8 million, despite increases in recent years.

An anti-corruption insider believes that the TIU needs £10 million to do its job properly, and the Independent Review Panel called for the TIU to “be properly and securely funded.” The TIU currently can’t even put an investigator at every event.

A sensible solution would be for the sport’s governing bodies to enshrine that a small percentage of total revenue – 0.5 per cent, say – be automatically diverted to the TIU. While doing so, the TIU could be made legally independent – it is located in the same building as the ITF, and its staff are employees of the ITF, something that the Independent Review Panel want changed. It also advocates that tennis eliminate gambling sponsorship.

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Like other sports, a basic tension runs through the heart of tennis’s relationship with gambling. The sport rails against corruption while simultaneously entering partnerships with companies that encourage people to bet – creating the liquidity in the market for fixers to make huge profits. This disconnect embodies that, for all the moral outrage whenever fixing allegation surface, tennis simply does not take corruption seriously enough.

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