UEFA looks to enhance anti match-fixing powers
Football governing body says its capabilities have not grown in line with the threat to the sport
UEFA has launched a tender process for a project to help the football governing body investigate and prosecute match-fixing cases.
UEFA said the process could see the creation of a new organisation completely dedicated to combatting match-fixing in football.
The new organisation would cooperate with other sporting bodies and national governments in a “focused, coordinated, and centralised” way with UEFA’s 55 national association partners.
UEFA said the capacity of UEFA and other sports bodies had not grown in line with the increased threat.
UEFA president Aleksander Čeferin said there was a need to be more aggressive in tackling match fixing, because collectively and individually, football governing bodies “haven’t done enough”.
At present, UEFA has an information-sharing agreement with the International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA), first signed in March 2018. Under this agreement, the IBIA’s 55 betting operator partners provide data on football matches to its monitoring and alert platform, with this data being shared with UEFA.
“The main problem is that our jurisdiction ends at football,” Čeferin said. “We cannot tap phones, we cannot put people in prison, and with many computer servers being 10,000km from Europe, it’s a problem we cannot solve on our own.
“This study will look at how to bring together the different actors on this stage, so we are all working in partnership, not isolation, to tackle one of the biggest threats to the integrity of sport,” Čeferin added.