Sportradar: Match-fixing alerts remain stable in 2023 as AI comes to the fore

Sportradar has reported a steady level of corruption and match-fixing attempts in 2023 compared to 2022 as the supplier’s AI tool came to fore, detecting 123% more cases than the year prior.

Monitored by its Universal Fraud Detection System (UFDS), Sportradar Integrity Services examined roughly 850,00 events across 70 different sports.

The group’s ‘Betting corruption and match-fixing in 2023’ report found there was a total of 1,329 suspicious matches in those 12 months, occurring in 11 sports and across 105 countries.

When compared to 2022, the data shows that the rate of suspected manipulation across all sports remained relatively stable at 0.21%, or one in every 467 matches.

The analysis, according to Sportradar, showed no single sport had a suspicious-match ratio greater than 1%, which correlates to 99.5% of monitored events demonstrating no aspects of suspicious betting.

On the group’s AI capabilities, Sportradar said almost three quarters of the alerts for all suspicious matches last year were detected by the tool.

That represents a 123% increase on 2022, with the firm noting that AI detection was then cross-referenced by human analysts to ensure “accurate interpretation of data”.

The report found football was the sport most affected by match-fixing, with 880 suspicious matches being detected.

Basketball was the second most affected sport with 205 suspicious matches recorded, with table tennis’s total of 70 in third.

The geographical region with the highest number of suspicious matches was Europe, which saw incidents rise from 630 in 2022 to 667 in 2023.

Asia also saw a rise from the previous year, with 302 suspicious matches, up from 240 in 12 months.

In contrast, South America saw a slight decline from the previous year, dropping from 225 incidents to 217 in 2023.

Finally, 1,295 of all suspicious activity occurred in male sporting events, with only 34 incidents taking place within women’s sports.

Andreas Krannich, Sportradar EVP of 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.”