On the front line in tennis' anti-corruption war

In the first of a new weekly column uncovering tennis' untold stories, Simon Briggs goes behind-the-scenes with Sportradar - the newest ally in the sport's fight against corruption. 

In a discreet building in London’s financial district, twenty or so young professionals are sitting at their computer screens.

The office could belong to any new-media company, judging by the prominent table-tennis table, the darts board and the absence of collared shirts. Yet security has to be tight at Sportradar’s Integrity Services. Employees cannot be named – and their pictures cannot be taken – for fear of reprisals from the thugs they are trying to thwart.

“People used to talk about fixing in tennis, and you’d think of the dodgy physio with inside info about someone’s bad knee,” says “Stephen”, a senior manager at the company.

“Now it’s more likely to be about money-laundering or organised crime. We have to take precautions.”

Sportradar’s Integrity Services began life in 2006, after the Bundesliga was rocked by a €2 million match-fixing scandal implemented by the rogue referee Robert Hoyzer and organised by the Balkan mafia. The FDS has since accounted for 36 criminal convictions, the majority in football, as well as 215 sporting disciplinary sentences.

But there is much more to Sportradar than their crimefighters. The main thrust of the business lies in collecting, packaging and reselling sporting data in the first place – a role that did not even exist until the start of the 21^st century. And while the head office might be in London, the scope is global. Check out the electronic bulletin board above that table-tennis table, and you’ll see internal vacancies for a data analyst in Ljubljana and a customer-relations manager in Montevideo.

From a tennis perspective, this story really starts in 2012, the year when Sportradar agreed to pay the International Tennis Federation a reported $14m per annum for data rights to the Pro Circuit (otherwise known as poorly paid Futures events, mostly contested by players ranked outside the top 300). But it was only three weeks ago that the ITF announced it would be sending some of that money back the other way, by engaging the Integrity Services.

Since 2008, tennis has run its own police force under the title of the Tennis Integrity Unit. Yet the perception is that the TIU, which has beefed up its staffing levels from six people to 17 since match-fixing became a hot topic two years ago, is still struggling with the scale of the problem: 120,000 annual tennis matches, generating perhaps 250 suspicious betting alerts.

Hence the ITF’s investment in this more technologically-led process, which picks up irregular patterns in the betting markets via algorithms, and then hands them over to investigators like “Andrew” who have 72 hours to see if there is anything substantive behind the data alerts.

“If the odds move in a way that doesn’t make sense from our desks, we need to check the news, check social media, and look for an explanation,” Andrew says. “Maybe there’s an injury, or maybe something as simple as the weather can have an effect. We also employ a network of freelance journalists as boots on the ground. And as we go deeper into a case, we research the individual player, his associates and his connections.

“Less than one per cent of alerts end up being reported to sports federations or law enforcement. We start from the position of hoping to prove that matches are legitimate, because it’s important that we don’t pass anything on without having first convinced ourselves that there’s a genuine problem there.”

Certain patterns crop up again and again. According to Stephen, “The smallest unit you can bet on meaningfully is a set, even if specialist bookmakers might offer games or even points. So you hear of players saying to their next opponent, ‘Right, I’ll win the first set 6-3, you win the second 6-2, and then we’ll play the third out for real.’

“That way, an insider can cash in on three markets – the result of the first set, the result of the second set, and the fact that the match went to a decider – without actually knowing who will win. But the players can still tell themselves that it was a proper match, even if it only lasted a set. Then, once they’ve crossed that line, the fixers have a hold on them.”  

Andrew shows me a file he compiled before the new ITF policing deal was struck, involving a tournament where multiple matches were put into an accumulator and thus paid off a massive dividend to the crooks. (The tournament has also been reported to the TIU.)

“We wanted to investigate what was going on,” says Stephen. “The exercise was partly for our own understanding of the market, and partly because if you end up pitching your services, you have to be able to show some evidence of what you can offer. If you just say ‘We cracked these cases in football,’ then tennis authorities will reply, ‘What’s that got to do with us?’”

The bulk of suspicious betting patterns occur at Futures level, simply because Futures events make up around three-quarters of the total matches played. But risk levels are roughly equivalent across the entirety of the game – or the men’s game, at least. Last year’s TIU figures showed that only 13 per cent of suspicious matches were played by women: a similar gender split to the numbers recorded in wider corporate fraud. Overall, women are simply less corruptible and less likely to commit crime.

Sportradar’s deal does not cover ATP or Women’s Tennis Association matches – a typically mixed-up state of affairs in this often baffling sport. Those two elite tours both use the traditional tennis powerhouse IMG – the company founded by Wimbledon favourite Mark McCormack – to gather their score data, and they are relying solely on the TIU’s investigative powers. (It should be emphasised that Sportradar’s work is intended to supplement the existing arrangements rather than to replace them, and that the TIU are expected to lead any investigations derived from it.)

Since January 2016 – when a joint BBC-Buzzfeed investigation into match-fixing caused an outcry – the sport has been waiting for the outcome of an Independent Review Panel headed by Adam Lewis QC. Delivery of an interim report was expected late last year, but has been held up by wrangling over the rights and wrongs of cases that took place almost a decade ago. The more important question would seem to be “Where should we go from here?”

The ITF have already indicated that their next step will include splitting the Pro Circuit into two: a beefed-up, better funded version of Futures tournaments for players ranked above 700 or so, and a Transition Tour for those below, offering no rankings points as we know them. The idea is to bring down the number of world-ranked players by perhaps 50 per cent, so that the cut-off point for so-called “professional tennis” is much higher. The governing bodies hope that betting on the very bottom rung of the ladder will fall as a result, although it’s hard to know whether punters will take the hint.

Gamblers around the world have become hooked on these low-level events. There are few sports other than football and tennis that are truly international, thus providing content 24 hours a day, virtually all year round. And as Stephen points out, “It’s the niche markets that differentiate between bookmakers. Everyone offers the Premier League, but if you’re Croatian, for example, and your cousin plays second-division handball, you might want to bet on that. Then you place all your bets – including your Premier League bets – on whichever bookmaker is servicing those lesser events.”

Are sports-data companies partly responsible for the integrity issues that tennis faces? Some would argue that these deals with the ITF and the ATP created the crisis in the first place. They certainly increased the availability of betting markets. But perhaps this was an inevitable trend in our super-connected era. There are plenty of operators looking to supply the numbers, including Perform, Genius Sports and STATS LLC. And even if you don’t license your sport with an official provider, it’s hard to stop others going to an event and sending live scores to a bookmaker.

Ultimately, this data is one of tennis’s resources. Adam Lewis’s IRP, which is now expected to deliver its interim report in late April, will no doubt have a view as to how it is best used. But the ITF have decided that a deeper cooperation with the providers is better than the alternative: trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle. It could prove to be one of their wiser moves.

Simon Briggs' Secret Service column will be available every Tuesday at telegraph.co.uk/tennis.