“If there is any modality in which we have not yet had a public scandal, it is because we do not have the tools to detect it.”
Before competing in this year’s World Cup, the Ivorian footballer Elye Wahi was arrested on suspicion of manipulation related to betting.
Wahi, who plays for Nice in France, has not yet been formally charged, but what he is suspected of has become emblematic of a new wave of scandals spreading across the sport.
According to , the player did not make an obvious error nor did he fail to try to score. He was allegedly limited to receiving a yellow card deliberately, according to accusations from the Ligue de Football Professionnel, the body that controls Ligue 1, the main level of French football.
It may not seem serious. But this is precisely the essential point of the so-called spot-fixing: the deliberate manipulation of small events within a game, less decisive for the result, with the aim of making money with these episodes in sports betting applications or prediction markets.
AND much less dramatic than the full riggedness of a gamein which a player may deliberately lose a match. And it may be even more subtle than the spot margin manipulation, when someone tries to win by a smaller difference than expected to contradict the bookmakers’ predictions.
In the case of Wahi, the striker made a clumsy tackle on an opponent and immediately received a yellow card. As it was his fifth yellow card of the season, he was suspended for the team’s next game.
The LFP was alerted to suspicious betting patterns during gamblingrelated to bets in which Wahi would receive a yellow card — information provided by sources heard by The Athletic and confirmed by the LFP itself
If what Wahi did was deliberate, it is a perfect example of spot-fixing. The yellow card did not have a significant impact on the gamewhich ended 0-0. But it could have guaranteed a big payout to someone who had bet precisely in this specific event.
This type of bet fits perfectly into “data age” that currently dominates the sport. As The Athletic notes in an article on the phenomenon, one of the ways sports data companies make money is sell this information to betting houses.
Any action by an athlete on the field can be registered and transformed into a statisticand major betting sites have allowed bettors to explore in each game. How many balls will one throw pitcher? How many touches of the ball will a striker have?
Driving this trend is also the rise of prediction markets like AEA, who specialize in hyper-specific betsparticularly suitable for spot-fixing.
Technically, these platforms also are not considered gambling sitesdespite strong evidence to the contrary, and are subject to less regulatory scrutiny than traditional bookmakers, notes .
O spot-fixing is being observed “basically in all sports, on all continents”, he told The Athletic Chris Kronow RasmussenDanish expert on integrity in sport.
“Of course, the modalities in which you see the highest volume of bets are the most popular, the biggest targets, due to the size of the market”, adds Rasmussen. “If there is any modality in which we have not yet had a public scandal, It’s because we don’t have the tools to detect it“.
Modalities such as basketball and baseball they are more vulnerable to spot margin manipulation and spot-fixing, and have already recorded some media scandals. But the football is also beginning to be affected by the phenomenon.
Last year, three Australian top league players were found guilty of deliberately receiving yellow cards in several games.
In the English Premier League, the richest and most watched sports league in the world, a player was accused of four acts of spot-fixing for also deliberately receiving yellow cards, but ended up clear of any infraction after a two-year investigation.
O spot-fixing is putting the bodies responsible for integrity in sport on alert. Not surprising.
